Scholar hooked on medieval pursuits

GERMAN SCHOLAR

18-9-1921 - 14-4-2009

MARIANNE Wynn, a leading international authority in the field of medieval German literature, who was known for her sound academic judgement and sure literary instinct, has died of a stroke in London. She was 87.

Highly regarded for her many achievements, including her outstanding contribution to the study of the 12th century knight and poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, Marianne's professorial and other academic appointments were at a time when women were still struggling for recognition in universities.

Marianne, who fled Germany with her parents after Kristallnacht in 1938, arrived in Australia via Holland and Canada, and nine years later married a young doctor and heir to a wine-making business, Victor Wynn.

She had studied English and German at Melbourne University, where she wrote her MA thesis on Middle English poetry, before going on to teach and lecture in German in Melbourne. In 1948, a scholarship took her to Girton College, Cambridge, where she took a PhD in medieval German literature. She had married the previous year, and by mutual agreement she left her new husband to pursue her academic career on the other side of the world. He joined his wife in Britain about two years later.

From 1951, Marianne lectured in German literature at Girton and then at King's College, London University, before joining the academic staff at Westfield College (now Queen Mary and Westfield College), also London University, in 1954.

She was appointed reader in 1966, and professor of German in 1984. At that time she was the only woman professor at Westfield out of 124 members of academic staff and one of only two women professors in German in Britain. In 1984, she had the rare distinction of being made professor honoris causa of medieval studies at the University of Giessen in West Germany. She was also conferred professor emeritus at Westfield when she retired in 1986.

For many years Marianne sat on the University Board of Examiners in German, and was chairman for several terms.

An impeccably elegant woman, she had a strong aura of personal authority and assertiveness that was moderated by wit and a lively sense of humour. She was fiercely independent and held strong feminist views.

Born in Breslau, Silesia (Wroclaw, Poland), she often spoke with warmth and gratitude of her father, Johann Lappe, a doctor in Breslau and a non-practising Jew, who steeped his two daughters in German culture.

It was his gift to Marianne of Gustav Schwab's Deutsche Heldensagen, the classic German collection of heroic tales that sparked her interest in the Middle Ages and paved the way for her later academic career. Regular visits to the opera house in Breslau also kindled a strong love of music, both grand opera and operetta.

She cherished fond memories of walking in the Riesengebirge mountains, and after the war it was these sites of her early encounters with German culture and landscape that she eventually sought out during her personal process of "reconciliation" with herland of birth.

The family chose to flee to Australia because Marianne's elder sister, Eva (Michelson) had come to Melbourne in 1937 to study dentistry.

After denying her German background for many years in an attempt to integrate and assimilate, it wasn't until the early 1970s that she began to visit Germany when invited to lectures and conferences. She revisited places of her childhood in Breslau/Wroclaw; many had been destroyed. Finally, the old wounds caused by her enforced separation from her Silesian homeland healed - Marianne retained her Australian citizenship, taken out in 1945, to the end - and she began avidly collecting and humming the German "kitchen songs" the family's maids in Breslau would sing to her and her sister.

Ranked among the leading international experts of her generation on the German courtly romances, she wrote incisive and stimulating studies on their narratology, mimesis and the theme of love.

Among them was the seminal publication Wolfram's 'Parzival': On the Genesis of its Poetry (1984, revised edition 2002). Other works embraced a broader chronology, such as her essay Medieval Literature in Reception. Richard Wagner and Wolfram's 'Parzival'.

A devoted fan of Wagner's operas, her scholarship derived from a profound intellectual bent, which was evident in her conversation as much as in her writing, and she maintained her remarkable vitality well into advanced age. In her seminars and tutorials she did not suffer fools gladly, and many young undergraduates wilted under her forthright criticism - always delivered with a smile.

To her postgraduate students she was a loyal friend and companion beyond the realms of academe.

Her husband Victor, who became professor of metabolism and endocrinology at St Mary's, Paddington, in London, died in 2006. She is survived by her daughter, Nicola and granddaughter, Antonia.

Nicola Crichton-Brown is Marianne Wynn's daughter.