Bernhard Schädel i els Països Catalans

Abstract

Since his death Bernhard Schädel has only rarely been mentioned in Catalanist publications and in handbooks on Romance studies, despite being a pioneer of Catalan philology and pioneer of the consolidation of the Catalan language at the beginning of the 20^th century. In the Catalan countries, his work is always discussed alongside that of his Majorcan friend, the philologist Antoni M. Alcover; two of Alcover's most important achievements, which made a decisive contribution to the aforementioned consolidation, namely the Diccionari català-valencià-balear and the "Primer Congrés de la Llengua Catalana" (1906), were greatly influenced by Schädel as a scientific advisor and collaborator.

As a young lecturer in Romance languages ​​in Halle, Schädel published several studies on Catalan phonetics and dialectology. However, he was primarily a publicist and the initiator of scientific projects. Various circumstances –including differences of opinion with the three Catalan scholarship holders he had brought to Halle, his appointment as a professor at the Colonial Institute in Hamburg, and then the First World War– led to a cooling off in his relations with Catalonia after 1909. He then devoted himself more to the whole of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. He died unexpectedly in 1926, in the midst of his work as professor at the University of Hamburg and as director of the Ibero-American Institute, which he had founded.