Jain Journal 1970 01

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 40

146
with them, Schubring told me that Meyer-Benfey had told him of the letter from Tagore that I had given them. Meyer-Benfey's original name was only Meyer, but as it was a very common German name, he added to it his first wife's maiden name Benfey (Jewish), also to indicate his nearness to her in life and spirit. After her premature death his present wife joined her own maiden name Franck to his original name. During the ascendancy of the Nazis later, to whom everything Jewish was anathema, he dropped Benfey from his name in order to keep out of the public prejudices and became simple Meyer again. When I visited them in their house in the country in later days, one or both of them always came to the station to receive or see me off. these visits in the forenoon and spent the whole day with them. In the afternoon they would take me for walks through the countryside where we visited barn houses and peasants' homes, and saw fields being tilled with machinery drawn by huge horses.
I paid
Another Professor, a Political Science teacher with whom the Auslandsstelle had put me in touch, invited me to visit him and his family regularly once a week and spend the evening with them.
JAIN JOURNAL
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Soon I began to meet the other members of the Indian Seminar, viz., Dr. Tavadia, a Parsi of very quiet manners, who was a Lektor in Hindi (in Germany only teachers of modern foreign languages are called Lektors; what we call Lecturers i.e., Junior Professors are known as Privatdozents i.e., Private Teachers, because in former days they used to be unpaid); Mr. Matsunami, a very intelligent and industrious Japanese who studied for many years with Schubring without bothering to take the Doctorate; he is now a Professor of Sanskrit in a Japanese university; Dr. Ziesseniss who had already taken his Doctorate and was working on his Habilitationsarbeit i.e., a higher Thesis that qualified one for Privatdozentship; he died during the last War; and Fraeulein (i.e. Miss) Brosin, the lady who was Secretary to the Professor; she was also the Seminar librarian. Two others who were in India but returned after some time were Dr. Ludwig Alsdorf who has now succeeded Schubring in the Hamburg Chair and Dr. Olaf Hansen who is now Professor in Berlin University; both of them were working at the time on their Habilitationsarbeit. Students who took up Sanskrit only as a subsidiary subject (Nebenfach) or as casual students (Gasthoerer; anyone who had passed the School Final or Matriculation-Abituer, its standard being as high as the B.A. Honours in India-could enrol as a casual student for a particular subject) did not belong to this higher circle whose