Background
Margarete Bieber was born on July 31, 1879, in Schoenau, Kreis Schwetz, West Prussia (now Przechowo, Poland), the daughter of a prosperous Jewish industrialist, Jacob Heinrich Bieber, and Valli Bukofzer.
( The description for this book, The History of the Greek...)
The description for this book, The History of the Greek and Roman Theatre, will be forthcoming.
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educator historian archeologist
Margarete Bieber was born on July 31, 1879, in Schoenau, Kreis Schwetz, West Prussia (now Przechowo, Poland), the daughter of a prosperous Jewish industrialist, Jacob Heinrich Bieber, and Valli Bukofzer.
Margarete attended local schools and then boarding schools in Dresden and Berlin. In 1901 she matriculated at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. As a woman, she needed to secure her professors' permission to attend their lectures. She heard the greatest classical scholars of the time: Hermann Diels (Greek philosophy), Eduard Meyer (ancient history), and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Greek literature), for whom she wrote a paper in Latin on the Greek sources of Catullus. She began to study Greek sculpture with Reinhard Kekule von Stradonitz, but his lectures bored her. She transferred to Bonn and became the student of Georg Loeschcke, her mentor and dissertation adviser, whose portrait always hung in her study. Her dissertation, on Greek sculpture and acting, anticipated her life-work. She received her Ph. D. in 1907.
Bieber spent the years 1907-1914 in Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor, where she visited ancient sites and museums and met the greatest archaeologists of the day: Wilhelm Dorpfeld, Sir Arthur Evans, Franz Studniczka, and Theodor Wiegand. In 1915 she published her exemplary catalog of the ancient sculptures in the museum at Kassel, Germany. Her interpretation of the Kassel Apollo remains authoritative. While working intensively with her sister for the Red Cross during World War I, Bieber gave instruction privately from 1915 to 1918 in Berlin. From 1919 to 1933 she taught archaeology at the university of Giessen, progressing from lecturer to positions comparable to associate professor and department chairman. She lectured on a wide variety of subjects but was not paid a salary until 1926 and did not receive a regular budget line until 1931.
Although Bieber had always thought of herself as a German, not a Jew, she was forced to retire by the Nazis on July 1, 1933. She wisely decided to emigrate immediately. After a disappointing year at Oxford University, Bieber arrived in New York City on September 21, 1934, to serve as a visiting lecturer at Barnard College. In 1935 she became a member of the Department of Fine Arts and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she eventually reached the rank of associate professor. During her years at Columbia, on September 26, 1940, Bieber was naturalized as an American citizen. After retiring in 1948, she continued to teach at Columbia's School of General Studies till 1956 and at the New School for Social Research till 1950. She also had an appointment as a visiting lecturer at Princeton University (1949 - 1951). She made a last trip to Europe (1951 - 1952) but did not visit Germany.
Bieber was a synthesizer rather than an interpreter. In the tradition of earlier German "monumental philology, " she used texts and monuments to elucidate each other. She valued Roman art for what it was rather than as a means to learn about lost Greek masterpieces. She did for American archaeologists, who because of the anti-German feeling generated by World War I, tended not to read German, what Werner Jaeger had done for classicists: she made the German achievement available and exciting. She regularly reviewed and summarized German books in American journals. Her necrologies of German colleagues were widely read. She even wrote an often-reprinted textbook to teach American students how to read German art historians. Her two most influential students were the Greek art historian Evelyn Byrd Harrison and the Etruscologist Larissa Bonfante.
Bieber's life is also important for those concerned with the emergence of academic women. She opened art history and archaeology to women in Germany both in universities and in the foreign institutes. She gained her first teaching posts only because her father's wealth allowed her to serve without salary. As the first woman who had ever taught them, she astonished students at Berlin and Giessen, but her competence and good nature quickly won them over. She was as much a victim of prejudice at Columbia as she had been in Germany: she was overworked, poorly paid, and repeatedly denied promotions. Even the title "emeritus" with its concomitant benefits was withheld from her.
Bieber remained loyal both to Germany and her adopted country. She bore no grudge against her fellow Germans. After 1945 she sent numerous food and gift packages to her former colleagues and students in Germany, some of whom had spoken against her earlier, and she wrote letters exonerating them. Her apartment at 605 West 113th Street became a salon where European and American scholars met, exchanged ideas, and learned from one another. Through public interviews she became an inspiration to older people because the last thirty years of her long life were her most productive and satisfying. She died in her sleep in New Canaan, Connecticut.
( The description for this book, The History of the Greek...)
Bieber never married, but she did adopt a daughter in 1932.