Background
Weller"s father was a businessman concerned with industrial products and a commercial traveller, and his mother was a baker"s daughter from Gmünd.
linguist university professor writer
Weller"s father was a businessman concerned with industrial products and a commercial traveller, and his mother was a baker"s daughter from Gmünd.
Hermann Weller transferred from the Real Lyceum in Gmünd to the “Latin School” in Bad Mergentheim. In 1897, he passed the school leaving examination. Weller then studied law in Berlin and Tübingen, and then Classical Languages.
In 1901 he received his doctorate in Latin and Sanskrit.
In subsequent years, he completed his state examination in Latin, Greek, French and Hebrew. He also distinguished himself by a sound knowledge of English, Italian, Indian and Persian.
He is considered the Horace of the twentieth century. After his studies in Tübingen, the classical philologist taught as a school teacher in the Ellwangen Gymnasium between 1913 and 1931. He also held a position at the Ehingen Gymnasium.
In 1930 he qualified as a university teacher in Tübingen.
Weller was already so famous by 1931 that in that year the Ellwangen town council decided to name a street after him. The Latin scholar, Uwe Dubielzig, recognised in 2001 that the text was a playfully disguised accusation against the ever more apparent anti-Semitism of the Nazis, the effects of which Weller could observe in his immediate surroundings of Tübingen University.
Additionally, if the text cannot be read as a document of anti-fascist resistance, it is still a spirited but camouflaged document opposing the Nazi racist politics, the full brutality of which, before the pogrom of the so-called Reichskristallnacht, Weller would have underestimated, (as did Charlie Chaplin even in 1940 in his film The Great Dictator). In that sense the Y Elegy can be assessed as a remarkable testimony for "internal emigration".