Ich weiß wohl, was soll es bedeutenDass ich so traurig bin
An anguish of old age is living immersed in death — of family, friends, loves, colleagues, mentors and models, students, people who have entertained, enriched, and illuminated you — while laboring just to get from day to day yourself. I have failed to memorialize many of the departed, I cannot cope any more, and I am ashamed of all of that. And now comes the death of Manfred Bierwisch, not exactly a surprise, since he was a full decade older than me, but then he was one of the few who should have been granted a life forever. And with a special role in my life.
Martin Haspelmath on Facebook this morning:
RIP Manfred Bierwisch (1930-2024, in the middle of the picture).
(MH:) The picture shows [MB] with his close friends Paul Kiparsky and Dieter Wunderlich (taken from Kiparsky’s 2023 memoir in the [Annual Review of Linguistics])He was the GDR’s most prominent linguist, but he made no compromises with the regime. When some people were doing “Marxist linguistics” because it was good for their careers, he kept pursuing “structural linguistics”. Unlike some of his friends from the 1950s (e.g. Heinz Vater and Ewald Lang), he did not try to leave for the freer West Germany, but he stayed in the East. In 2005, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Leipzig University, where he had studied in the 1950s (and where he was jailed for 10 months for possession of illegal writings).
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