Rita Schober

Rita Schober (née Tomaschek; 13 June 1918 – 26 December 2012) was a German scholar of Romance studies and literature.

Rita Tomaschek was born and grew up in Rumburg (as Rumburk was then known), a small manufacturing town near the northern tip of Bohemia, in what was at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The town was overwhelmingly ethnically and linguistically German.

Between 1928 and 1936 Rita Tomaschek attended the secondary school (Realgymnasium) in Rumburg, before moving on to study at the German University in Prague between 1938 and 1940, and then again during 1944/45.

As a child her longstanding ambition was to become a school teacher, but after she moved to Prague she modified this goal, setting her sights instead on a career in the universities sector.

The focus of her undergraduate university career was on Romance studies and Classical Philology.

According to one source she was obliged to combine study with paid employment since otherwise there were no family funds available to finance her university education.

It was presumably also to the pressures arising from the war her student career was not unbroken.

One of the children whom she taught was Peter H. Feist (1928 – 2015) who later became a distinguished East German art historian.

The needs of the military and the slaughter of war created a desperate shortage of teachers: between October 1940 and 1943, and again from December 1944 till December 1945, she worked as an assistant Latin teacher at a secondary school (Gymnasium) in Warnsdorf, near her parents' home.

She had married Hans Hetzer, another art historian, in 1940, but he had gone missing in 1943 and was presumed to have been killed while taking part at the Battle of Stalingrad.

In March of that year she had received her doctorate from Prague University.

The discipline was Linguistics and her dissertation concerned the suffix "-age" in the French language.

(It became predominantly Czechoslovak after 1945.) Her father was a clerical worker.

Her mother worked in garment manufacturing.

By the summer of 1945 Rita Hetzer, now aged 27, was a widow.

The work was supervised by Erhard Preißig who surprised and delighted her early in 1945 by offering her an academic job, working for him.

The opportunity to embark on a university career at a time like this represented a dream come true.

Unfortunately, however, Erhard Preißig died in Prague a few months later.

In any case, the post–war ethnic cleansing made it impossible for ethnic Germans to stay in newly liberated Czechoslovakia.

Like tens of thousands of others, Rita Hetzer emigrated.

With her mother, she settled in Halle in 1946, where she took a post as a research assistant with the Romance studies department, which she now helped to re-establish at the university.

During 1946 she had been one of tens of thousands of early joiners of the new Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), created under contentious circumstances during April of that year.

Schober would later recall that between 1946 and 1948 she was employed as a research assistant in a university department without its own head.

In 1947 her responsibilities expanded to include a teaching position in Old French and Old Provençal.

She later explained that had made a conscious decision, when forced to flee to Germany, to settle in the Soviet occupation zone rather than in one of the three "western" zones administered by the British, the Americans and the French, because she anticipated a more rapid Denazification process under the Soviet administrators.

During the chaotic closing chapter of the war she had indeed joined the Communist Party in Prague, shortly before leaving the country.

That changed in 1948 with the arrival of Victor Klemperer, a noted scholar of Romance languages, who took on the leadership of the Romance Studies Institute at the University of Halle.

Halle had ended the war administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone (to be relaunched in October 1949 as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic ("East Germany")).

Between 1949 and 1989 the SED would be the ruling party in a new kind of German one party dictatorship, operated according to the Leninist precepts developed in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s.

Under Klemperer's leadership she also became a dean of studies in 1949 and began work on her Habilitation project which concerned the popular nineteenth-century French novelist George Sand.

She had married Robert Schober in 1950 and the birth of Hans-Robert Schober (1951–2012) diverted her energies.

At the professional level, by the time the move from Halle to Berlin had been competed she had been introduced to François Zola, Emile Zola's son, who at that point was still alive, through the mediation of the energetic "Zola specialist", Henri Mitterand.

When Rita Schober finally completed her habilitation, her subject would be not George Sand but Emile Zola.

During 1951/52, she obtained an important government advisory role (Hauptreferentin) on languages teaching to the Department for Higher and Technical Education ("Staatssekretariat für Hochschulwesen").

During 1951/1952 Schober transferred with her mentor from Halle to the Humboldt University of Berlin where she took a professorship and a teaching post.

Klemperer was by now well past the conventional retirement age, and it was evident that Rita Schober was being prepared to take over from him as head of the university Institute for Romance studies.

Meanwhile, her habilitation of George Sand was deferred and then abandoned.

She had found no complete collection of the author's work and certainly, in her words, no "scholarly" complete collection ("...keine wissenschaftliche Ausgabe ").

Another reason that she had no time to complete her habilitation on George Sand was the offer she received in 1952 from the Potsdam-based publishing firm of Rütten & Loenning to take charge of a major translation exercise involving Emile Zola's twenty novel Rougon-Macquart cycle.