Author Description

English summary: In the early twenties the 'Orientalist' Hellmut Ritter (1892-1971), younger brother of the famous historian Gerhard Ritter, worked as a teacher at the newly founded University of Hamburg. After the war, from 1949 to 1956, he resumed his teaching at the University of Frankfurt. A follower of Carl Heinrich Becker, Ritter remained closely connected to Becker's circle throughout his life. Yet it was in Kemalist Turkey that Ritter achieved academic maturity, observing political and intellectual developments in Germany during the period after 1933 from a distance. His connections to the changing world of Ottoman scholarship and to the German immigrants who came after 1933 and who Ataturk expected to reform Turkish universities (above all in Istanbul and Ankara), gave Ritter's work a level of understanding and breadth that has hardly ever been matched in German 'Orientalist' scholarhship. In his last years, he radically changed his field of research when he discovered a community of Aramaic-speaking Christians in Beirut who had come from Tur Abdin and had continued to cultivate their new-Syrian language in their Lebanese exile. Ritter turned away from Islamic studies and instead set out to analyze the grammar of the newly discovered idiom. "Im Halbschatten" (in the half shade) portrays Ritter's life and work in terms of an intellectual biography. German description: Der Orientalist Hellmut Ritter (1892-1971), jungerer Bruder des bekannten Historikers Gerhard Ritter, unterrichtete in der ersten Halfte der zwanziger Jahre an der neu gegrundeten Universitat Hamburg und nach dem Krieg von 1949 bis 1956 an der Universitat Frankfurt. Er war Schuler von Carl Heinrich Becker und blieb dessen Umkreis Zeit seines Lebens verbunden. Seine wissenschaftliche Reife erlebte Ritter jedoch in der kemalistischen Turkei und betrachtete die politische und geistige Entwicklung im Deutschland der Zeit nach 1933 aus spurbarer Distanz. Seite Kontakte mit der im Umb