Sa love for Italy was so strong, knowledgeable and serious that he dealt like no other with the contradictions in the relationship between his compatriots and the country they yearned for, pointing out the many ambivalences, dubiousness and inconsistencies: In his book “Criminal, corrupt, catholic? Italians in German Prejudice” (2018), Klaus Bergdolt gets to the bottom of the phenomenon in which an intellectual and moral sense of superiority is combined with a demonstrative enthusiasm for art and history and follows it through the centuries, from Luther to Goethe and Schiller to Aby Warburg and Thomas Mann, up to the recent present. “With arrogant matter-of-factness one claimed (so) the sovereignty of interpretation over the entire Italian culture,” he says, summing up the German tradition of “sitting in judgment on the inhabitants of the peninsula,” not without notable exceptions that confirm the rule, including August von Platen or Victor Hehn, to mention positively.
Sought-after interview partner in the Corona crisis
To understand the everyday life of the Italians, their social preferences, religious customs and moral concepts, which remain hidden to many travelers from the north, Bergdolt brings with him a critically trained attention and a universally well-read curiosity: born in Stuttgart in 1947, he initially studied medicine and then history and art history, in order to bring together his widely ramified research interests in his Würzburg habilitation in 1989 on “Physician and Illness in Petrarch”. In 1990 he became director of the German Study Center in Venice, where his standard work on the plague, “The Black Death in Europe” (1994), was written. In “Germans in Venice” (2015), Bergdolt describes the “story of an encounter”, the traces of which he traces “from the emperors of the Middle Ages to Thomas Mann”. In his last book, “The Nativity Scene” (2021), he explores their cultural-historical connections and also explains it as an expression of Italianità. In 1995 he moved to the University of Cologne, where he headed the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine until his retirement in 2014 and played a reserved but inspiring role in cultural life. During the Corona crisis, he was a much sought-after interview partner and expert. As has just become known, Klaus Bergdolt died on February 11th in Cologne at the age of 75 after a short, serious illness.
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