Ulrich Ernst Simon (1913 - 1997)

Born 21 Sep 1913 in Berlin, Germany

Ancestors

Died 31 Jul 1997 at age 83 in London, England, UK

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Biography

Ulrich Simon ’s life was impacted by the Holocaust.

Anna and James Simon had two sons: Jörn and Ulrich.

Jörn Martin Simon was born in 1910 and died in 1937. He escaped from Germany to avoid the Nazis, heading to Russia. He was killed by the Russians during the time of the purge and the Moscow Trials in 1937. He was one of the thousands of Westerners and intellectuals who were shot upon arrest, during the 1937 purge by Stalin. He would not have been one of the main Russian figures put on show-trial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Trials

Ulrich Simon was born in Berlin and in 1933 immigrated to England. In England he became interested in Christianity , later converted, and in 1939 becomes a Church of England priest. He studied theology and has written some books.

Birth

Birth:

Date: 21 SEP 1913

City: Berlin

Country: Germany

Death

Death:

Date: 31 JUL 1997

City: City of London

State: Greater London

Country: UK

Note

Note: {geni:occupation} Theologian

Note: {geni:about_me} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Ernst_Simon

Obituary: The Rev Professor Ulrich Simon

By Richard Coggins, THE INDEPENDENT (UK)

Saturday, 16 August 1997

Nearly 40 years ago a nervous young candidate was being interviewed for a lectureship in the theological department of King's College London. Suddenly the emergency telephone rang. A student had been knocked off his bicycle just outside the college.

The Dean rushed to be with the student, asking his fellow interviewer, the theologian Ulrich Simon, to look after me - for I was, of course, the candidate. What part of the Old Testament was I working on? I mentioned Genesis. "Then you know what you should read?" I expected some weighty piece of German scholarship to be recommended. Weighty and German it certainly was, but not conventional scholarship: Thomas Mann's great novel Joseph und seine Bruder.

What I was then quite unaware of was that Simon had known Thomas Mann during his childhood in Berlin: a childhood not always very prosperous in material terms, but surely an intellectual feast, with such as Mann and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as near neighbours. Simon's family were non- practising Jews, but, practising or not, their lives were at risk in the Third Reich and, after flirting with the Communists, Simon came to Britain in 1933.

His father was later put to death, and among Ulrich Simon's books his A Theology of Auschwitz (1967) must be the most chilling. His account, in his autobiography Sitting in Judgement (1978), of the difficulties of his reception inBritain is a reminder that attitudes to refugees have not changed much in the intervening years.

Unexpectedly the non- practising Jew found himself attracted to the Church of England, and in what seems to have been an astonishingly short space of time he had become a Christian, and enrolled at King's College London with a view to ordination. He graduated and, after a brief time at Lincoln Theological College, was ordained in 1938 (would he have been interned as a suspected enemy alien if that had not happened?) and, after two parish curacies, returnedto King's to spend the rest of his working life on its staff.

For many people, theology at King's was embodied by the unlikely combination of two wonderful but very different pastors: its Dean, Sydney Evans, the establishment man and superb organiser par excellence, and the utterly unpredictable Ulrich Simon.

Simon wrote extensively (a dozen books), but he never fitted into neat categories. He loved the Hebrew Scriptures, and his lectureship (later Readership) was in Old Testament. But as my first experience of him showed he was never a conventional Old Testament scholar. His study of Isaiah 40-55, Theology of Salvation (1953), displays rare insights, but features on few conventional reading-lists.

It was a disappointment to him that he did not receive the Old Testament professorship, but the electors wisely offered the chair to someone more in tune with mainstream scholarship. When Simon became a Professor, it was a personal chair with the title of Professor of Christian Literature - an apt and imaginative choice of title, for his knowledge of Christian literature was all- embracing. Dante, Blake, Holderlin, Dostoevsky - the range was enormous, the knowledge profound.

The students loved him. When in the 1960s students wanted more say in the organisation of their programmes, I had to organise a straw vote finding out their wishes. Simon, whom I had thought might be quite alien to them, was theirfirst choice. And it was not only theological students whom he could captivate. King's is known for the Non-Theological Associateship of King's College (AKC), the arrangement by which large numbers of students from every discipline could attend lectures offered by the theology department. Simon always attracted vast numbers.

He was never an administrator. He ended his academic career as Dean of King's, but unashamedly relied on others to see to the nuts and bolts of daily organisation. What he would have thought of current styles of university life, with research assessment exercises and the like, beggars description.

Ulrich Simon was a man of many paradoxes. He wrote two books on heaven, Heaven in the Christian Tradition (1958) and The Ascent to Heaven (1961), and the hope that it embodies. Yet there was a side of him which was deeply pessimistic. The phrase "sick humanity" occurs frequently in his autobiography, and he was deeply distrustful of liberalism, both the ineffective liberalism, as he saw of it, of his German childhood, and the theological liberalism of morerecent times.

It was the deep resonances of worship which had first attracted him to Christianity, and the "mateyness" of much contemporary worship he regarded as deplorable trivialisation. Yet there was always hope, perhaps most naturally enshrined in playing or listening to the string quartets of his beloved Haydn and Mozart; I am told that his last act, the day before he died, was to get his violin restrung.

--

Ulrich Ernst Simon, theologian: born Berlin 21 September 1913; ordained deacon 1938, priest 1939; University Lecturer, King's College London 1945- 60, Reader in Theology 1960-72, Professor of Christian Literature 1972- 80, Dean 1978-80; married 1949 Joan Westlake (two sons, one daughter); died London 31 July 1997.

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Literature & Theology, Vol 12 No 2 June 1998

PROFESSOR ULRICH SIMON

WHEN PROFESSOR Simon died in the late summer of 1997, Literature &

Theology lost one of its first and most perceptive adviser. He was Professor of

Christian Literature at King's College London from 1971-1980, and shortly

after his retirement took an energetic part in the establishment of the series

of Durham conferences on literature and religion. Few who were present

will forget his powerful lecture on Job. In the early days of the journal he

wrote to me regularly when I was learning the business of editing—commenting

and criticising, but always encouraging our endeavours. His knowledge

of theology and European hterature and culture was extraordinary.

His personal history against the background of Nazi atrocities is well

known, and inevitably marks all his writings and thinking. I was privileged

to act as general editor of one of his later books, Pity and Terror, but my

personal favourite of all his writings is the little work entitled Atonement:

From Holocaust to Paradise (1987). An examination of the doctrine of atonement,

it ranges widely from Shakespeare to Dostoevsky and Kafka. The title,

I hope, is a kind of description of his own pilgrimage. The study of literature

and theology owes much to this wise and learned man.

David Jasper, University of Glasgow

Sources