Professor Bernhard Kytzler (seated) seen with UKZN colleagues and friends during his farewell tea.School of Arts bids farewell to German Academic
The School of Arts recently bid farewell to one of its longstanding academics in Foreign Languages, Professor Bernhard Kytzler, who will turn 90 in August. After working at UKZN for 27 years, Kytzler will now return to his home in Germany.
A celebratory tea was held for Kytzler on the Howard College campus which colleagues and close friends attended to say their goodbyes and well-wishes.
Said Kytzler: ‘I would like to thank all my colleagues for their continuous friendliness and support over the 27 years I spent at UKZN (former UND). I will miss the Departments of Foreign Languages and Classics, but hope to come back and visit them again many times. And everybody is welcome to visit me in Berlin.’
Kytzler is known in the international academic circles as a German classical philologist. He got his PhD at the Free University Berlin in 1956 with a thesis on the “Thebaid” of Statius. He was a fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. He habilitated in 1970 at the FU Berlin and taught there as a professor until his retirement in 1992.
Some of his visiting professorships took him to the Universities of Frankfurt, Fordham, Changchun (People's Republic of China, the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations) and in 1990 to the University of Natal.
Kytzler deals with a broad range of topics in Classics and other related disciplines, especially with Neo-Latin and the afterlife of antiquity. He has also published numerous translations of ancient authors. In 1965, he published the first Latin-German edition of “Octavius” ??by Marcus Minucius Felix. In addition, he is a member of the Historical Commission for Silesia.
Words and photograph: Melissa Mungroo