Martin Ostwald
German-American classical scholar (1922–2010)
Martin Ostwald (January 15, 1922 – April 10, 2010) was a German-American classical scholar, who taught until 1992 at Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania. His main field of study was the political structures of ancient Greece.
Early life
Born the elder son of a German-Jewish lawyer, Ostwald was raised in Dortmund, where he attended the Municipal Gymnasium (Städtisches Gymnasium). He had always intended to become a classical scholar, but when this possibility was removed by the passage of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which closed the German universities to Jews, he decided instead to pursue his interests in teaching and scholarship by becoming a rabbi. But during the Reichskristallnacht on November 9, 1938, Ostwald was arrested together with his father and his younger brother, Ernst. Forced to leave his parents behind in Germany, Ostwald and his brother were able to emigrate to England via the Netherlands on a Kindertransport. In England, however, Ostwald and other German refugees were, in the wake of the British defeat at Dunkirk, transferred to a concentration camp in Canada.
Education & career
Following his release, Ostwald enrolled at the University of Toronto, where he was able to resume his original interest in classical studies. After graduation in 1946 he continued his studies in the (at that time still quite new) Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he wrote an M.A. thesis on the treatment of the Orestes myth by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In 1949 he became a doctoral student under fellow German immigrant Kurt von Fritz at Columbia University in New York City.
“Martin Ostwald” enters the record as german-American classical scholar (1922–2010). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Martin, Ostwald and German-American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q110740. VIAF identifies the subject as 61561328. The Library of Congress control number is n81033499. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1922, 2010, 1992 and 1935.
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This entry incorporates text from “Martin Ostwald” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.