In the shadow of Bismarck’s empire, one dedicated teacher quietly built a staggering body of scholarship on Geoffrey Chaucer—without a university post, a research grant, or a single PhD student. His name once filled the footnotes of English literature. So why don’t we remember him?

By Richard Utz

In 1896, a large party gathered near the ruins of the medieval castle of Rudelsburg, near Naumburg, Germany, to celebrate the 80th birthday of the founding chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck. As part of the ceremony, Bismarck assisted in the unveiling of a statue that depicted him as a university student. Sitting, and leaning back in a relaxed manner, his right hand holds a Mensurschläger, a specialty sword used during the academic fencing duels popular among student organizations at universities across Germany, Belgium, Poland, and the Baltic states. The student corps and their chivalric rituals linked higher education with the military and its traditions, participating in a highly competitive form of modern nationalism, intent not only on military and economic dominance but also on leadership in research and scholarship.

Among the student corps delegations honoring Bismarck and their fallen comrades in wars gone by was a Berlin school teacher and corps leader by the name of Johann (John) August Hermann Koch. He may have felt especially beholden to Bismarck because the chancellor had played an important role in ushering in and building up the study of English in the rapidly growing higher education landscape in the German Empire after 1871. Conceiving of English as a Germanic language, and intent on ‘Germanizing’ the annexed Alsace-Lorraine region after the Franco-Prussian War, the Imperial University of Strassburg (Strasbourg) had been chosen to receive the country’s first professorship in English philology.

The first chair in this position was Bernhard ten Brink, a specialist on Old and Middle English studies, with a focus on Beowulf and Geoffrey Chaucer. Between 1872 and 1914, 32 professorships in English philology were established at German universities, many of them medievalists or at least scholars with medievalist training. In many ways, John Koch’s own career was made possible by the support that “English” as a “Germanic” subject had received from Bismarck’s imperial government and its plans to weaponize higher education as an essential part of Germany’s general ascent toward national greatness.

John Koch was born in 1850 near Danzig (Gdansk, Poland) and began to study Romance and English philology at the Prussian University of Königsberg (Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1869. Like so many of his fellow students, he joined a conservative-nationalist student corps and voluntarily interrupted his studies to serve in an artillery regiment in the Franco-German War of 1870–1871. He thus actively enabled Otto von Bismarck to declare Wilhelm I Emperor of the German Empire and annex Alsace-Lorraine and Strasbourg from France. He then received his doctoral degree in 1875 and, after employment as a teacher in Königsberg and travels to England, France, and Italy, married and had three daughters, and then joined the Dorotheenstädtisches Realgymnasium in the Imperial Capital, Berlin, where he taught until his retirement in 1911.

He started out his academic work with publications on Old French and Anglo-Norman poetry, and then a book-length study of the medieval legend of the Seven Sleepers. He found time to produce a history of the Berlin Society for the Study of the German Language and its book collections and wrote and edited dozens of textbooks, grammars, and language manuals and anthologies for middle school students of French and English. His academic writing at the time includes articles on Anglo-Norman literature, English court masques, and Walter Scott’s connections with Germany—each of them published in the top journals of English and French studies. And he was an active member in various societies focusing on school and curricular reform, the alumni association of German Corps Students, and the German Philological Society.

All this sounds more than enough for someone with a family and a full-time position at a Gymnasium that taught students from fifth through twelfth grade. However, it is just the beginning. In 1877, Koch started his prodigious scholarship on Geoffrey Chaucer with a 44-page article investigating the relationship between the descriptions of the Temple of Venus in Boccaccio’s Teseida with Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Parliament of Fowls, a piece important enough to be reprinted by the Chaucer Society one year later. In 1879 he published his first review essay of other scholars’ work on Chaucer, and he would write more than a dozen such review essays (on multiple publications) and more than 60 reviews of individual Chaucer studies between 1879 and 1934, becoming something like a one-man “Year’s Work in Chaucer Studies.”

Most medievalists in the late 19th and early 20th century were especially keen on establishing the author’s sources, clarifying Chaucer as the actual author of manuscripts without author attribution, and building reliable modern textual versions out of the multiple manuscripts that existed for many of Chaucer’s works. Koch worked on all these matters, offering detailed studies on the medieval poet’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, the dating of Anelida and Arcite, the influence of Classical Roman authors on Chaucer, or the different versions of the prologue to the Legend of Good Women.

Koch also worked on the most laborious but prestigious efforts of medieval literary studies, creating critical editions of many of Chaucer’s texts (usually based on a painstaking comparison of all available manuscript versions of a single work), and he published an entire monograph on the chronology of Chaucer’s works, an important prerequisite to understanding the poet’s development and growth as a writer. He worked on all of Chaucer’s texts, including The Canterbury Tales (for which he published a complete edition for the Chaucer Society) to the shorter poems, many of which he even translated into German verse, another sign of his total inhabiting of the medieval poet’s thought and poetic voice.

In addition to the astounding number of book reviews and review essays mentioned above, Koch managed to publish two monographs (one 422 pages in length); three book-length translations from Middle English into German (one 579 pages in length); four critical editions of Chaucer’s poetry (one 475 pages in length); and 27 scholarly articles, published in the top journals in English studies. No other Chaucerian working between 1877 and 1934 reached a similar record. And he did all of this without academic support structures, access to doctoral students, or research funding (or, come to think of it, artificial intelligence).

Considering all this, how come Koch is never mentioned among those who created the field of Chaucer Studies? As a schoolteacher, he never built an academic following of PhD students who continued his work and honored his legacy. In addition, most tenured university professors in Germany looked down on scholars without a professorship, even those with Koch’s amazing record, and so at his death in 1934 he received only a single official eulogy by the editor of Englische Studien. The eulogy tellingly referred to Koch as “one of those rare, ideal representatives from the ranks of German schoolteachers who combined independent, scientific scholarship with their successful work in school.”

The most impactful development for the silencing of his legacy, however, was the very nationalism that helped create his specialized field at the German universities in the first place. Like the numerous other medievalist scholars who made up the first generation of chairs of English philology following Bismarck’s Anglophile policies, most of Koch’s publications were in German, at the time perfectly reasonable because there were at least as many German-speaking scholars focusing on English medieval texts as there were UK specialists. In fact, British scholar A.S. Napier admitted in 1892 that “at the present time a scientific study of English philology and literature is absolutely impossible without a knowledge of German.”

His colleague Henry Sweet commented in 1885 that “the historical study of English was being rapidly annexed” by heavily state-funded Germans and “that no English dilettante can hope to compete with them—except by Germanizing himself and losing all hope of his nationality.” Sweet also stated sarcastically that he might not qualify as a Chaucerian, “being merely a native of London, in which city Chaucer was born.”

As part of Germany’s aggressive move toward creating the most powerful system of higher education, Koch and his colleagues had often expressed nationalist pride in their achievements, stressing how their own science-like (philological) methodologies were superior to some of the more interpretive literary approaches favored by their colleagues in the gradually expanding English departments in the UK and among gentleman scholars.

Their censorious adversarial condescension would backfire as World War I broke out and German access to English libraries and English-language scholarship was interrupted. In the absence of well-functioning interlibrary loan services, scholars at the time would regularly send each other personal copies of books and essays, and Koch muses with some degree of self-awareness in one of his publications about having perhaps been too critical of his British colleagues’ writings. Clearly, those colleagues were cutting their ties with their German counterparts, retaliating against German scholarly nationalism with their own. In 1921, the UK government’s Newbolt Report performed something we would nowadays call an effort at “decolonizing” the study of English literature from German methodologies. J.R.R. Tolkien was among the few English academics who tried to resist this change in educational policy.

John Koch’s work on Chaucer, especially his English-language publications, survived in the footnotes and explanatory notes of the most widely used modern edition of Chaucer, F.N. Robinson’s 1933 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (revised edition, 1957), and in some legacy reprints. However, by 1951, with World War II further reducing the reach and reputation of German scholarship, Chaucer studies was fully re-Englished, so that leading U.S. Chaucerian Albert C. Baugh incorrectly claimed that “in Germany Chaucer studies never really flourished.”

Richard Utz is Interim Dean and Professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology.