Erica Simon

Resumé

Erica Simon

26/2 1910 - 11/2 1993

William Michelsen writes a personal obituary about the French Grundtvig scholar Erica Simon. He first met Erica Simon in the middle of the fifties, when she was studying the Swedish folk high schools and wanted to meet all the Grundtvig scholars and people who put Grundtvig’s ideas into practice. Erica Simon was a university professor in Scandinavian languages and literature, but she also founded her own folk high scholl west of Lyons. Erica Simon’s interest in Grundtvig and her commitment to the Grundtvig’s ideal of .the school for life. was aroused in the mid-fifties, when she studied at Uppsala and met the Swedish folk high scholl Hvilan in Sk.ne. Erica Simon worked together especially with the Nordic folk high school in Kung.lv, and she wanted to spread the knowledge of Grundtvig’s ideas, not only in France, but all over the world. Like Grundtvig, Erica Simon wanted to find the roots of folk culture behind the influence from the Roman Empire, an influence which underlies the centralized school system dating back to Napoleonic France. Erica Simon’s main subject in her Grundtvig research was his ideas of the connection between folk enlightenment and science or scholarship. Science and folk culture are different matters but have to interact in order to establish a scholarship built on folk culture. In accordance with Grundtvig, Erica Simon stresses medieval Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic literature as the Nordic element in universal history, establishing a vernacular culture in opposition to the Latin school and scholarship. Erica Simon was a passionate scholar and interpreter of Grundtvigian ideas. She often visited Denmark and was on the Committe of Grundtvig-Selskabet, where she gave lectures, and she published papers in the Grundtvig-Studier in 1969 and 1973.

Erica Simon was born i Königsberg on February 26th, 1910. She spent her youth in Hannover and afterwards studied language and literature in Geneva and in Paris. She married in 1936 and became a widow in 1942, but remarried, bearing the name Vollboudt. Jacques Kleiner, her son from her first marriage, today lives in Switserland. From 1939-54 she was a secondary school teacher in France, but in 1954 she began studying the Nordic folk high school, doing research in Uppsala in 1955-56. In 1962 she became a doctor at the Sorbonne University in Paris (Doctorat d.tat in 1962), with a dissertation about the Swedish folk high schools in the late 18th century.