HERE is encouragement for any with academic ambitions who might feel they are not as young as they used to be. For Josef Jacobs, at the age of 87, found 3that something was missing in his life. He became a student. He matriculated, and at the age of 93 was an MA, Master of Arts. Now, all of one hundred years old he has just handed in his doctoral thesis.
He is obviously a bit fed up with journalists chasing him so when Gunter Dahl phoned him he was suspicious until Dahl told him that he was seventy two. Said Jacobs: "Then you still have your life before you." When they met, the reporter said "Good day, Herr Doktor." The Doktor-to-be: "Not yet, but the next time you come, it could be so.
It began in 1919 when Jacobs, seriously wounded in the war, became a student of economics in Frankfurt. He had earlier been intended for the church but the war ended that. He joined his father in his wine-growing business after a few terms at economics, which didn't interest him. Married. Flopped in the wine business and returned to Frankfurt where he was employed for thirty years in the city administration. As a pensioner he got a part-time job in the library of Frankfurt University and there wrote a novel "Murder in the German Seminar". Published by himself, 500 copies.
So, at 87 years of age, he was still restless, and after his Master's degree at 93 it was indicated to him that his academic career was thereby at an end. His favourite professor sawn his deep disappointment. Well, you do your doctorate under me." The title of the work is Rhine Romanticism in the Viniculture of the 19th Century."
He works from home, not being so, light-footed, now. He is a widower. A daily system. Up at 8 o'clock. At 11 a home-help comes. Lunch at midday courtesy of Meals on Wheels run by the Red Cross. The phone is off the hook until 3 o'clock. He has a snooze. Then he writes at his thesis - by hand. A secretary has typed it up eighty pages. His sons will accompany him when it comes to the viva voce part of the doctoral process "for it is nowhere written that an aspirant doctor must rush over hot-foot to his oral examination."
To the question put to him by Jacobs: "Have you been a student?" the interviewer answers that he started, but the war put an end to it. "Keep on studying he is advised. And, writes the reporter "I'll bear that in mind for the next 28 years. But I won't rush into anything." All at greater length in Die Zeit of Hamburg.