Alexander Zieseniss

Alexander Zieseniss (born March 11, 1899 in Börnsen , Duchy of Lauenburg , † April 11, 1945 in Breslau ) was a German Indologist .

Life

Alexander Zieseniss, the son of a businessman, attended Hansa School in Bergedorf . After graduating in February 1917, he was drafted into the First World War. After the end of the war he studied oriental studies at the University of Heidelberg . Especially Carl Bezold and Bruno Liebich , with whom he learned Arabic and Sanskrit , shaped his scientific development. After a semester in Freiburg (with Ernst Leumann ), Zieseniss moved to the young University of Hamburg in 1922 , where he joined the orientalist Walther Schubring . With him it was established in 1928 with a thesis on the Rama saga among the Malays, their origins and design doctorate .

After obtaining his doctorate, Zieseniss deepened his studies at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin . For two years he worked as a secretary at the core institute of the University of Leiden , which was headed by Jean Philippe Vogel . In 1936 he completed his habilitation at the University of Hamburg. In 1941 he switched to teaching Indology at the University of Breslau . During the siege of the city by the Red Army, Zieseniss was drafted into the Volkssturm and fell on April 11, 1945, even before his planned appointment as an extraordinary professor. Part of his estate went to the Indological Department of the University of Tübingen.

Despite his early death, Zieseniss was important as a researcher: He was the first German Indologist to study the history of Indian texts and Indian salvation legends in Java. In addition to his dissertation and his habilitation thesis (which only appeared in excerpts), he wrote numerous essays. A special field that owed numerous new insights to his work was the history of the dogmatics of Shaivism .

literature

• Helmuth von Glasenapp : Alexander Zieseniss (1899–1945) . In: Journal of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft , Volume 99 (1945–1949), pp. 158–159 (with picture after p. 159)

Web links

• Literature by and about Alexander Zieseniss in the catalog of the German National Library