Erich Woldan

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Erich Woldan (born October 7, 1901 in Vienna ; † January 8, 1989 in Hinterbrühl , Lower Austria ) was an Austrian administrative lawyer, private scholar and collector of old maps and other historical and geographical works.

Life

Erich Woldan was the son of the magistrate Oskar Woldan and Maria Woldan, née Prokopp. He attended in Vienna and Prague , a human High School and studied from 1920 political science and law at the University of Vienna , where he 1924 Dr. jur. received his doctorate and passed the state examination. He worked at Viennese courts and for tax authorities before he was appointed to the Court of Audit in 1931 . In 1935 he became Ministerial Secretary there.

On July 6, 1933, he joined the illegal Austrian NSDAP , for which an occupation ban was issued on June 19, 1933 . After the “Anschluss” of Austria , he was head of personnel in the presidential office of Reich Governor Arthur Seyß-Inquart in Vienna from July 1938 to April 1939 . He then headed price monitoring agencies until 1942, first at the Frankfurt an der Oder regional council , and from August 1941 at the Danzig-West Prussia regional council . On January 1, 1941, he became a member of the NSDAP and the SA . From February 1942 to 1945 he worked as a government councilor in the geographic service of the Federal Foreign Office and also as head of the historical map archive.

After a short American and Soviet internment, during which he had to work as a legal advisor in Weimar , he was able to return to Vienna in the late summer of 1945, where he was not taken back into the civil service because of his membership in the NSDAP. He then worked in the Vienna City Archives and the Lower Austrian Provincial Archives . In the end, he was classified as suitable for civil service by the special commission of the Court of Auditors, but turned down a position and retired in July 1948. From 1946 to 1950, Woldan, who continued to devote himself to his collection and historical geography , founded the Museum of Austrian Culture, part of the Art History Museum , with August von Loehr . He supported Hugo Hassinger in his work Austria's share in the exploration of the earth - a contribution to the cultural history of Austria .

Woldan became honorary director of the library of the Austrian Geographical Society in 1949 and published articles on the history of cartography and discovery in specialist journals. He supported Robert Haardt in his efforts to build the Globe Museum in Vienna.

In 1975 Woldan was given the professional title of Professor by the Federal President . In the same year he became a member of the Commission for the History of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), in 1980 he received the OeAW's highest award, the Bene Merito in gold medal. He was a founding member of the Coronelli Society for Globe Studies . Woldan died in 1989 after a femoral neck fracture in a care facility in Hinterbrühl.

Woldan Collection

Woldan began collecting maps and other geographical works in his youth, during his high school days in Prague. In the interwar period, many libraries of impoverished former aristocratic families came onto the market, which enabled him to acquire many objects very cheaply. He lived in his parents' apartment, had no family of his own, and almost all of his civil servant salary went towards his passion for collecting. For decades, the collection was housed in his private apartment in the inner city , Landhausgasse 2, in a very small space, sometimes stacked almost to the ceiling. His collection is now considered to be the most extensive private collection of Geographica and Kartographica in Central Europe.

Despite lucrative offers from abroad, the historian Günther Hamann was able to persuade Woldan to bequeath his valuable collection to the Academy in his will in 1970. There it was preserved as a closed collection, is scientifically processed and made accessible to researchers and interested parties. Research into the provenance of collection objects acquired during the Nazi era began in 2018.

The "re-Woldan world map" is an approximately 1,485 Resulting incunabula - unique , a mix of medieval TO-card (with paradise in the east) and Ptolemy map .

The Woldan Collection mainly contains old maps, atlases, travelogues, geographical works and topographical views with a total of around 11,000 titles, consisting of around 20,000 volumes or single sheets from the end of the 15th to the beginning of the 20th century:

  • 4310 titles in the field of Geographica (7000 volumes)
  • 2805 Juridica titles (5000 volumes)
  • 1711 title Cartographica (4000 single sheets)
  • 1657 views and individual views of topographical views (2500 volumes)
  • 286 titles mixed holdings
  • 25 globes

In 2018 the Austrian Academy of Sciences digitized the 380 most important historical maps in the collection and made them available online in high resolution, including the Wieder-Woldan map .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Johannes Dörflinger : In Memoriam. Erich Woldan 1901–1989. In: The Globusfreund. No. 38/39, 1990/91, pp. 195-202 ( excerpt ).
  2. ^ Rudolf Agstner : Handbook of the Austrian Foreign Service. Volume 1: 1918-1938. Headquarters, embassies and consulates. (= Research on the history of the Austrian Foreign Service 11) Lit, Münster 2015, ISBN 978-3-643-50685-6 , p. 355.
    Johannes Hürter (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: Volume 5 T – Z, supplements. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-71844-0 , p. 317f.
  3. ↑ a b Erich Woldan - About the person. OeAW (PDF)
  4. ↑ a b On the passion of collecting. meinviertel.at from July 8th 2011 (with numerous pictures).
  5. ↑ a b Helmut W. Lang, Wilma Buchinger Karen Kloth (ed.): Handbook of historical book stocks. Volume 2: Vienna. Olms-Weidmann, Hildesheim / Zurich / New York 1995, ISBN 3487099063 , p. 152ff.
  6. ↑ Petra Svatek: Metadata: re-Woldan world map 1485th
  7. ↑ OeAW puts historical maps online ORF from May 18, 2018.
    Magnificent historical maps digitized and put online. The standard from May 18, 2018.
    Wieder-Woldan-Weltkarte 1485 ÖAW
personal data
SURNAME Woldan, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian administrative lawyer, private scholar and collector
DATE OF BIRTH October 7, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1989
Place of death Hinterbrühl , Lower Austria