Hans-Jürgen Mattusch

Max Hans-Jürgen Mattusch (* 1931 in Merseburg ) is a German Slavist and interlinguist with close ties to general linguistics.

Life

After Mattusch had been denied his actual study wishes, such as pharmacy and / or business law and non-European languages, in the former Soviet occupation zone or the GDR (he was discriminated against because of his "bourgeois" origin and "western relatives"), he studied from 1949 to 1950 at the Foreign Language School (Bach School) in Leipzig Russian and from 1950 to 1954 at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena Slavic Studies, Education, Psychology and Philosophy, at times also Sinology and Geography. Mattusch received his doctorate in 1970 with the thesis "Phraseology and special foreign language university education - depicted in nominally defined technical word combinations of selected chapters of the Russian-language human medical literature" at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. In 1981 he completed his habilitation there with "Technical languages ​​and communicative-functional language considerations - represented by the request modality in scientific technical languages ​​of Russian". Both went hand in hand with an increased focus on general linguistics and interlinguistics as well as non-European languages. The state security authorities of the GDR prevented his further academic and professional career and threatened his family, one of his sons was arrested by the state security authorities in connection with his application to leave the country, and his parents were threatened with an occupational ban. Only after the fall of the Wall was Mattusch appointed as a lecturer in applied linguistics, but due to the previous blockade of the Stasi he was no longer young enough for a further professional and academic career.

After a school internship in Bad Langensalza and a voluntary editorial activity at the Jena University Radio, Mattusch worked as a foreign language teacher and linguist at the Technical University of Dresden (1954–55), at the Bergakademie Freiberg (1955–56), at the Niemeyer Verlag in Halle an der Saale ( 1956–59) and at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (1959–96). At the same time he worked at the Moscow Linguistic University as a German lecturer (1960–61), at the Lomonosov University Moscow (1974, 1978 - language training and study work in Russian academic libraries), at the University of Sofia (1975), at the Bashkir State University in Ufa (1977, 1981), at the Ufa and Sofia Medical Schools and as a tour guide in Russia and Bulgaria.

Mattusch taught students from a wide variety of disciplines, such as medical professionals, pharmacists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, economists and agricultural scientists, held special seminars on technical languages for philologists and lectures on global language problems for listeners from all faculties, gave seminars and lectures on linguistic issues in and outside of Germany Abroad (so in Moscow, Ufa and Sofia), developed specialist language teaching materials and carried out research in the linguistic field. His main research interests were technical languages ​​and their relationship to the general language, how to make them teachable through functional approaches, as well as planned languages and the global language problem.

In addition to the works listed below, Mattusch published over 100 essays and reviews and gave numerous academic lectures at home and abroad. He was a co-founder of the interdisciplinary research group "Communicative-functional language observation and foreign language teaching". He organized and led a number of national and international linguistic conferences and events, belonged to various scientific committees, supervised numerous diploma and doctoral students and was head of the Slavic Languages ​​department at the Institute for Foreign Languages ​​at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg from 1984 to 1990 . When he retired, he and his wife researched the history of the Esperanto movement in Düsseldorf and published books on linguistic and interlinguistic issues as well as an extensive biography of his life.

Mattusch has lived in Düsseldorf with his wife since 1996. He has been married for over 60 years and has three children.

Fonts

• with E. Mattusch: The rules of Russian orthography and punctuation. (translated from Russian). Hall 1959.
• Conception for a guideline for the functional-semantic description of Russian technical languages ​​in the natural and social sciences. Hall 1984.
• Contributions to a functional semantic grammar for subject-related Russian training. Halle 1988, 1989, 1992, 1993.
• with S. Fiedler: Basic Esperanto course. Part 1 and 2. Hall 1990.
• Multilingualism: a curse or a blessing for humanity? On questions of a European and global foreign language policy. Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Bern / New York / Paris / Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-631-30587-7 .
• with E. Mattusch: Esperanto - a way out of Babylon? 95 years of Esperanto in Düsseldorf. Düsseldorf 2002, ISBN 3-89906-339-2 .
• Our language world and its future . BoD, Düsseldorf 2012, ISBN 978-3-8482-1869-1 .
• Is Esperanto still up to date? An essay on a controversial linguistic project. BoD, Düsseldorf 2019, ISBN 978-3-7494-0854-2 .

Web links

• Literature by Hans-Jürgen Mattusch in the catalog of the German National Library

literature

• Max Hans-Jürgen Mattusch: A Long Wandering - A War Child's Search for the Land of His Dreams . BoD, Düsseldorf 2009.
• Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar 1996 . 17th edition. Humanities and Social Sciences. Berlin / New York 1996.
• W. Kürschner (Ed.): Linguists Handbook . 2 volumes. Tubingen 1994.