Hans Petri (theologian)

Hans Petri (born March 5, 1880 in Küstrin , † August 23, 1974 in Leonberg ) was a Protestant theologian.

Life

education

Hans Petri comes from a family of theologians and lawyers from Lemgo and Bremen . His father was a Protestant pastor in Gablonz , which was Austrian at the time , and superintendent in Küstrin . Petri was born here on March 5, 1880, the fourth of six children. He spent school and youth in Sorau , where his father took over the management of the diocese in 1886. Since his uncle, the church historian Gustav Bossert, lived near Tübingen, Hans Petri chose this Württemberg city to begin his theology studies. To continue his education he moved to Erlangen because, in Petri's opinion, the faculty there was the refuge of liberal theology. During his studies there he became a member of the Bubenreuther fraternity in 1900 . At the end of his studies he chose Berlin to hear the Baltic Adolf Harnack . Hans Petri was devoted to the work of the Inner Mission from an early age, but on the other hand wanted to get to know Protestant community life under special living conditions. He volunteered at the Evangelical Upper Church Council in Berlin for service in other European countries. In 1909 he received the parish office in Turnu-Severin on the lower Danube in the Kingdom of Romania . During the First World War he was interned as an enemy foreigner in 1916 and came to Russia as a civil prisoner , from where he was released in 1918 on the intervention of Elsa Brandström , the "Angel of Siberia". In 1921 he was elected to the Protestant parish church of Bucharest and stayed there for 30 years until he retired and moved to Leonberg in Württemberg in 1951 . From 1937 to 1949 Petri was dean of the Bucharest church district, which included all Protestant parishes in Moldova and Wallachia as well as Dobruja .

Work for the Germans in Southeast Europe

His new sphere of activity immediately captivated him, and so in the first few years he began to publish reports in Sorau and Hamburg about the Germans in Romania and the kingdom ruled by the Hohenzollern Karl I. After taking over the office in Bucharest, he resumed the work interrupted by the war. He mainly dealt with the history of the smaller German-Evangelical communities of old Romania; most of them were only founded in the 19th century. For the extensive monograph “History of the Evangelical Community in Bucharest” (Leipzig 1939) he used material from the archives of Berlin, Leipzig and Stockholm. In addition to several articles in specialist publications, he devoted a larger work to the Germans in the Dobrudscha, "History of the German Settlements in the Dobrudscha" (Munich 1956), which Petri witnessed at the end of 1940 when these Germans were brought "home to the Reich" .

Since the Dobrudscha Germans are related to the Bessarabia Germans , he also dealt with these and beyond with the Germans in southern Russia as a whole. With the latter, it was especially the so-called fringe groups that he was interested in: Swabian chiliasts, Herrenhuter , Hutterite brothers , about whom informative studies appeared. He was interested in the Reformation in Moldova during the reign of Prince James Heraklides in the 16th century; the work was published by the Romanian Academy (1927). "Duke Christoph von Württemberg and the Reformation in France" was another work from this topic. A very informative study is dedicated to the diplomat Karl Friedrich Reinhard, employed in the French service, who represented Napoleon's south-east European policy as envoy in Moldova in 1806 and then came into Goethe's field of vision , with whom he had been in personal and correspondence for decades. In addition, small contributions were made on a wide variety of topics, but mainly always related to the Germans of Southeast Europe.

Hans Petri died on August 23, 1974 at the age of 95. An obituary said: "Future historiography will find that his name deserves a permanent place in the series of historians who contributed to the promotion of church history in the Southeast" (Oskar Wittstock).

Works

• Protestant diaspora priests in Romania in the 19th century, M. Warneck Verlag, Berlin 1930
• History of the Evangelical Congregation in Bucharest Leipzig 1939
• History of the German settlements in the Dobrudscha Munich 1956, publisher of the Südostdeutsche Kulturwerk
• The Germans in Old Romania Reprint from the 1971 yearbook of the Dobrudscha Germans

literature

• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 4: M-Q. Winter, Heidelberg 2000, ISBN 3-8253-1118-X , pp. 298-299.

Web links

• Biography in the culture portal West-Ost, the text of which was adopted after the copyright was released.