Heinrich Wittram

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Heinrich Wittram (born March 28, 1931 in Riga ; † August 7, 2018 in Hanover ) was a Protestant theologian and church historian of Baltic German origin.

family

Heinrich was the oldest of five children of the historian Reinhard Wittram and his wife Ilse, nee. Koch. Heinrich Wittram had been with Helga, born in 1958. Heinze married.

Life

As part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact , the Wittram family came to Posen at the end of 1939 . In 1941 Heinrich was accepted into the classical grammar school there. After fleeing Posen on January 20, 1945, the family found their first admission in Göttingen and a new home after the end of the war. Heinrich attended the humanistic grammar school in Göttingen until he graduated from high school in 1950. In connection with the rethinking after the end of the Nazi state and the war, he decided to study Protestant theology. After studying in Göttingen, Tübingen and Heidelberg from 1950 to 1955, he returned to the Hannoversche Landeskirche and in 1958 took the second theological exam after the vicariate. He then became a study inspector in the Imbshausen seminary (1958–1960). With the practical theologian Martin Doerne in Göttingen he received his doctorate in 1960 with a dissertation on the Dorpater practical theologian and Luther researcher Theodosius Harnack and in the same year took over a parish pastor in Clausthal-Zellerfeld . 1964–1970 he was a student pastor in Göttingen and then from 1970 to 1976 head of the vicar training of the Schleswig-Holstein regional church in Ahrensburg . From 1976 until his retirement in 1996 Wittram worked as superintendent in Stade , so again in the regional church of Hanover.

Wittram has made the preservation of the Baltic ecclesiastical heritage and the maintenance of today's ecclesiastical contacts to Estonia and Latvia as well as the cohesion within the Baltic theological convention in Germany a special task. He has inspired the work of the German-Baltic Church Service for decades and has also directed it for many years. Since 1964 he was a full member of the Baltic Historical Commission ; With a large number of essays and lectures, he has accentuated and promoted research on the Baltic church history over the past six decades. From 1996 to 2002 he was chairman of the Carl Schirren Society .

Publications

  • The church at Theodosius Harnack. Ecclesiology and Practical Theology . Göttingen 1963 (work on pastoral theology, volume 2). -
  • To exist in freedom. Evangelical churches in the Baltic countries between yesterday and tomorrow . Leipzig 1999 (from the evangelical diaspora, gestalten -eventethoughts, volume 7).
  • Follow the blessings - overcome boundaries. German-Baltic Church Service 1946–2006 . Hanover (2006).
  • Insights into the Baltic church history. Trials in a Baltic Sea Region , Rheinbach 2011 (Documents from Theology and Church, Volume 9) (Collection of the most important essays).
  • Looking back at stations in my life . Typescript (Hemmingen 2017) (Archive of the German Baltic Genealogical Society Darmstadt, call number IV / 2–55).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ To the Wittram family: Reinhard Wittram: Three generations. Germany-Livonia-Russia. 1830-1914. Göttingen 1949. See experienced history. Baltic Germans in the 20th century. A reader . Published by the Carl-Schirren-Gesellschaft eV, Lüneburg 2002.
  2. ^ Heinrich Wittram: End of the war as a new beginning , In: Mitteilungen aus Baltic Life 61 (2015), Heft 2, p. 4.
personal data
SURNAME Wittram, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Protestant theologian and church historian of German Baltic origin
DATE OF BIRTH March 28, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga
DATE OF DEATH 7th August 2018
Place of death Hanover