Otto Alexander Webermann

Otto Alexander Webermann (born January 7, 1915 in Vihula , Estonia Governorate ; † February 14, 1971 in Göttingen ) was an Estonian Finnougrist , literary scholar and cultural historian who lived in exile in Germany after the Second World War .

Life

Webermann was born in Vihula (then in the Estonia Governorate of the Russian Empire ) in 1915 into a rural family. He received his education at the high school in Rakvere , where he graduated in 1935. In 1937 he enrolled at the University of Tartu in to philology to study. In 1943 he began further studies abroad at the University of Halle , where he was conscripted in 1944. In the prisoner of war camp in Lübeck he met the Estonian poet Kalju Ahven , who died of tuberculosis in 1946 and whose poems were the subject of Webermann's doctoral thesis. From 1946 to 1948 he lived in a displaced persons camp in Göttingen and continued his studies at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen , where he did his doctorate until 1951 and obtained his doctorate degree in 1952 . In June 1959 Webermann was accepted as a corresponding member of the Baltic Historical Commission . In February 1971 he died of a stroke.

plant

From 1947 to 1964 Webermann worked as a lecturer for Estonian at the Georg-August University in Göttingen , where he was appointed to the Finnish-Ugric seminary as an academic adviser from 1965 . His research dealt with Estonian and German Baltic literature and cultural history . In 1953, during research in the Goettingen State and University Library, he found a copy of the first edition of the previously lost book Juttud ja teggud by the Baltic German writer and enlightener Friedrich Wilhelm Willmann , which he described in 1959 in an edition of the Ural-Altaic yearbooks . A work about the German Baltic writer and popular enlightener Friedrich Gustav Arvelius remained unfinished at his death and was published posthumously in 1978.

Fonts (selection)

• Kalju Ahven. The life and work of a contemporary Estonian poet. Göttingen , Diss. Phil 1951. 286 pp.
• A unique Estonian in Göttingen. In: Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher 31, Wiesbaden 1959, pp. 491–502.
• Baltic female poets in literature from the 17th to 19th centuries. In: Yearbook of Baltic Germanism 1960, Lüneburg 1959, pp. 57–61.
• Kreutzwald's "Kalevipoeg". On the problem of the Estonian epic. In: Wolfgang Veenker (Ed.): Volksepen of the Ural and Altaic peoples. Lectures at the Hamburg Symposium from 16. – 17. December 1965 (= Ural-Altai Library 16). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1968, pp. 13-35.
• Popular Enlightenment Studies in Estonia. Friedrich Gustav Arvelius (1753-1806). In: Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological - Historical Class: Volume 3; No. 110. Edited and edited by Johann Dietrich von Pezold. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1978.

literature

• Bernard Kangro: Otto A. Webermann - eesti ruumi kultuuriloolane. In: Tulimuld 22, 1971, pp. 82-88.
• Piret Noorhani: Nigol Andreseni ja Otte A. Webermanni kirjavahetusest. In: Keel ja kirjandus 39, 1996, pp. 26–31.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Matriculation No. 16504, Academicum Universitatis Tartuensis 1918-1944 .
2. ^ Dorothee Goetze: Cultural mediation under the sign of the Cold War. Otto A. Webermann, a biography between Estonia and Germany. Lecture at the 65th Baltic Historians' Meeting from June 1st to 3rd, 2012 in Göttingen.
3. ^ ^{A b} Marie-Elisabeth Schmeidler: Otto Alexander Webermann 7.1.1915–14.2.1971. In: Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher 44, Wiesbaden 1972, pp. 213–224.