Walter Baetke

Walter Hugo Hermann Baetke (born March 28, 1884 in Sternberg (Neumark) ; † February 15, 1978 in Leipzig ) was a German, German and Scandinavian Medievalist and religious scholar .

Life

Baetke studied German , English , pedagogy and philosophy at the Universities of Halle / Saale and Berlin from 1902 to 1907 and graduated in 1907 with the state examination for higher teaching qualifications.

After that he worked at a few schools before turning back to university. In 1934 he got a teaching position for Germanic religious history and in 1936 was appointed professor for religious history . In 1943 he was elected a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences .

In 1946 Baetke received an honorary doctorate from the theological faculty in Leipzig. In the same year he was appointed to the chair of Nordic philology at the philological faculty of the University of Leipzig. From 1948 to 1950 he was Dean of the Philosophical Faculty there. He particularly distinguished himself in the field of Germanic religious history and published numerous books on the subject.

In 1926 he joined the DNVP , to which he belonged until 1932. From 1934 until the end of the war he was a member of the NSDAP organization National Socialist People's Welfare . In 1946 he joined the SED .

Fonts

• Dictionary of Old Norse prose literature , Akademie Verlag, 8th unchanged edition, Berlin 2008. ISBN 978-3-05-004897-0 .
• Nature and beliefs of the Germanic Hanseatic publishing house Hamburg, Hamburg 1934.
• The sacred in Germanic JCB Mohr, Tübingen 1942.
• Of the spirit and inheritance of Thule. Essays on the Nordic and German intellectual and religious history , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1944.
• Yngvi and the Ynglingers; a source-critical investigation of the Nordic "sacred royalty" . Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig: Philological-historical class: session reports. Berlin: Academy, 1964.
• The Svoldr problem . In: Reports on the negotiations of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, year 58, Berlin 1951, pp. 55–135.
• De Eikbom - A selection of Low German poems . Together with E. Walter, VEB Max Niemeyer Verlag, Halle (Saale) 1953.

Translation from Old Icelandic

• Iceland's settlement and oldest history (= Thule. Old Norse poetry and prose. Vol. 23). Transferred from Walter Baetke. Diederichs, Jena 1928.

literature

• Kurt Rudolph , Fritz Heinrich: Walter Baetke (1884–1978). In: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 9, 2001, pp. 169–184.
• Jan Alexander van Nahl: Baetke, Walter. In: Heinrich Beck et al. (Ed.), Germanic Antiquity Online . European cultural history up to the High Middle Ages 01/2014 (DOI 10.1515 / gao_31).

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Baetke in the catalog of the German National Library
• Walter Baetke in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig
• Walter Baetke, professors at the University of Leipzig 1945–1993 , accessed on November 15, 2017
• Religious Studies Institute Leipzig
• Walter Baetke, dictionary of Norse prose literature - digital. 2006.