Wilhelm Braun (Germanist)

Wilhelm Braun (born August 5, 1929 in Trautenau in the Riesengebirge , † May 17, 2010 in Berlin ) was a German Germanist and lexicographer .

Life

Wilhelm Braun grew up as the sixth child of a farming family in the Giant Mountains. Expelled from the Sudeten German homeland at the end of the Second World War , Wilhelm Braun studied German studies with Hermann Teuchert at the University of Rostock after graduating from high school . After working with the Brothers Grimm during his studies , he went to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1955 . For more than 50 years - longer than the Brothers Grimm themselves - he was instrumental in the project of the German Dictionary by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (DWB). He wrote numerous verbal articles for the project and, among other things, contributed the last article for the last volume of the first edition in 1961. In the following years he worked on the source directories and the revision of the letters A to F. Since 1973, he gave seminars at the Humboldt University of Berlin , where he in 1975 with a lexicographical thesis on concurrent job titles in the field of crafts doctorate was.

In addition to working on the dictionary, he took part in other lexicographic projects at the academy, such as the Etymological Dictionary of the German Language . In 2003 he published the revision of the dictionary of Christian vocabulary founded by Erhard Agricola . In the Berlin office of the DWB, he was in charge of the reference library and created important collections on lexicographical topics. After retiring, Braun mainly worked on the publication of the Brothers Grimm's correspondence. From 1999 he was co-editor of the book series Brothers Grimm Commemoration .

Since 1991 Wilhelm Braun was a founding member of the Grimm-Sozietät zu Berlin eV , of which he later became vice-chairman and finally an honorary member.

As a professed Catholic, Braun was intensively involved in his parish in Berlin-Pankow for decades . After the fall of the Berlin Wall he was also active in local politics and in 1990 was elected to the first district assembly of Pankow. Later he was active in the senior citizens' union of the CDU and in the disability advisory board in his district.

Fonts (selection)

• Dictionary of Christian Vocabulary (Ed.), Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-7776-1273-1 .
• Etymological Dictionary of German (collaboration), Munich 1995, ISBN 3-423-03358-4 .
• The Grimm dictionary, studies on lexicographical methodology (with Joachim Dückert), Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-7776-0428-3 .

Web links

• Obituary by Alan Kirkness on Grimmnetz.de
• Obituary by Andreas Unger in: Der Tagesspiegel from August 20, 2010
• Braun's essay on issues relating to the edition of the Grimm correspondence