Wilhelm Doegen

Wilhelm Albert Doegen (born March 17, 1877 in Berlin ; † November 3, 1967 ) was the founder and director of the Doegen Tonbildmuseum and Berlin Sound Archive as a linguist .

Live and act

As the son of the magistrate Albert Doegen and his wife Helene Grauwinckel, he attended grammar school and secondary school, which he graduated from high school in October 1896. At the University of Berlin he studied practical and theoretical economics, commercial law, cultural history, modern languages, literary history and phonetics.

In 1899 he went to Oxford and studied English language, literature and English phonetics with the English linguist and philologist Henry Sweet (1845–1912). From him Doegener probably received decisive impulses for his later sound collections. After these studies he made some trips to England and France.

In 1902 he did his military service as a one-year volunteer with the 2nd Guards Regiment on foot (Berlin). In the same year he married Margarete Tornow. He passed the examination for the higher subject in 1903. With the subject of the use of phonetics in English lessons , he finished his studies in 1904 and began to work as a course instructor at Lessing-Gymnasium .

In 1905 he taught at the Andreas-Gymnasium, with a secondary occupation involved in founding a voices museum of the peoples . In 1906 he taught as a senior teacher at the Borsig Realschule. At the world exhibition in Brussels in 1910, he gave a lecture on behalf of the Ministry of Culture and presented a speaking device that could use a record. For this development he received a silver medal as an award.

In the years from 1910 to 1914 he made further trips to England and France. A lecture tour took him to Moscow in 1914 . At the beginning of the war he taught in 1914 as a military teacher in the main cadet institute in Groß-Lichterfelde . From 1915 he was commissioned by the Prussian Phonographic Commission to record and collect voices, language and music from 215 different ethnic groups and related texts until the end of the war. A substantial part of these recordings comes from German prisoner-of-war camps during the First World War. The collection of the Berlin Sound Archives is therefore a 'sensitive collection'.

In 1916 he was appointed head of the sound department of the Berlin State Library , where he was appointed titular professor without a license to teach. With Ludwig Darmstaedter he built up a collection of parts for the autograph collection Darmstaedter from March 1917 , which consisted of a collection of voices by well-known contemporaries. In 1918 he proposed the establishment of a sound department in a memorandum, which on April 1, 1920 led to the establishment of a sound archive. He continued to build up this archive until June 1933.

In 1932 he headed the Working Group for Anglo-American Labor Studies and the International Phono League as President. He was also a member of the Society for Modern Languages and the German Society of Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory in Berlin. He was also a member of the International Phonetic Society .

From 1930 anti-Semitic circles ran a campaign against him because he was allegedly of Jewish origin. In May 1933 he was discharged, although the relevant reason was missing. After the war he was able to teach as a lecturer for English from 1947 to 1951 in Berlin.

Fonts (selection)

(Ed.) POWs peoples. Volume 1: The prisoner of war attitude and fate in Germany . Publishing house for politics and science, Berlin 1921.
(Ed.) Among foreign peoples. New ethnology . Publishing house for politics and science, Berlin 1925.
Yearbook of phonetics 1931. Lehner, Berlin 1930.
Our opponents - then and now . Publishing house Oskar Franz Huebner, Berlin-Lichterfelde 1941.

literature

Herman George Scheffauer : "Sounds of Today Will Echo 10,000 Years [Berlin Professor Preserves Speech, Songs of Men and Current Noises On Master Records of Brass Today's Sounds Echo 10,000 Years]" , in: The New York Times Magazine , (September 13, 1925 ), p.7.
Herrmann AL Degener : Who is it? Berlin 1935.
Jürgen-K. Mahrenholz. " South Asian speech and music recordings in the sound archive of the Humboldt University in Berlin ." in: MIDA Archival Reflexicon (2020), ISSN 2628-5029 , 1–19.

Web links

Literature by and about Wilhelm Doegen in the catalog of the German National Library

Biographical summary (PDF; 145 kB)

mirror

Sound archive in the Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Technology

Wilhelm Doegen's personnel sheet in the personnel file of the BIL expert body in the archive database of the Library for Research on Educational History (BBF)

Article in the biographical database Persecution and Emigration of German-Speaking Linguists 1933-1945 (Accessed: April 13, 2018)

Individual evidence

↑ Jürgen ‑ K. Mahrenholz: South Asian speech and music recordings in the sound archive of the Humboldt University in Berlin . In: MIDA Archival Reflexicon . 2020, p. 1 .
↑ Britta Lange: "When the war is over, many stories will be printed." South Asian positions and European research in the "half moon camp". In: Franziska Roy, Heike Liebau, Ravi Ahuja (eds.): Soldier Ram Singh and the Kaiser - Indian prisoners of war in German propaganda camps 1914-1918 . Darupadi Verlag, Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-937603-84-1 , p. 165-208 .

personal data
SURNAME	Doegen, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Doegen, Wilhelm Albert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German linguist
DATE OF BIRTH	March 17, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH	Berlin
DATE OF DEATH	3rd November 1967

[1] Jürgen ‑ K. Mahrenholz: South Asian speech and music recordings in the sound archive of the Humboldt University in Berlin . In: MIDA Archival Reflexicon . 2020, p. 1 .

[2] Britta Lange: "When the war is over, many stories will be printed." South Asian positions and European research in the "half moon camp". In: Franziska Roy, Heike Liebau, Ravi Ahuja (eds.): Soldier Ram Singh and the Kaiser - Indian prisoners of war in German propaganda camps 1914-1918 . Darupadi Verlag, Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-937603-84-1 , p. 165-208 .