Wilhelm Peßler

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wilhelm Karl Johannes Peßler (born March 21, 1880 in Riga ; † February 25, 1962 in Hanover ) was a German folklorist and cultural historian . From 1928 to 1945 he headed the Vaterländisches Museum (today: Hanover Historical Museum ).

Life

Wilhelm Peßler was born in Riga in 1880 at the time of the German Empire as the son of a doctor and lived in Hanover from 1884, where he attended the Ratsgymnasium .

After studying geology, geography, art, philosophy, antiquity and German linguistics and literature at the universities of Tübingen , Berlin , Göttingen , Munich , Leipzig and Königsberg , he received his doctorate in 1905 with his dissertation The Old Saxon Farmhouse in Its Geographical Distribution . After the following state examination as a high school teacher , Peßler completed his military service in 1906 and 1907 and then went to southern Germany and Austria for research purposes .

In 1907 Wilhelm Peßler published his essay Plan einer Große Deutschen Ethno - Geographie ; this attempt at a folkloric and geographical recording of all folklore phenomena was to occupy him throughout his subsequent life. Peßler played an essential part in the creation of the Atlas of German Folklore and was temporarily involved as editor- in-chief.

From 1907 he worked as an assistant in museums in Hamburg , from 1909 in the Vaterländisches Museum in Hanover, where he was promoted to assistant director in 1913. In 1914 he presented a proposal for a German folklore museum that used not only landscape but also racial classifications. During the First World War he developed the vision of a systematic network of war museums in Germany with “national pathos” .

In 1923 he became a department director. The “systematist from passion” published his work Das Heimatmuseum in the German-speaking area in 1927 as a mirror of German culture . Numerous museums have taken the example of the abandonment of the rather random towards systematic collecting activities, their presentation and in-depth research , as shown in it.

During the Weimar Republic , Wilhelm Peßler was appointed director of the Fatherland Museum in 1928. He missed a discussion of local Jewish culture and history , instead he approached Nazi cultural policy with his activities and put his work at the service of National Socialist folklore. From 1935 he was involved in the establishment of an army memorial in the Leineschloss . In 1935, Peßler decentralized the museum's holdings, rearranged them and presented them in a more modern way. At the time of the air raids on Hanover in 1943, Peßler partially outsourced the holdings, but in the same year the premises were destroyed by aerial bombs and the stored collections on Hanover's city history were partially destroyed.

Wilhelm Peßler also gave numerous lectures in retirement . It was not until 1958 that he finished his work on the Volkstumsatlas von Niedersachsen , which he began in 1933 . In his decades of involvement in the Lower Saxony home movement , he always advocated its scientific foundations and against amateurism .

Wilhelm Peßler was buried in the Engesohde city cemetery .

Honors

  • 1951: Honorary President of the International Commission for the European Folklore Atlas
  • Honorary member of the Association of Folklore Associations
  • 1960: Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany
  • 1961: Hannover city badge

Works

  • The old Saxon farmhouse in its geographical distribution. (= Dissertation). 1905.
  • Plan of a large German ethno-geography. 1907.
  • The local museum in the German-speaking area as a mirror of German culture (= publication of the Werkbund for German ethnicity and race research ). JF Lehmanns Verlag, Munich 1927.
  • Volkstumsatlas of Lower Saxony. (= Publications of the historical commission for Hanover, Braunschweig, Schaumburg-Lippe and Bremen, volume 14), delivery 1: 1933; Delivery 5 (final delivery): 1957.
  • Wilhelm Peßler (Ed.): Handbook of German Folklore ,
    • Volume 1. Athenaion, Potsdam [1935-1938]; Digitized in the Internet Archive .
    • Volume 2. Athenaion, Potsdam [1935-1938]; Digitized in the Internet Archive.
    • Volume 3. Athenaion, Potsdam [1935-1938]; Digitized in the Internet Archive.

literature

  • Literature by and about Wilhelm Peßler in the catalog of the German National Library
  • Wilhelm Peßler. In: German Biographical Encyclopedia . Volume 7, p. 610.
  • Peßler, Wilhelm. In: Dirk Böttcher, Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein, Hugo Thielen: Hannoversches Biographisches Lexikon . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2002, ISBN 3-87706-706-9 , p. 282.
  • Peßler, Wilhelm. In: Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) U. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 499.
  • Susanne Abel: On the political instrumentalization of science in the service of national ideology using the example of Wilhelm Peßler's work from 1906 to 1945. Dissertation 1995 at the University of Göttingen, university thesis 1996.
  • Helmut Plath : Wilhelm Peßler. In: Hessian sheets for folklore. ed. on behalf of the Hessian Association for Folklore, Issue 53 (192), pp. 209–214.
  • U. Stille: Directory of the writings of Dr. Wilhelm Peßler. In: New archive for Lower Saxony . Journal for Urban, Regional and State Development , Issue 15 (Peßler Festschrift), ed. from the Scientific Society for Studies in Lower Saxony (WIG). Dorn, Bremen 1950, pp. 154-165.
  • Hans Verhey: Wilhelm Peßler 70 years. In: New archive for Lower Saxony. Journal for urban, regional and state development. Issue 15 (Peßler Festschrift), ed. from the Scientific Society for Studies in Lower Saxony eV (WIG), Dorn, Bremen 1950, pp. 1–8.

References and comments

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Peßler, Wilhelm . In: Hannoversches Biographisches Lexikon . Schlütersche Verlagsgesellschaft, Hannover 2002, ISBN 978-3-87706-706-2 , p. 282; online through Google Books
  2. ↑ a b c Eva Zwach: German and English Military Museums in the 20th Century , LIT Verlag, Münster 1999, ISBN 9783825841607 , p. 88 ff.
  3. ^ Jens Hoppe: Jewish history and culture in museums. On the non-Jewish museology of the Jewish in Germany , dissertation 2001 at the University of Münster ( international university publications, volume 393), Waxmann, Münster [u. a.] 2002, ISBN 3-8309-1178-5 , here p. 321; online through Google Books
  4. ↑ Waldemar R. Röhrbein: Army Memorial. In: Stadtlexikon Hannover . Schlütersche Verlagsgesellschaft, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 499. p. 278
  5. ↑ Compare the information under the GND number of the German National Library
  6. ↑ In contrast, the German National Library names 1957 as the year of the last delivery of the Lower Saxony Volkstumsatlanten
personal data
SURNAME Peßler, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pessler, Wilhelm Karl Johannes (full name); Pessler, Wilhelm; Pessler, Willi; Pessler, Wilh.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German folklorist and cultural historian
DATE OF BIRTH March 21, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga
DATE OF DEATH February 25, 1962
Place of death Hanover