Reemtsma, Jan Philipp

Born in 1952 in Bonn, Reemtsma lives in Hamburg.

Founder of the Institut für Sozialforschung, the Arno Schmidt Stiftung and Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur. Literary scholar and Professor of German literature at the University of Hamburg since 1996.

Reemtsma received several awards, among others the Lessing Preis in 1997, Teddy Kollek Prize in 2007 and Schillerpreis in 2010.

Roduner, Markus

Markus Roduner is a translator and a linguist. He was born on 6 February 1967 in the city of Rheinfelden, Switzerland. He studied philology of the Slavonic and Baltic languages, historical-comparative linguistics at Bern University. In 1991, underwent training in Lithuania and Georgia. From 1992 to 1995 he lived in Lithuania, worked at the Department of Press and Information at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania, and as a teacher of the German language. In 1996, he returned to his native Switzerland where he continued his studies, worked as a teacher and taught German to foreigners. In 2001, he completed his studies with a thesis on syntax of the Lithuanian and Karaim languages. Since 1999 he has been living in Lithuania – since 2000 in the town of Šiauliai. He is working as a freelance translator.

Since 2004 he has been organising the annual international prose festival “Days of European Literature in Šiauliai”, since 2013 also an international festival for youth literature. In 2008, he was awarded the Culture and Art Prize of the town of Šiauliai, in 2009, he received the St. Jeronimus Prize.

Johnson, Uwe

Uwe Johnson (1934–1984), born in Cammin (nowadays Poland), grew up in the small town of Anklam in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. At the end of World War II, his father, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1940, disappeared into a Soviet camp; he was declared dead in 1948. Johnson and his mother remained in Communist East Germany until his mother left for the West in 1956, after which Johnson was barred from regular employment. In 1959, shortly before the publication of his first novel, Speculations About Jakob, in West Germany, he emigrated to West Berlin by streetcar, leaving the East behind for good. Other novels, The Third Book About Achim, An Absence, and Two Views, followed in quick succession. A member of the legendary Gruppe 47, Johnson lived from 1966 until 1968 with his wife and daughter in New York, compiling a high-school anthology of postwar German literature. On Tuesday, April 18, 1967, at 5:30 p.m., as he later recounted the story, he saw Gesine Cresspahl, a character from his earlier works, walking on the south side of Forty-Second Street from Fifth to Sixth Avenue alongside Bryant Park; he asked what she was doing in New York and eventually convinced her to let him write his next novel about a year in her life. Anniversaries was published in four installments—in 1970, 1971, 1973, and 1983—and was quickly recognized in Germany as one of the great novels of the century. In 1974, Johnson left Germany for the isolation of Sheerness-on-Sea, England, where he struggled through health and personal problems to finish his magnum opus. He died at age forty-nine, shortly after it was published.

Veit, Birgit

Born in Essen in 1948, Birgit Veit studied Slavic philology, Literature, Latin and Greek philology and Theology in Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin and Leningrad. She now lives in Berlin.
For six years she worked as research fellow for Slavic literature history at Freie Universität Berlin; since 1985 as a free lance translator from Russian to German, as interpreter and journalist.

Dahlmann, Friedrich Christoph

Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, born in Wismar in 1785, died in Bonn in 1860. He was a German historian and politician. His father, who was burgomaster of Wismar, then controlled by the Swedes, intended him to study theology, but he preferred to study classical philology in Copenhagen, Halle and again Copenhagen.
After finishing his studies, he translated some of the Greek tragic poets, and The Clouds of Aristophanes. But he was also interested in modern literature and philosophy; and the troubles of the times, of which he had personal experience, aroused in him a strong feeling of German patriotism, though throughout his life he was always proud of his connection with Scandinavia.
He took a doctor's degree in Wittenberg in 1810, then qualified at Copenhagen in 1811, with an essay on the origins of the ancient theatre, as a lecturer on ancient literature and history, on which he delivered lectures in Latin, and was summoned to the University of Kiel as professor of history in 1812. In the inevitable conflict with the Danish crown his upright point of view and his German patriotism were further confirmed.
After transferring to Göttingen around 1829 he had the opportunity of working in the same spirit. As confidant of the duke of Cambridge, he was allowed to take a share in framing the Hanoverian constitution of 1833, which remodelled the old aristocratic government in a direction which had become inevitable since the July revolution in Paris; and when in 1837 the new king Ernst August declared the constitution invalid, Dahlmann inspired the famous protest of the seven professors of Göttingen. Though deprived of his position and banished, he had the satisfaction of knowing that German national feeling received a boost from his courageous action, while public subscriptions saved him from poverty.
After several years in Leipzig and Jena, King Frederick William IV of Prussia appointed him in October 1842 to a professorship at the University of Bonn.
His Politik (1835) had already made him a name as a writer; he now published his Dänische Geschichte (1840–1843), a historical work of the first rank; and this was soon followed by histories of the English and French revolutions,
When the revolution of 1848 broke out, the "father of German nationality," found himself the centre of universal interest. Naturally he was elected to the national assembly at Frankfurt, and took a leading part in the constitutional committees appointed first by the diet, then by the parliament. His objective was to make Germany as far as possible a united constitutional monarchy, with the exclusion of the whole of Austria, or at least, of its non-German parts.

Jungfer, Victor

Victor Jungfer, a German economist, writer and translator, was born in Hirschberg, Silesia on 6 May  1893. He studied economics and philosophy from 1913-14 at the University of Munich and from 1918-21 at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, where he received his doctorate in economics for a dissertation on the Lithuanian export of lumber. He became acquainted with Lithuania and some of its more prominent figures during World War I while serving in the German army when it occupied Lithuania and Courland, the southern part of Latvia; he made several journeys through the occupied territories, which were referred to by the Germans as Ober Ost, and learnt Lithuanian. It was during this period that he wrote his first book on Lithuania ‑ Kulturbilder aus Litauen. Ein Beitrag zur Erkenntnis des litauischen Volkstums, 1918. Together with Msgr. Kazimirs Jasėnas (1867-1950) he translated Simanas Daukanta's Būda Senowes Lietuvii ir Kalnienu into German and edited it as the first part of Alt-Litauen. Eine Darstellung von Land und Leuten, Sitten und Gebräuchen, 1926. From 1925-39 he taught economic history, sociology and statistics at the University of Kaunas and from 1939-40 at the University of Vilnius. During this period he translated several books on economics from Lithuanian into German and produced two poetically conceived works about Lithuania: Hinter den Seen, hinter den Wäldern. Bilder litauischen Volkstums, 1932, and Litauen, Antlitz eines Volkes, 1938 (21948), as well as a translation of Lithuanian folksong texts titled Litauischer Liederschrein. Volkslieder in deutschen Übertragungen und Nachdichtungen, 1939 (21948). Descriptions of Lithuanian people and life can also be found in some of his German novels, for example, Das Gesicht der Etappe. Ein Kulturroman, 1919, Der Weg der Skaringa, 1940, and Irka, 1945. Two of his works,  Das Gesicht der Etappe and Litauen, Antlitz eines Volkes, were banned by the Nazis. Despite this, from December 1941 until January 1945 Jungfer held a professorship at the Posen Reich University. Following his escape to the West, Jungfer taught at a college in Nuremberg and at the University of Erlangen from 1946 until his official retirement 1957. Jungfer died in Nuremberg on April 21, 1964.