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.

Bergengruen, Werner

Werner Bergengruen was born in Riga in 1892, a “neighbor of the Estonian Reval”, as he puts it. He maintained his Baltic identity for life despite never having lived in a Baltic state since attending the ‘Gymnasium’ in Lübeck and Marburg (1903–1910) and even though his parents also fled the “forced Russification of the Baltic provinces” to settle in Germany (Deutsches Reich). An obituary for a Baltic friend, delivered after the World War II, when the entire Baltic region had become part of the Soviet Union, equally applies to Bergengruen himself: namely, he continued life as a “true humanist, a German European from a lost, beloved country.” Humanist also means cosmopolitan individualist: “indeed, our tiny subtribe […] always consisted of people who were fiercely protective of […] their idiosyncrasies.” He drew the following conclusion for himself and his ‘subtribe’ in 1957: “Es läßt sich auch mit Würde und zugleich mit Heiterkeit aussterben” [The process of becoming extinct may be borne with dignity and in good humour.]
Bergengruen’s studies at Marburg, Munich and Berlin universities were cut short by the war in 1914. Both his brothers and he volunteered for the German Army, - he himself served as Ulan and in the infantry in the East, where he was also asked to interpret from Russian and Latvian. In 1919, he joined the “Baltische Landwehr” that was mainly tasked with driving off the Bolshevik troops. In this year, he married Charlotte Hensel.
His writing career started in Berlin with journalism and translations from Russian (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), followed soon by his own early novels and stories (from 1927 onwards he was an independent writer). When he worked on his most mature historic novel Der Großtyrann und das Gericht (A matter of conscience, The Grand Tyrant and the Court), the topic “suddenly became […] chillingly and eerily real” as Hitler came to power in 1933. From then on, the author considered the novel a representation of resistance, and when it was published in 1935, his educated readers and friends commented with awe on his “daring courage” (W. Wilk) in conveying a “dire warning” (C.J. Burckhardt). This warning, however, appears to be even less perceivable today as it was then. The national socialist Völkischer Beobachter defused any allusion to people in power by praising the work as a “Führerroman der Renaissance” [Renaissance leadership novel].
Still, Bergengruen was excluded from the Reichsschrifttumskammer in 1937, which meant that “any further books required special permission”. Twelve books could be published in such circumstances, some in large editions, despite being labelled “unwanted”. His next sizeable historic novel Am Himmel wie auf Erden (1940), was – temporarily - forbidden one year later. The fact that his wife’s family tree was considered tainted as she descended from the Jewish Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family was reason enough for Bergengruen’s dissent from the NS regime, and they were threatened by forced divorce or deportation until the end.
Bergengruen converted to Catholicism in 1936: a close friend, the Catholic poet Reinhold Schneider and Bergengruen were later classified as belonging to the circle of Christian-conservative “inner emigration” (Paetel, 1950).
In 1937 followed a move to Catholic Bavaria, to Munich-Solln, where he was able to purchase a spacious house for his family (three children). When it was bombed in 1942, he sought refuge in Tyrol. His seemingly settled existence in Zürich from 1946 to 1958 and later in Baden-Baden was interrupted by multiple (reading) journeys and a lengthy stay in Rome (Römisches Erinnerungsbuch, images by Charlotte Bergengruen, 1949). The much read and well-respected author was not part of any “modern” trend in the newly founded Bundesrepublik; his belief in a higher order, his “noble and precise” wording, ridiculed by Friedrich Sieburg, seemed backward; a volume of poems with the awkward title Die heile Welt (1950) evoked irritation and anger (Adorno in Jargon der Eigentlichkeit).
Werner Bergengruen died in Baden-Baden in 1964, a few days before his 72nd birthday.

Hans Peter Neureuter

Bjelfvenstam, Dorothea

Born in 1933, she grew up in Königsberg, lived in Potsdam until 1952 and moved to Sweden in 1955. She introduced Finnish-Swedish writer Tove Jansson in German, esp. the Moomin books and her books for adults, and translated prose books by Lars Norén, Axel Strindberg and others to German, before working as a teacher in Stockholm.

In 2012 she published an autobiographical book of her own, Man nannte uns Hitlermädchen. Kinderlandverschickung von Königsberg (Pr.) nach Sachsen.

Interview with Dorothea Bjelfvenstam, summer 2022, in German: Gespräch über die Übersetzungen von Tove Jansson.

Greverus Mjøen, Cläre

Cläre Mjøen, born Greverus Berndt in Magdeburg in 1874, died in Norway in 1963. She was one of the most productive translators from Norwegian to German after her marriage with Jon Alfred Mjøen in Magdeburg in 1896. She moved to Kristiania (Oslo) soon after she had married, where she became the translator of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Knut Hamsun, Barbra Ring and many others.
She was the mother of six children, five of which became actors, and the grandmother of Norwegian writer Gerd Brantenberg.

Schreber, J. C. D.

Johann Christian Daniel (von) Schreber, born in Weißensee (Thuringia) in 1739, died in Erlangen in 1810. He was a German naturalist and professor of medicine at the University of Erlangen from 1769 onwards.

As a pupil to Carolus Linnæus he wrote a 64 volume work entitled Die Säugethiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur mit Beschreibungen which was published between 1774 and 1804. Schreber also wrote on entomology notably Schreberi Novae Species Insectorvm. His herbarium collection has been preserved in the Botanische Staatssammlung in Munich since 1813.

From 1791 until his death in 1810, he was the President of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1787. In April 1795 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in London.