Steinitz, Wolfgang

Wolfgang Steinitz (28 February 1905 – 21 April 1967) was a German linguist and folklorist. Through his rediscovery of hidden social commentary in traditional folk songs, he was an important pioneer of the German folk-revival in both East and West Germany. He researched the language and culture of the Ugric people of West Siberia, including the songs that form an important part of the tradition of this endangered ethnic group. Steinitz also left extensive work in other areas of linguistic studies.
Steinitz was born on 28 February 1905 in Breslau, the son of a wealthy Jewish lawyer. From 1923 to 1928 he studied Finno-Ugric linguistics and ethnology at the universities of Breslau and Berlin. He joined the Communist Party in 1927, and traveled to Finland, Estonia and the Soviet Union. In 1933 Steinitz was fired from the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin because he was a member of the communist party. He took his family to the Soviet Union in 1934, and taught for several years in Leningrad at the Institute of Northern Peoples, a training center for members of the indigenous peoples of the Russian North and Siberia. He fell out with his colleagues over the way the state treated ethnic minorities, leading to problems with the authorities. He left Russia and from 1938 until the end of World War II he and his family lived in Stockholm, Sweden. From 1943 he was an assistant at the Stockholm University.
Steinitz returned to Berlin in 1946, and became professor of Finno-Ugrian languages at Humboldt University. Steinitz held many different scientific and political positions in East Germany, including heading the Finno-Ugric Institute of East Berlin's Humboldt University. He may have arranged the 1951 visit to the institute by the distinguished Russian ethnographer Sergei Aleksandrovich Tokarev. For a while he was one of the most prominent political scientists in the GDR. From 1954 to 1958 he was a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party, and from 1954 to 1963 Vice President of the GDR's German Academy of Sciences. Steinitz died in Berlin, East Germany in 1967 from the effects of a stroke. (Wikipedia, läst 2017-05-12)