Draft:Otto Langbein
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Otto Langbein (1910-1988)[1] was an Austrian writer, resistance fighter against the Nazi government, member of the Austrian Communist Party (until the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956) and language reformer for Standard Austrian German. As chief editor of the Österreichisches Wörterbuch, Langbein played a role in the codification of Austria's post-World-War-II standard variety.
Early Life
[edit]Langbein was born on 7 October 1910 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. There, he joined the communist party in the early 1930s, as did his younger brother Hermann Langbein, who is internationally known for his role as a witness in the Auschwitz trial. Otto was a student representative in Geography for "Roter Studentenbund", the communist student party,[2] before he received a doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1935 with a dissertation on "The natonal-autonomous units in the geographical structure of the Soviet Union: a geographical-political view".[3][4]
Anschluss & World War II
[edit]As a communist student leader Langbein was politically opposed to and active against both the Austro-fascist government of Engelbert Dollfuß/Kurt Schuschnigg and the Nazi party government following Anschluss in March 1938.[5]
He was subject to several forms of discrimination and persecution by the Nazis, above all his Jewish ancestry and his communist party engagement. It is unknown how Langbein survived the war, as, unlike his brother Hermann, there is no indication of him leaving the Third Reich. It is conceivable that Langbein lived illegally in dustriaid Alfred Hrdklicka, or t's family (also Communists) o he subsumed a fake identity (like those provided by George Mantello for thousands of Jews), a combination of both or some form of arrangement. On 14 July 1942 Langbein's doctorate was revoked by the Nazi-Senate of the University of Vienna, with the racist reasoning that Jews were considered "unworthy of academic degrees from German universities".[2] On 15 May 1955, a full decade after liberation from Nazi rule, the rescinding of Langbein's academic degree was declared "null and void".[2]
Postwar Austria
[edit]Langbein was Secretary General [Zentralsekretär] of the Austrian-Soviet Society and held several other functions within the communist party, including chief editor of the magazine Telegramm. In January 1957, in protest of the armed Soviet response to the 1956 Hungarian uprising, Langbein left the Austrian Communist Party.[6] He subsequently directed the "Wörterbuchstelle" of the Österreichisches Wörterbuch (ÖWB) at Österreichischen Bundesverlag until 1975 (succeeding the retiring founding editor Albert Krassnigg).
Langbein was one of Austria's most outspoken proponents for linguistic autonomy from Germany. Given his experience in World War II, Langbein focused on the Austrian component in standard German as a means to help create an independent Austrian identity. In his regular column "Die Sprache des Österreichers", published in the quarterly journal Die Österreichische Nation, Langbein discussed under the pseudonym Dr. Norbert Gstrein from 1959 to 1975 features of Standard Austrian German.[7] Langbein's column was criticized into the 1970s by former Nazi supporters and Austro-fascists alike[8], yet found praise by proponents of a pluricentric German.[9] In the 1990s Langbein was recognized as an early codifier of the Austrian standard.[10]
Langbein was, as chief editor of ÖWB, a member of the Austrian (state) committee for orthographic reform, along Anton Pelinka and Eberhard Kranzmayer.[11]
Otto Langbein was under his alias Franz Schneider a founding member of Vienna's HOSI initiative in 1980, the country's first lobbying society for the rights of homosexual and lesbian people.[12]
Selected Works
[edit]Österreichisches Wörterbuch, editions 1960-1976. ÖBV.
Österreich-Lexikon in zwei Bänden, ed. by Richard Bamberger, Franz Maier-Bruck, Otto Langbein. 1966, 1967, Additions & Corrections volume 1968. ÖBV.
References
[edit]- ^ "Otto Langbein (1910 - 1988): ADLER Heraldisch-Genealogische Gesellschaft, Wien". tng.adler-wien.eu. Retrieved 2025-09-29.
- ^ a b c "Gedenkbuch". gedenkbuch.univie.ac.at. Retrieved 2025-09-28.
- ^ German-language original title: Die national-autonomen Einheiten im räumlichen Aufbau der Sowjet-Union. Eine politisch-geographische Betrachtung [partly published in Geographischer Jahresbericht Österreich, Bd. 18, 1935.
- ^ Langbein, Otto (1935). "Dissertation". usearch.univie.ac.at. Retrieved 2025-09-29.
- ^ "40 Jahre Gedenkstein in Mauthausen - Homopoliticus". homopoliticus.at (in German). 2024-12-06. Retrieved 2025-10-01.
- ^ "ÖNB-ANNO - Zeitgeschichte".
- ^ Schmidlin, Regula. 2011. Die Vielfalt des Deutschen. Brill, p. 119.
- ^ Theodor, Veiter (1973-03-17). "Deutschland, deutsche Nation und deutsches Volk. Volkstheorie und Rechtsbegriffe". bpb.de (in German). p. Footnote 95. Retrieved 2025-09-28.
- ^ Pollak, Wolfgang. 1992. Was halten die Österreicher von ihrem Deutsch? Wien: ISSS.
- ^ Ammon, Ulrich. 1995. Die deutsche Sprache in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz: Das Problem der nationalen Varietäten. Berlin: der Gruyter, p. 276ff.
- ^ https://www.parlament.gv.at/dokument/XIII/AB/1429/imfname_484025.pdf, p. 11.
- ^ "Lambda Nachrichten" (PDF). lambdanachrichten.at. 2005. p. 10 (#8 in picture). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2024-05-13. Retrieved 2025-10-01.