The Hungarian-German Jewish Arabist Hedwig Klein (1911–1942): A Tribute to her Life and Work

The tragic case of the Hungarian-German Jewish Arabist Hedwig Klein (1911-1942) is well known—formerly a student of Islamica and Semitica at Hamburg with Rudolf Strothmann (1870-1960), Arthur Schaade (1883-1952) and and Walter Windfuhr (1878-1970) as her principal teachers, Hedwig Klein passed her final doctoral exam in December 1937. Both the dissertation and the oral exam were marked with the highest possible grade (“ausgezeichnet”). When she handed in the revised dissertation in 1938, she was refused the imprimatur and hence the doctoral degree. With the support of her former teachers and of other friends, Klein searched from 1935 onwards for ways to leave Germany. An opportunity to emigrate to India opened up during the summer of 1939 but eventually failed. Klein only made it to Antwerpen from where she had to return to Hamburg. For a few months (1941/42), Klein worked for the Harrassowitz project of a Neu-arabisches Wörterbuch. On 11 July 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered. Thanks to Carl A. Rathjens’ (1887-1966) efforts after the war, Klein was eventually granted in 1947 her doctoral degree, posthumously. A first article about Hedwig Klein’s sad fate was published in 1991 by Peter Freimark, and in 2018 Stefan Buchen devoted an essay to her that was made accessible in German, English, and Arabic—it was the latter publication that was widely read and that prompted a veritable outpour of shorter essays and blogs.
This study revisits the available archival material pertinent to Hedwig Klein from Basel, Göttingen, Halle, Hamburg, Jerusalem, Leiden, London, New Haven, Nürnberg, and elsewhere in an attempt to reconstruct her biography, and especially the events of the years 1937 through 1942. With respect to her scholarly trajectory, her contributions to Ibadi studies are investigated, as well as the early history of the Neu-arabisches Wörterbuch and Klein’s contribution to it. In the second part of the book, annotated editions of all relevant correspondences and documents will be provided.