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Founder and head
Georg Wenker was born in Düsseldorf in 1852, attended high school there in 1867, earning his high school diploma in 1872. Starting in summer semester 1872, he studied in Zurich, Bonn and Marburg passing his doctoral examination in Tübingen in 1876 with his dissertation “On the shift of the root syllable coda in Germanic.” In 1877 he took on a librarian position at the Royal University of Marburg. In 1886, the Royal Flemish Academy for Language and Literature in Ghent appointed him an honorary foreign member. After the institute became a state institution in 1888, Wenker served as its director. He died in 1911.
Ferdinand Wrede was born in Spandau in 1863. He studied Germanics and history at the University of Berlin, where he also earned is doctorate in German studies in 1884. Six years later, he completed his habilitation in Germanic philology in Marburg. He earned the title of professor in December 1899. Starting in 1902, he held a position as a librarian at the Royal Library in Berlin while living in Marburg. In 1911 he became a full honorary professor, and from then on led the work on the Language Atlas of the German Empire as well as the newly founded Hesse-Nassau Dialect Dictionary. In 1919, he was appointed senior librarian, and the following year he became a personal full professor and director of the Central Office of the Language Atlas of the German Empire and German Dialect Research. Wrede died in 1934.
Walther Mitzka was born in 1888 in Posen (now Poznań), where he attended high school and passed his graduation examination in 1906. From 1906 to 1912 he studied at the universities of Marburg, Heidelberg and Berlin. He earned his doctorate in 1911 in Marburg in the subjects German, ancient and modern history, and one year later took the state examination in German, history and theology. Starting then, he became a student council member until 1927, when he received his venia legendi or authorization to teach Germanics at the University of Königsberg, where he held a lectureship for two years. In 1933 he became a full professor of German philology at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and director of the Research Center Deutscher Sprachatlas, chair of the German Department and director of the Phonetics Device Gallery. Mitzka became professor emeritus in 1956 and died 20 years later in Bonn.
Ludwig Erich Schmitt was born in Lennep in 1908. After graduating from high school in 1928, he studied until 1933 variously in Giessen, Marburg, Berlin and finally at the University of Leipzig, where he earned his doctorate in 1934 and worked until 1941 as a university assistant (starting in 1938 as a senior assistant) at the Germanics Institute there. Starting in 1939, he was additionally an assistant at the University of Groningen. He completed his habilitation at the University of Leipzig in July 1941 and was then a university professor at the University of Groningen until 1943. In 1944 he held a chair in Munich. From 1945 to 1953, he was an associate professor in Leipzig. After being banned from teaching and fleeing Leipzig, he took up teaching positions in Cologne and Giessen. In 1956 he was appointed full professor of Germanic philology at Philipps-Universität Marburg and became director of the Sprachatlas-Institute. Schmitt became professor emeritus in 1976 and died in 1994.