Background
Babinger was born in Weiden in der Oberpfalz, Bavaria and was already an accomplished academic and linguist by the time he had completed his secondary school studies.
historian university professor
Babinger was born in Weiden in der Oberpfalz, Bavaria and was already an accomplished academic and linguist by the time he had completed his secondary school studies.
Babinger completed his doctoral studies at the University of Munich on the eve of World War I. After the war started, he joined the German Army. After the war, Babinger continued his studies at Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Berlin where he completed his Habilitationsschrift in 1921 and became a Professor at the same institution.
An English translation by Ralph Mannheim is available from Princeton University Press under the title Mehmed the Conqueror and his time. Prior to starting University, he had already learned both Persian and Hebrew. Because of his language skills and abilities, Babinger served in the Middle East, thus avoiding the deadly trench warfare that cut short the lives of many promising scholars of his generation.
During this period, he published Geschichtsschreiber der Osmanen und ihre Werke ("Historians of the Ottoman Empire"), which became the standard bibliographical review of Ottoman historiography and confirmed the reputation of Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität as a leading center for Near East studies.
The rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 forced him to resign his position. However, the Romanian statesman, academic and polymath Nicolae Iorga, himself a widely respected historian of the Ottoman Empire, invited Babinger to take up a position in Bucharest, which he held until he was ordered out of the country in 1943.
Babinger resumed his teaching career after the Second World War at the University of Munich in 1948 until his retirement in 1958. In 1957, he testified about German atrocities against Romanian Jews.
He continued to work and publish actively until his accidental death by drowning in Albania on June 23, 1967.
(. covers loose, needs rebinding, 1927 Leipzig, Otto Harra...)
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.