HEINRICH MUTSCHMANN – PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY IN TARTU (DORPAT) FROM 1921 TO 1939 Enn Veldi
Associate Professor Emeritus Department of English University of Tartu
It must have been in 1973 when I noticed the name Heinrich Mutschmann for the first time. As a first-year student of English, I was browsing the shelves of English-language dictionaries at the university library. There was a thesaurus of American slang published in 1942, which listed ‘A glossary of Americanisms’ by Mutschmann published in Dorpat in 1931 among its sources. As a student I was impressed by the fact that the work of this scholar was known in North America. In fact, throughout the Soviet period Mutschmann’s name was rarely mentioned. There is a footnote about him in The development of English language studies in the 16th– 20th centuries by Oleg Mutt (1982: 40): Heinrich Mutschmann (1885–1955), professor of English at Tartu University in 1920–1938, worked later at Marburg University (West Germany); he is remembered primarily for his manual of English phonetics and research on English dialects and American English. Now a century has passed from the time when Heinrich Mutschmann arrived in Tartu, and it is time to take a fresh look at the life and work of the professor who laid the foundation of English philology in Tartu. As a starting point I was inspired by Terje Lõbu’s recent article about the German professors employed by the University of Tartu at the beginning of the first period of independence of the Republic of Estonia (Lõbu 2019). It then transpired that one of my teachers, Pent Nurmekund (until 1936 Arthur Roosmann), had attended a number of courses taught by Heinrich Mutschmann in the early 1930s. Fortunately, his hand-written lecture notes and a seminar paper on American English have survived and can be consulted at the university library. These materials provided the student’s perspective to Mutschmann’s lectures. Moreover, in the late 1970s, Pent Nurmekund recommended me to do some research about the history of teaching English at Tartu University.
Heinrich Mutschmann
By the time Heinrich Mutschmann was offered a full professorship in English philology in Tartu in 1920, he was a well-qualified German Anglicist. Moreover, he had studied and taught for a number of years in British universities before the First World War.
Heinrich Mutschmann was born in Essen an der Ruhr in Germany on February 18, 1885. His father Ernst Mutschmann was a teacher of deaf-and-mute people. In 1904 Heinrich Mutschmann graduated from an upper secondary school of science in Essen. In the autumn of the same year he was admitted to the University of Bonn where he studied Germanic and Romance philology as well as philosophy (his university studies are described in detail in Mutschmann 1909). In the autumn of 27
