Johannes Benzing

Johannes Benzing (13 January 1913 – 16 March 2001) was a German Turkic specialist and diplomat in the era of National Socialism and in the Federal Republic of Germany. Benzing worked as a linguist in Pers Z S, the signals intelligence agency of the German Foreign Office . He was the youngest senior official and headed the section from October 1939 until September 1944.

Life After high school, Benzing discovered his profound interest in scholarly issues. In 1938, Benzing moved to Berlin to take up Oriental Studies. At the Humboldt University of Berlin, Benzing studied Islamic philology with Richard Hartmann, Hans Heinrich Schaeder and Walther Björkman, and Turcology with Annemarie von Gabain, and Mongolistics with Erich Haenisch. At the same time, he acquired practical knowledge of oriental languages at the Oriental Seminar, where Gotthard Jäschke and Sebastian Beck were among his teachers. He also learnt Tatar from Saadet Ishaki (Çagatay), the daughter of the famous Tatar intellectual Ayaz İshaki. In 1939, Benzing took his examination for promotion of Dr. phil with a thesis on the verbal system of Turkmen, Über die Verbformen im Türkmenischen. In 1942, Benzing habilitated with a thorough study on the subject Chuvash language, called Tschuwaschische Forschungen. At that time, in the middle of the war, Benzing was unable to get an adequate position at a university. Instead he found an occupation in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. and her husband, Dr. Kahsai Wolde Georgis.

Work Benzing continued the tradition of Willi Bang-Kaup's Berlin school of linguistic Turcology, though broadening its scope and refining its scholarly working procedures. Besides publishing books and articles, Benzing devoted much time and care to instructive book reviews containing analyses and complementary remarks on scholarly questions. A selection of these reviews: Critical contributions to ancient literature and Turkology (German: Kritische Beiträge zur Altaistik und Turkologie), appeared in 1988 as volume 3 in the series Turcologica magazine (Harrassowitz). Historical-comparative research on Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolic languages was Benzing's main field of interest, to which he contributed many studies. One example of this is Benzing's critical occupation with the so-called Altaic question, the still controversial problem of a possible genetic relatedness of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic (maybe even Korean and Japanese). In a truly visionary paper: Menless land: Inner and North Asia as a philological work area (German:Herrenloses Land: Inner und Nordasien als philologisches Arbeitsgebiet), he argued that the ‘ownerless’ territory of Inner and Northern Asia, filling a fifth of the world's surface, should finally be subject to comprehensive scholarly study.

On 20 July 1937 Benzing joined Pers Z S. He was the youngest senior Beamter in the Pers Z S unit. A linguist, he was a specialist in Near Eastern languages and originally worked under Dr Scherschmidt. He headed this section from October 1939 until September 1944. He was then placed in charge of work for Iranian, Iraqi and Afghan systems.

Publications

. Manuscript of "Muqaddimat al-Adab" Arabic-Persian dictionary