Brief description

Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj* is considered the most famous pioneer of modern Mongolian literature. He spent a few years in Germany at the end of the 1920s, mostly in Leipzig, where he studied and worked under the tutelage of Friedrich Weller and Erich Haenisch. At the latter's instigation, he wrote Mongolian parts of a two-volume German-Mongolian dictionary index in the vertical Mongolian script (mongol bichig)* in 1927. These volumes have been part of the library in Bonn since the Seminar für Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft Zentralasiens was established by Walther Heissig in 1964. They were catalogued in the same year and have been available for all users of the library ever since. Nevertheless, the content as well as the context of provenance remained largely unexplored. Thus, it is the goal of the ongoing project to not only make the two volumes accessible to a wider audience in a digital form but also to conduct a systematic and holistic textological study: We are working on a critical, annotated and illustrated complete edition in order to contribute to the understanding of the intellectual history of Mongolian-German relations.

The alphabetical register of German words and expressions is based on Isaak Jakob Schmidt’s Mongolian-German-Russian dictionary of 1835. As an original, this partly handwritten index is a meaningful mirror and testimony of time, and it should also be accessible to future generations. We consider this artefact to be a key document of our subject history (Fachgeschichte), and even though it was created in Germany, it is also part of Mongolia’s outstanding heritage. Therefore, it is our long-term goal to make it accessible also via the National Library of Mongolia (Mongol Ulsyn Ündesnii Nomyn San).*

The Mongolian-German project team expects the edition to draw attention to the history and changes of lexicological foci and to questions of interest and representation at the time. Our collaborative project has a cross-disciplinary approach: Members of the project team are systematically analyzing the two volumes, each providing specialist knowledge and scientific expertise from different fields beyond their academic focus in Mongolian Studies. The results are to be published and presented to an expert audience in Mongolia in 2026 to mark the 120th anniversary of D. Natsagdorj’s birth. We thank the Institute for Mongolian Studies at the National University of Mongolia for the agreement to finance the publication.

*A simplified transcription is used here for technical reasons.