Heimatbuch der Heidegemeinde Marienfeld im Banat; Anton Peter Petri

About Anton Peter Petri

Anton Peter Petri is one of the most productive local historians and folklorists from the Banat. While the first biographical lexicon of Banat personalities is currently in print (it will hold about 4,500 people), the publication list by Anton Peter Petri is already impressive and can hardly be overlooked. From the history of the settlement to the typical local phenomena, from the agricultural to the urban and industrial local history, hardly any topic has escaped Petri's research. The top priority for him was the preservation of factual material, and the dozens of local monographs on Banat villages are real treasures for the reader interested in social history and folklore.

From the very beginning, Petri has been concerned with language as a mirror of historical changes. The son of the innkeeper and butcher Peter Petri from Lowrin and his wife Marianna, born shopkeeper, had first visited the "Banatia" (1935-1943), the largest German school center in Southeast Europe. Then Petri became a soldier and was taken prisoner; in 1946 he succeeded the flight to Austria and Bavaria.Full-time Petri, who had studied German language and literature, history and geography in Munich and received his PhD in 1957, worked as a teacher in Bavarian school service, from 1963 to 1964 still as department head at the Institute for Central European Folk Research at the University of Marburg / Lahn, from 1964 to 1981 then as a student and senior student in Mühldorf / Inn. The fate of the German language in Southeast Europe kept him busy. His dissertation was dedicated to the Rhineland-Franconian dialect of his home community (1956). In 1965, Petri's study of cultural history in the dialects of the Danube Swabians appeared. Petri also dealt with plant and animal names in Danube-Swabian dialects (1971), and even the German street names in the pre-Trianonian Banat were a focus of research (1975).

Petri remembered the editorial traditions of his region of origin, the Banat, when he started to publish a series of books that he designed exclusively on his own: in this New Banat Library, which has so far had 70 numbers, earlier attempts by Franz Wettel and Felix Milleker continued. This is how a documentation was created on numerous individual questions in the history of Banat. The Role of the Church During the Settlement Period (The Jesuits in the Belgrade Mission, 1985; Bishop Lonovics' efforts to establish a university in Temeschburg1986), the places of origin of the settlers (von Neudorf, 1989; Lichtenwald, 1989; Bruckenau, 1990), the situation of teachers, officers etc. are examined in the book series.