Winter, Eduard

Winter, Eduard, b 16 September 1896 in Grottau (now Hrádek), Bohemia, d 3 March 1982 in East Berlin, East Germany. German historian; full member of the East German Academy of Sciences (EGAS) from 1948. A graduate of Innsbruck University and the German-language Ferdinand University in Prague, he was a professor at Ferdinand University (1922–45), Martin Luther University in Halle (1946–51; rector, 1948–51), and Humboldt University in East Berlin (from 1950). At the EGAS he headed the Institute of USSR History, the history department of the Institute of Slavistics, and the Working Group for the History of the Slavic Peoples. He wrote many works on East European cultural and religious history, among them Byzanz und Rom im Kampf um die Ukraine, 955–1939 (1942; Ukrainian translation 1944), as well as a monograph on the papacy and tsarism and Vatican policy vis-à-vis the USSR (1961; Russian translation 1964, 1977). He also edited Die Deutschen in der Slowakei und in Karpathorussland (1926), coedited an edition of Ivan Franko’s selected German writings on Ukrainian history and culture (1963), and contributed to an East German collection of essays on Taras Shevchenko (1976). Festschrifts in his honor were published in 1956 and 1966.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]