Hans-Peter Vietze

According to www.mongolei.de, Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Vietze died on Oct. 9th. He is most well-known for his edition of "the" Mongol-German and German-Mongol dictionaries (notwithstanding the earlier work of Johannes Schubert). In recent years, he worked a lot as translator, on official occasions like state visits, or at the Berlinale. I, and probably most Mongolians in Germany, remember him best for working for the police at Berlin-Tegel airport.

Some people I know well used to call him, half-jokingly, a spy, because he had an eye for illegal immigrants, and always appeared as the friendly old man. He was part of the Tegel experience just like the chaos in front of the check-in counter, the stressed-out check-in clerks having a cigarette in some corner, and the joy of meeting someone arriving from Mongolia cf. the emotions when accompanying someone to the airport, or the stress of finding someone who would take some stuff to Ulaanbaatar. He did of course look elderly, but definitely in good health. Uudraa would sometimes make fun of his accent. Once or twice he even said Hello to Uudraa - maybe because she already looked familiar, or because he remembered her from the one time Uudraa had a problem with immigration, or from the time when she first entered Germany. At that time, he greeted all of the newly-arrived exchange students, and asked them to show their dictionary - part of his job at immigration, I suppose. Uudraa was the only one who produced a pirated copy. But Mr. Vietze just smiled. 

The best reminder of Prof. Vietze is probably the success of his dictionaries.   A revised edition of both the German-Mongol and the Mongol-German dictionaries was published early this year, and pirated copies of older editions are easily available in UB. When learning languages like English, French, or Chinese, the existence of good dictionaries is often taken for granted, but it is with the languages that only few dictionaries exist for that you realize how valuable they really are.