Eberhard Kranzmayer

Austrian philologist, dialectologist and, prior to 1945, also ethnologist of the German language. Kranzmayer has long been considered the most important dialectologist of German in Austria, yet his roles in the Third Reich and his perspectives on German, surfacing fully in the early 2020s present challenges for German dialectology.

Kranzmayer was born into a Klagenfurt, Carinthia, family of coppersmiths of long local lineage. He learned Slovene, rather atypical for Carinthian native German speakers in the Habsburg Empire, from a local farm family. He studied at the University of Vienna German department, defending his dissertation under Anton Pfalz, who was the leader of the Austrian Academy of Sciences project Dictionary of Austrian-Bavarian Dialects (DABD) in Vienna, in 1926. Kranzmayer had regularly worked for the DABD since 1916, as a high school student, and during his studies. In 1926, he was tasked to coordinate data collection with the sister project in Munich at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the Dictionary of Bavarian Dialects (DBD). In 1933, Kranzmayer defended his "habilitation" with anti-Semite Rudolf Much, from which point on he was a full-fledged academic researcher and teacher. Both projects are ongoing and together they define the cross-border Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German.

Kranzmayer's Nazi past had long been left unscrutinized. He is today considered as "definitely" a member of the then illegal Nazi party as of 1 January 1937, though likely much earlier. He continued to work in Vienna until December 1937; by January 1938, not two months before Anschluss, Kranzmayer moved to the Bavarian Academy's sister project in Munich as the leader of the DBD. Within five weeks after Anschluss, Kranzmayer reported with Anton Pfalz on their recording trips throughout Austria, what had by then become Germany's Ostmark, for Adolf Hitler's 1939 birthday present.