Hermann Weller

Hermann Weller (4 February 1878 – 9 December 1956) was a German Indiologist and Neo-Latin poet born in Schwäbisch Gmünd, died in Tübingen.

Weller's father was a businessman concerned with industrial products and a commercial traveller, and his mother was a baker's daughter from Gmünd.

Weller, a private senior lecturer, at Tübingen University, submitted the Y Elegy at the end of 1937, to the Certamen Hoeufftianum, a competition of neo-Latin poetry of the Royal Dutch Academy of Wetenschappen (KNAW) held annually in Amsterdam, which he won thirteen times in the course of his life.

The fact that Weller could be promoted to the position of Special Professor in the same year (despite certain doubts on account of his Catholicism) shows that knowledge of Latin among Nazi officials was not wide.

The Latin scholar, Uwe Dubielzig, recognised in 2001 that the text was a playfully disguised accusation against the ever more apparent anti-Semitism of the Nazis, the effects of which Weller could observe in his immediate surroundings of Tübingen University.