________________
Professor Dr. Alsdorf
Professor Dr. Alsdorf. Professor Emeritus and former Head of the Department for the Culture and History of India at the University of Hamburg in the Federal Republic of Germany, passed away on March 25th, 1978, aged 73.
Professor Alsdorf, an authority on Jainism, was wellknown in the scholarly circles of India and the world. His comprehensive knowledge of Indian studies unattained by the younger generation reached far beyond the realm of traditional Indology and included the phenomena of contemporary India,
Born in 1904 in the Rhineland, he studied Indology, Coniarative Linguistics as well as Persian and Arabic at the universities of Heidelberg and Hamburg. His teachers in Sanskrit were Heinrich ZIMMER and Walther SCHUBRING, the latter having been the leading western Jainologist who initiated him in Jain studies. Prof. Alsdorf got his doctorate from Hamburg University in 1928 for a thesis dealing with a Jain Apablıramsa text (Kumārapalapratibodha). He continued his studies in Berlin under Heinrich LUEDERS who was the then foremost German Indologist, It was, however. Hermann JACOBI, wellknown to Jain community in India, who suggested to him the subject of his Habilitation thesis, namely the Jain Harivamśpurāna (published in 1936).
From 1930 to 1932 Prof. Alsdorf served as a lecturer of German and French in the University of Allahabad. During this time he travelled extensively all over India and established connection with several leading Jaina Munis such as the late Acharya Vijaya Indra Suri and Munis Vidya Vijaya and Jayanta Vijaya,
In 1935/38 he was Reader of Indology at Berlin University and afterwards taught Indology at the University of Muenster. In 1950 Prof. Alsdorf was appointed Head of the Department of Indology at Hamburg University as successor to his Guru Prof. Schubring. Since 1972 he had been professor Emeritus of that university,
