Rotermund,Wilhelm b. November 21, 1843; Stemmen, Hanover d.April 5, 1925; Sao Leopoldo, Brazil
Secretary of the Committee for the German Protestants in Southern Brazil and founder of the Synod of Rio Grande do Sul. He established the most important South American publishing house for didactic material in German.
Rotermund was a theologian, pastor, publisher, and writer. After his theological studies at the universities of Erlangen and Gottingen with Johann Christian Konrad von Hofmann, Johannes August Heinrich Ebrard, Friedrich August Eduard Ehrenfeuchter, Albert Peip, and L. F. Schoberlein, he worked as a Hauslehrer (family teacher) in Kurland and did his internship in Hanover, where he also worked as a school inspector. In the fall of 1873 he became the secretary of the Committee for the German Protestants in Southern Brazil and was a collaborator of Friedrich Fabri in Barmen. In 1874 he defended his doctoral dissertation, Die Ethik Laotses mit besonderer Bezugnahme auf die buddhistische Moral (The Ethics of Lao Tse with special emphasis on Buddhist Morality), at the University of Jena. From December 1874 until 1918 he was a Lutheran parish pastor in Sao Leopoldo, where he arrived a few weeks after the massacre of the messianic movement of the Muckers. The lack of orientation of the Lutheran congregations prompted him to become a writer, bookseller, and publisher from 1877 on. The school needs of the same congregations led him to create a publishing house, which became one of the most significant publishers of didactic material in German in South America. In order to fight the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach and Ernst Haeckel that were promoted by the journalist Karl von Koseritz and other Forty-Eighters, he published the Deutsche Post (German Mail) from 1880 to 1928 and the Kalender fur die Deutschen in Brasilien (Calendar for Germans in Brazil) from 1881 to 1939. (Koseritz rejected religion; he also advocated Darwinism and evolution. Thus, he became a propagandist for atheism based on natural sciences and philosophical materialism. Rotermund opposed these views and Koseritz. Rotermund defended Christianity [based on a historical-critical Protestantism] although he recognized that modern sciences had an important place in society.) In his publications Rotermund advocated equal rights for Lutherans and Catholics. His publications range from the primer (Fibel) to the Vollstandige Grammatik der portugiesischen Sprache (Comprehensive Grammar of the Portuguese Language). His most important accomplishment, however, was the creation of the Synod of Rio Grande do Sul, the German Protestant church of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The Synod of Rio Grande do Sul served as a model for the creation of three other synods: the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Santa Catarina, Parana and Other States (1905), the Evangelical Synod of Santa Catarina and Parana (1911), and the Synod of Central Brazil (1912). These four synods gave rise to the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil in 1949.Martin Norberto Dreher
See also Brazil; Forty-Eighters; German Almanacs in Rio Grande do Sul; Germanism in Rio Grande do Sul; Mucker; Printing and Publishing
References and Further Reading
Dreher, Martin. Igreja e Germanidade. 2d ed.
Sao Leopoldo: Editora Sinodal, 2003.
Fausel, Erich. D.Dr. Wilhelm Rotermund. Ein Kampf um Recht und Richtung des Evangelischen Deutschtums in Sudbrasilien. Sao Leopoldo: Verlag der Riograndenser Synode, 1936.