Traian Bratu
Traian Bratu (October 25, 1875 – July 21, 1940) was a Romanian scholar who specialized in German language and literature. Born in Rășinari, Transylvania (then part of Austria-Hungary) to a peasant family, he moved to the Romanian Old Kingdom after high school to study at the University of Bucharest, graduating in 1898. He earned a doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1907, focusing on the lyric poetry of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué.
In 1907 Bratu became a professor of Germanistics at the University of Iași, where he taught until his death. Early in his career he published on German language and literature, and later shifted to linguistics, writing about word order in Low German and other topics. He married Gertrud Schmidt in 1909.
Bratu fought in World War I as a second lieutenant in the Romanian Army, serving on the Dobruja, Moldavia fronts, and at Oituz and along the Trotuș River. He was demobilized in 1918.
After the war, Bratu supported a melting-pot approach to Romania’s ethnic minorities. He became dean of the Iași faculty in 1920 and served as rector twice (1921–1922 and 1932–1938). A member of the National Peasants' Party, he was president of the Romanian Senate from 1928 to 1931. He opposed far-right movements, clashing with A. C. Cuza and with the Iron Guard, which twice attempted to kill him (the 1937 attack cut off his earlobe).
Bratu died of lung cancer in Bucharest in 1940. Some later accounts link his death to the violence of the attacks.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 22:47 (CET).