Johannes Klatt


Johannes Emil Otto Klatt was a Prussian-German Indologist and librarian who studied the history of Jainism in India.

Biography

Johannes Klatt was born on 31 January 1852 in Filehne, in the Prussian Province of Posen.
From 1868 to 1872, he studied Indology in Berlin under Albrecht Weber. In 1873, he finished his doctorate at the University of Halle.
At the Royal Library in Berlin, Klatt's appointments were as follows.
  • 1872: part-time staff
  • 1874: assistant
  • October 1880: Kustos
  • April 1889: Bibliothecarius
He died in Bonn on 28 August 1908.

''Jaina-Onomasticon''

His magnum opus, the Jaina-Onomasticon, was a comprehensive bibliography listing names of Jain authors, texts, and toponyms, as well as biographies. The nearly completed manuscript, handwritten consisted of over 4,000 pages written in English, but just over 100 pages were published during his lifetime. Due to illness, he was unable to complete the work and died in 1908.
The Jaina-Onomasticon was edited and published in 2016 by Peter Flügel and Kornelius Krümpelmann. It is the largest prosopography in Jain studies.

Personal life

Klatt was married to Margarete Patzig. They had two sons, Fritz Klatt, an educator, and Albert Klatt, a painter.