Otto Miller (priest)

Otto Franz Josef Miller (27 July 1879 – 4 January 1958) was a German Roman Catholic priest, writer and hymn composer.

Biography

Otto Miller was born at Mehlsack in Ermland. In 1884, he moved to Braunsberg and attended the local grammar school. After graduating from high school, he went to the Catholic seminary and was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Andreas Thiel in Frauenburg on February 8, 1903. Afterwards he served as a chaplain for Father Johannes Tietz in Neuteich. He received from the cathedral chapter in Frauenburg the "Scholarship Preuckianum", which had been donated in 1631 by the canon of Ermland Johann von Preuck in his will to enable theologians from Ermland to study in Rome.

Thus he traveled to Rome in 1906 and studied philosophy and archeology there. In 1908, he returned to Ermland and was chaplain in Seeburg until 1909. In 1909, he traveled to Italy and was a parish priest in Genoa. He studied at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg im Breisgau under the historian Heinrich Finke and received his doctorate of philosophy there in 1912 with a dissertation on Dante's Philosophy of History. In 1911, he was appointed second episcopal secretary to Augustinus Bludau in Frauenburg, and in 1922 he became first secretary at the local episcopal curia. At the same time, from 1922, he was a country parish priest in Thiergart (now Zwierzno) in the Marienburg deanery.

He published in the Akademische Bonifatius-Korrespondenz and the Ermländische Zeitung. After the NSDAP assumption of power in 1933, he would be banned from teaching religion. Between 1936 and 1938, he wrote several hymns for the hymn and prayer book Lobet den Herrn, published by Bishop Maximilian Kaller in 1938. He retired for health reasons in 1938 and lived until the fall of 1944 as a house chaplain with the Sisters of Saint Elizabeth in Neuhausen-Thiergart (today Guryevsk) near Königsberg.

Because of the approaching battles, he moved to Lower Silesia to a monastery in Glogau. After the end of the war, in the course of the flight and expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe, he was sent to a nursing home in Freystadt in the Upper Palatinate in early 1945. After eleven months he arrived in December 1946 in a camp in Magdeburg in the Soviet occupation zone. He managed to cross the zone border and arrived at a convent of the Grey Sisters in the city of Delmenhorst. He spent the last years of his life in Wewelsburg near Paderborn with the Sisters of St. Catherine, who cared for elderly people from Ermland in the St. Joseph Home for the Aged.

Works

Major publications

• Dantes Geschichtsphilosophie (1912)
• Geist und Form (1919)
• Der ermländische Dichter Julius Pohl. Ein Essay (1919)
• Unsre Heimatstadt Bischofstein. Gedenkblatt zur Volks-Abstimmg am 11. Juli 1920 (1920; with Eugen Brachvogel)
• "Franz von Sales und Franziska von Chantal," Unser Ermlandbuch 15 (1920), pp. 25–52.
• Franz Fleischer: Führer durch Frauenburg (1921; with Eugen Brachvogel)
• "Bischof Augustinius Bludau," Ermländische Zeitung (17. Februar 1930)
• Der Individualismus als Schicksal (1933; 1964)
• Der Dom in Frauenburg. Ermländische Zeitungs- und Verlagsdruckerei (1934; with Eugen Brachvogel)
• Du bist das Licht. Wir sind die Flut (1961; with Hermann Ophoven)
• Wo nimmt man jetzt das Lachen her. Empfehlungen eines freien Geistes (1966)
• Wenn der Durst nach Gott uns quält. Gebetete Lyrik (1979; with Ernst Laws)

References

• Eva-Maria Will, "Otto Miller." In: Ermlandbuch 2016. Münster: Bischof-Maximilian-Kaller-Stiftung (2016), pp. 77–90.