Wolfram Freiherr von Soden (19 June 1908, Berlin - 6 October 1996, Münster) was a German Assyriologist.
Born in Berlin, von Soden studied under Benno Landsberger at Leipzig and received his doctorate in 1931, at age 23, with his thesis Der hymnisch-epische Dialekt des Akkadischen (The Hymnic-Epic Dialect of Akkadian). In 1936, he was appointed a professor of Assyriology and Arabic studies, a new position, at the University of Göttingen. While his mentor, Landsberger, was obliged to leave Germany due to National-Socialist racial policy, von Soden joined the Sturmabteilung (the SA, the so-called brownshirts) in 1934. Although he did not immediately join the Nazi Party, in 1944 membership was automatically conferred upon him, along with all other members of the SA who were not already affiliated with the Party at that time.
From 1939 to 1945, he served in the military, primarily as a translator, and in 1940 this work prevented him accepting the offer of a chair in Ancient Near Eastern studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Von Soden published significant works that implicitly supported Nazi cultural and racial policy; during this time, Von Soden also spoke out against his doktorvater Landsberger.
Following the Second World War, von Soden’s former activities as a Nazi initially barred his reentry to the teaching profession. Because of his extraordinary abilities, however, and ironically thanks to Benno Landsberger who wrote in his support, von Soden was appointed to an academic position in Vienna in 1954. In 1961, he accepted the offer of a professorship at Münster, where he served as director of the Oriental Seminar until his retirement in 1976. At his death in 1996, he left his scholarly library to the newly revived Institute for Near Eastern Studies at the University of Leipzig, where he had earned his doctorate.
Von Soden’s scholarship evidenced a Nazi outlook primarily by denigrating Semitic cultural influences in the ancient Near East in favor of Indo-European or “Indo-Germanic” cultures. This is especially marked in such works as Der Aufstieg des Assyrerreichs als geschichtliches Problem (1937, The Rise of the Assyrian Empire as an Historical Problem) and Arabische wehrsprachliche Ausdrücke (1942, Arabic Military Terminology and Expressions).
His significant learning, demonstrated in his scholarly publication, is undisputed. Works such as his Grundriss der akkadischen Grammatik (Outline of Akkadian Grammar) and the Akkadisches Handwörterbuch (Basic Akkadian Dictionary) remain, in new editions, standard works even up to the present day.
Very little of von Soden's scholarship has been translated from the original German; Donald Schley's English translation of von Soden's Einführung in die Altorientalistik (The Ancient Orient: an Introduction to the Study of the Ancient Near East) was published by W.B. Eerdmans in 1994.