For my rese­arch in Indo­ne­sia, I had to beco­me flu­ent in Indo­ne­si­an. In 2007, I redis­co­ver­ed the wri­tin­gs of Ren­ward Brand­stet­ter. That was short­ly befo­re his 150^th bir­th­day, coming up in 2010. I mana­ged to mobi­li­ze a group of for­mer col­le­agues and rese­ar­chers for a con­fe­rence. The objec­ti­ve was to revi­sit Brandstetter’s work which had given the noti­on of “Aus­tro­ne­si­an lan­guages” a syste­ma­tic depth not rea­ched befo­re.

The con­fe­rence papers were edi­ted by Robert Blust and mys­elf under the tit­le “A world of words” (2012, out of print).  For tho­se who read Ger­man, the­re is a rela­ted book­let edi­ted by Iwar Wer­len and published by the Swiss Aca­de­my of the Social Sci­en­ces, “Ren­ward Brand­stet­ter (1860−1942). Bei­trä­ge zum 150. Geburts­tag des Schwei­zer Dia­lek­to­lo­gen und Erfor­schers der aus­tro­ne­si­schen Spra­chen und Lite­ra­tu­ren.» This volu­me also con­ta­ins a tran­script of his auto­bio­gra­phy.

In the years that fol­lo­wed I wro­te a bio­gra­phy on Brand­stet­ter that takes a com­pre­hen­si­ve approach to his life and idio­syn­cra­tic work. The book (in Ger­man) was published in 2019 by Har­ras­so­witz, Wies­ba­den.