As a result of the forced deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941, Heinrich Werner spent his childhood from the age of six in the village of Grosskossul in the
Krasnoyarsk Krai. After completing secondary school (Abitur) and military service, he studied from 1958 at the Pedagogical Institute in
Tomsk and received his doctorate there in 1966 in Germanic philology and general linguistics. He subsequently headed the Department of German in
Omsk and, from 1969, in
Taganrog. In 1975, he completed his habilitation at the Academy of Sciences in
Leningrad with a dissertation on the accent system of the
Ket. In 1991 he emigrated to Germany. In 1992 he was elected a foreign member of the
Russian Academy of Sciences and became a research associate at the
University of Bonn. From 2005 to 2010 he worked at the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Werner's research focuses primarily on the
Yeniseian languages and German
dialectology. He authored numerous monographs on the history, culture, and languages of the Yeniseian peoples, whose descent from the
Dingling he considers possible. == Works (selection) ==