Eudo Colecestra Mason (26 September 1901 – 10 June 1969) was a German scholar. He was a professor of German at Edinburgh University, joining in 1946 and becoming Chair of German in 1951, a position he held until his death in 1969, only the third person to take the role since 1919.^[1][2] He had previously worked as a lecturer in Münster, Leipzig, and Basel.^[3]

Mason attended school in Cambridge, before studying at both the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford completing his Doctorate in Leipzig.^[3] His thesis on Austrian-Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke was published in 1938.^[4] Mason was seen as the principal scholar in the revival of Henry Fuseli.^[5] In 1967 Mason won the Friedrich Gundolf Prize.^[6] His final works, Holderlin and Goethe:3 was published posthumously in 1975.

In 2004, the Chair of German at the University of Edinburgh was renamed the Eudo C. Mason Chair of German.^[2]

Personal life

Mason was born in Colchester, Essex on 29 September 1901 to Ernest Nathan Mason, an engineer's draughtsman and Bertha Betsey Mason (née Kitton), and had two older brothers, Bernard and Conrad and a younger sister Helena.^[7][8] Mason's father had worked for Paxmans, before developing a method of making photographic blueprints from engineering drawings and setting up his own firm E.N. Mason and Sons Ltd.^[9] Mason married Esther Klara Giesecke in Colchester in 1939, however he outlived her as she died in 1966.^[10]

Mason received a service of remembrance on 1 August 1969 at the University of Edinburgh's Chaplaincy Centre.^[11] The executors of Mason's will donated his collection of over 3,600 children' books in English, French and German to the National Library of Scotland.^[12]