Weller's father was a businessman concerned with industrial products and a commercial traveller, and his mother was a baker's daughter from Gmünd. His parents died by 1890, so the 12-year-old was an orphan along with his eight siblings but his parents’ maid took care of the upbringing of the nine children.
Education
Hermann Weller transferred from the Real Lyceum in Gmünd to the “Latin School” in Bad Mergentheim. In 1897, he passed the schoolleaving examination. Weller then studied law in Berlin and Tübingen, and then Classical Languages. In 1901 he received his doctorate in Latin and Sanskrit. In subsequent years, he completed his state examination in Latin, Greek, French and Hebrew. He also distinguished himself by a sound knowledge of English, Italian, Indian and Persian.
Weller wrote the elegy in neo-Latin Y Elegy, which describes how in a poet's dream the letters of the alphabet from a volume of Horace's poetry become alive, and how Acalls in a demagogic speech for the extermination of the foreign letter Y. Y escapes and tries through words to prove its right to exist, but the other letters do not allow themselves to be convinced, and are in the process of excluding Y. The poet asks for release and awakes from this nightmare. Weller, a private senior lecturer, at Tübingen University, submitted the Y Elegy at the end of 1937, to the :it:Certamen Hoeufftianum|Certamen Hoeufftianum, a competition of neo-Latin poetry of the Royal Dutch Academy of Wetenschappen held annually in Amsterdam, which he won thirteen times in the course of his life. In 1938 Weller was awarded the Gold Medal for this text. The fact that Weller could be promoted to the position of Special Professor in the same year shows that knowledge of Latin among Nazi officials was not wide. The Latin scholar, Uwe Dubielzig, recognised in 2001 that the text was a playfully disguised accusation against the ever more apparent anti-Semitism of the Nazis, the effects of which Weller could observe in his immediate surroundings of Tübingen University. Additionally, if the text cannot be read as a document of anti-fascist resistance, it is still a spirited but camouflaged document opposing the Nazi racist politics, the full brutality of which, before the pogrom of the so-called Reichskristallnacht, Weller would have underestimated,. In that sense the Y Elegy can be assessed as a remarkable testimony for 'internal emigration'.
