Hans-Günther Thalheim

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Hans-Günther Thalheim
Born(1924-05-05)5 May 1924
Germany
Died3 December 2018(2018-12-03) (aged 94)
Occupation(s)Professor (German Literature and language)
Writer

Hans-Günther Thalheim (5 May 1924 – 3 December 2018) was a German professor of

Literary sciences.[1]
He was also a writer and literary editor.

Life

Thalheim was born in Chemnitz, in the southern part of what was then central Germany. His father was a public official. He successfully undertook his school final exams in 1943 and in 1943/44 performed substitute national service by working as a teacher in Carinthia. He also undertook a period of study involving German literature, history pedagogy and philosophy at Freiburg university[1] in the south-west of the country, where his teachers included Walter Rehm and Martin Heidegger.

Despite a serious eye-sight defect, in 1944 he had to work in a

Soviet occupation zone in what had been Germany.[1]

After a brief spell working for the national higher education secretariat in Berlin, between 1951 and 1957 Thalheim lived and worked in Weimar. Initially he was employed at the Goethe and Schiller archive [de] as a senior research assistant[1] to Gerhard Scholz. In 1954 he received his doctorate for a dissertation on Griechenlandbild by the eighteenth century Hellenist scholar Winckelmann.[1] From 1954 he and Louis Fürnberg jointly produced the Weimarer Beiträge [de], which quickly became a respected literary journal. The focus of the journal, which appeared four times each year was the Weimar classicist movement. Fürnberg died young in 1957: Thalheim remained the journal's publishing editor till 1963.

Hans-Günther Thalheim - Publications (not a complete list)

Monographs etc

Between 1957 and 1964 he taught as Professor for Modern German Literature at Berlin's Humboldt University. Meanwhile he obtained his own habilitation (qualification ) in 1961 for work on Friedrich Schiller.[1] At the end of 1964 Thalheim accepted an offer to switch to the (East) German Academy of Sciences nearby. There he became Director of the Institute for German Language and Literature. However, he remained at The Academy only till 1968, due to internal reforms within the institution. From 1967 he was working on research for an Encyclopaedia for a Marxist History of Literature, and was chairman of the project's editorial collective. Work on the project, which dealt with German writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would last till 1979, although the volumes of the Encyclopaedia started to appear in 1973.

After retiring in 1989, Hans-Günther Thalheim continued to live in Berlin.

Work

Although Thalheim's career embraced a wide spectrum of literary research, his speciality remained the eighteenth century, and in particular the Sturm und Drang phase of the German classicist movement. At the heart of that was almost fifty years of work on Friedrich Schiller, whose work had been the basis for his habilitation dissertation in 1961, but he also made major contributions on Winckelmann, Goethe and Kleist.

His literary approach was enriched by insights into historical context: his linguistic and stylistic analyses included reflections on the political and social contradictions of the periods in which works were created.

Awards and honours

  • 1976:
    National Prize of East Germany
  • 1987: Lessing Prize
  • 1989: Johannes Stroux medal

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Leonore Krenzlin. "Thalheim, Hans-Günther * 5.5.1924 Germanist" (in German). Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur: Biographische Datenbanken. Retrieved 12 July 2015.