Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in Stanford (2015)

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (born June 15, 1948 in Würzburg ) is a German - American Romance scholar , literary scholar and literary historian , university professor and publicist . Until 2018 he held the chair of comparative literature at Stanford University . He is a permanent visiting professor at the Université de Montréal , the Collège de France and the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen.

Career

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht grew up as the child of two doctorates in urology in Würzburg. He passed his Abitur at the Siebold High School there; in high school he spent a year at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris. As a scholarship holder of the Maximilianeum Foundation, he studied Romance studies, German, philosophy and sociology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and in Regensburg. Stays abroad took him to the University of Salamanca in Spain and to the University of Pavia in Italy . He was a member of the Socialist German Student Union . After his studies, Gumbrecht received his doctorate in Konstanz under Hans Robert Jauß , whose research assistant he became. At the age of 26, he moved to the University of Bochum as a professor in 1975 and to the University of Siegen in 1983 . He applied unsuccessfully to succeed his academic teacher Jauß and was appointed to the chair of comparative literature at Stanford University in 1989. Gumbrecht has been an American citizen since March 2000. In March 2009 he took up a visiting professorship at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, which was later converted to a "permanent visiting professorship", so that the literary scholar regularly comes to Lake Constance for short periods of time to give lectures. In 2012 and 2013 Gumbrecht was a Fellow of the Friedrich Nietzsche College in Weimar , where he presented his drafts of a “Genealogy of the Western Intellectual” under the lecture title “Risky Thinking”. In 2018 he retired from Stanford .

Gumbrecht held numerous visiting professorships a . a. in Bogotá , Buenos Aires , Mexico City , Rio de Janeiro , Berkeley , Princeton , Montreal , Aarhus , Barcelona , Berlin , Budapest , Lisbon , Manchester , Munich , Paris , Riga , Cape Town , Jerusalem , Kyoto . In 2013, Gumbrecht was both juror and laudator for the Ludwig Börne Prize for the award winner Peter Sloterdijk .

Gumbrecht is married for the second time and has four children.

Journalistic positions

He writes regularly for the newspapers NZZ , FAZ , Die Zeit and Die Welt . From an American perspective, he describes the socio-political reality in Western Europe as bipartisan “social democracy”. He described mainstream intellectuals as "educated, semi-educated" people. Since 2012 he has been writing a blog Digital / Pausen on FAZ.net , in which he regularly commented on socio-political issues. In March 2018, after 273 blogs , FAZ.net surprisingly split up with Gumbrecht and other authors such as Rainer Meyer ("Don Alphonso") and Carsten Knop (who became FAZ editor-in-chief for digital products at the beginning of the year ) due to a realignment of their blog page .

Others

In his contributions, Gumbrecht repeatedly deals with the role of sport; he is a supporter of the Bundesliga soccer club Borussia Dortmund . In the course of the #metoo debate, he reported that he had been informed of a misleading signature in his e-mails: An ombudsperson at his university made him aware that his initials HUG could be misunderstood as “hug” (“hug”).

Honors

• 1995: Stanford University Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching in the School of Humanities and Sciences
• 1998: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad de la República (Montevideo)
• 1998: Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2000: Stanford University Cuthbertson Award for Extraordinary Contributions
• 2003: Honorary Doctorate from the University of Montreal
• 2007: Honorary doctorate from the University of Siegen
• 2007: Honorary doctorate from the University of Saint Petersburg
• 2008: Honorary doctorate from the University of Greifswald
• 2009: Honorary doctorate from the University of Lisbon
• 2009: Honorary doctorate from the Philipps University of Marburg
• 2010: Honorary doctorate from Aarhus University
• 2012: Honorary doctorate from the University of Budapest
• 2015: Culture Prize of the City of Würzburg
• 2017: Honorary doctorate from the Leuphana University of Lüneburg

Works

Monographs

• A history of Spanish literature . 2 volumes. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-518-58062-0 ( review ).
• On the life and death of the great Romanists . Hanser, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-446-20140-8 .
• 1926. A year at the edge of time . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-58300-X .
• The power of philology. About a hidden impulse in the scientific handling of texts . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-58368-9 .
• This side of hermeneutics. About the production of presence . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-518-12364-5 .
• Praise the sport . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-518-41689-8 .
• Dimensions and limits of the conceptual history . Fink, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-7705-3694-0 .
• California graffiti. Pictures from the western end of the world . Hanser, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-446-23515-1 .
• Our broad present . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-12627-1 .
• Read moods. About a hidden reality of literature . Hanser, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-446-23504-5 .
• Presence . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-518-29542-7 .
• After 1945. Latency as the origin of the present . Translated from American English by Frank Born. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-518-42304-2 .
• Weltgeist in Silicon Valley: Living and thinking in future mode . Edited by René Scheu . NZZ Libro , Zurich 2018.
• Fragile present. Reflections and reactions . Edited by René Scheu. Reclam-Verlag , Stuttgart 2019.

Editorships

• Materiality of communication . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-518-28350-2 (together with Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer ).
• Paradoxes, dissonances, breakdowns. Situations of open epistemology . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-28525-4 (together with Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer)
• with Bernhard Siegert and Friedrich Kittler : The poet as commandant. D'Annunzio conquers Fiume. Munich 1996.

Other contributions

• Four-part interview with Rudolf Maresch ( Telepolis , March / April 2006):
  • Part 1: The "West" as a unit does not exist. March 4, 2006.
  • Part 2: chance of winning with high risk. March 10, 2006.
  • Part 3: At any moment, life can take an unexpected turn. March 19, 2006.
  • Part 4: The homogeneity of Western culture is grossly overestimated. April 2, 2006.
• Why reform the humanities ?: A somewhat American question . Osnabrück University Speeches, V&R unipress 2010, ISBN 978-3-89971-799-0 .
• Ambivalent dysphoria or: The German tendency to be in a bad mood , Gumbrecht on the bad mood at German universities. Deutschlandradio Kultur, local time: Political Features, December 16, 2010.
• Playing in ruins. The literary scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on his book »After 1945« . Moderation: René Aguigah , Zeitreisen, Deutschlandradio Kultur, August 15, 2012.
• “We are inundated with the past.” Contemporary history. “How we became what we are.” Interview Elke Dauk with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on his book: After 1945 - Latency as the origin of the present . TAZ October 17, 2012, p. 15, online version: Historians on the German Present , taz.de, October 17, 2012.
• Blog on FAZ.net: portrait, article list ; about 120 articles since June 2011, for example:
  • The Life of the Mind
  • At the end of ideologies there is political fatigue - there is nothing the discerning citizen is more upset about than political fatigue. But doesn't it just show that we are finally redeemed from the age of ideologies?
  • Tango, Montevideo, Buenos Aires and the incomprehensibility of desire. - Argentina and Uruguay, the countries of tango, have advanced further in the past century. Does your dance embody the incomprehensibility of desire?
• Omnipresent and upscale: Whether our present absorbs the beautiful , in: Romanische Studien , Nr. 2 (2015), pp. 301–314, online

Reception: articles and reviews

• Thomas Wirtz: It was sadness, not the shiny make-up . In: FAZ . March 20, 2001 (Review of: HU Gumbrecht: 1926. A year on the edge of time. Frankfurt am Main 2001).
• Christoph von Wolzieh : Review of: HU Gumbrecht: 1926. A year on the edge of time. Frankfurt am Main 2001. In: Die Welt. April 4, 2001.
• Manuel J. Hartung : The game with Sepp . He provokes and polarizes: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is one of the few German humanities scholars who are heard worldwide. In: Die Zeit 13/2007 . (Portrait of Gumbrecht).
• Elias Kreuzmair: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's concept of presence and literature (PDF file; 534 kB). In: Helikon. A Multidisciplinary Online Journal. 2, 2012, pp. 233-247.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and reviews of works by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht at perlentaucher.de
• Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on the 70th: The Presence of Distance German , Portrait of the literary scholar in FAZ from June 15, 2018, accessed January 20, 2019
• Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University
• Blog Digital / Pausen by Gumbrecht at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
• Gumbrecht am Ball football column at the NZZ

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Manuel J. Hartung : The game with Sepp. In: The time. 13/2007 (portrait about Gumbrecht)
2. ↑ Permanent visiting professor for literary studies at Zeppelin University , Zeppelin University, accessed January 20, 2019
3. ↑ René Scheu: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: “I work so much that I manage to beat the really talented out of the field” | NZZ . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . ( nzz.ch [accessed December 14, 2019]).
4. ^ Akademie Schloss Solitude. March 28, 2019, accessed March 28, 2019 . 
5. ↑ ^{a b} CV of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Foundation for the Promotion of the University Rectors' Conference, March 28, 2019, accessed on March 28, 2019 . 
6. ↑ https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/europa-und-die-usa-schoener-softer-sozialdemokratismus-ld.153310
7. ↑ https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/die-neue-internationale-der-halbgebilden-ld.1331234
8. ↑ FAZ separates from Don Alphonso , Tagesspiegel of March 6, 2018, accessed on the same day
9. ^ Gumbrecht, Philosophy of the Empty Stadium. FAZ blog from February 22, 2014.
10. ↑ Swiss radio and television: TV program - srf.ch - program “Sternstunde Philosophie” - 9.12.2019 3:15 am. Retrieved on December 14, 2019 (Swiss Standard German). 
11. ↑ Kenneth M. Cuthbertson Award | Registrar's Office. March 28, 2019, accessed March 28, 2019 . 
12. ↑ Hans Gumbrecht's Profile | Stanford Profiles. March 28, 2019, accessed March 28, 2019 . 
13. ↑ Culture Prize Winner of the City of Würzburg