Karl Heinz Bohrer

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Karl Heinz Bohrer (born September 26, 1932 in Cologne , † August 4, 2021 in London ) was a German literary critic , literary theorist and publicist .

Life

Bohrer was the son of Hermann Bohrer, who holds a doctorate in economics, and his wife Elisabeth Bohrer, née Ottersbach. He attended elementary school in his hometown from 1939 to 1943 . Then he was a student at the humanistic grammar school and country school home Birklehof in Hinterzarten in the Black Forest . The pedagogy of the boarding school was re-established by the philosopher Georg Picht after the Second World War . In 1953 Bohrer passed his matriculation examination and initially studied German language and literature , theater studies and history at the University of Cologne for two semesters. In the same year he went to England for the first time , which he wrote about over the coming decades and where he lived for a long time.

In the summer semester of 1954 he moved to the University of Göttingen , where he studied German, history and philosophy . There he met the German scholars Arthur Henkel (who later became his doctoral supervisor), Wolfgang Kayser and Hans Neumann , the historians Hermann Heimpel , Karl Lange , Percy Ernst Schramm and Reinhard Wittram as well as the philosophers Helmuth Plessner and Hermann Wein (1912–1981) .

In 1957 Bohrer passed the state examination in German and history at the University of Göttingen. He then took up a position as a German language lecturer at the German Center in Stockholm . For his doctorate he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg in the summer semester of 1960 , where he heard the historian Rudolf von Albertini (1923–2004) and the German scholars Arthur Henkel and Peter Wapnewski . In 1961 he was with Arthur Henkel with the work The Myth of the North. PhD studies in romantic story prophecy.

Bohrer wrote cultural reports and literary essays for radio and the Deutsche Zeitung before he came to Hamburg in 1962 to work in the world's feature section . From 1966 to 1982 he was part of the feature section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and from 1968 headed its literature section. In 1974 he was replaced in this function by Marcel Reich-Ranicki , who later said of his predecessor Bohrer that he had "edited the literary part with his back to the audience". After a break of a year, Bohrer went to London as a correspondent for the FAZ in 1975 .

In 1977/78 he completed his habilitation at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literature at Bielefeld University with a study on the aesthetics of horror. The pessimistic romanticism and Ernst Jünger's early work . In 1982 he was appointed to the chair for modern German literary history at Bielefeld University. In 1984, as the successor to Hans Schwab-Felisch, he was appointed editor-in-chief of Merkur , which he held together with Kurt Scheel from 1991 to 2011 . From 1993 he also published the series Aesthetica by Suhrkamp-Verlag. Bohrer was the first to hold the Heidelberg Gadamer Professorship.

In 1997 he was in Bielefeld emeritus . Karl Heinz Bohrer's first marriage was to the writer Undine Gruenter († 2002). He last lived in London and was married to Angela Bielenberg (née von der Schulenburg) for the second time. Bohrer died in London in early August 2021 at the age of 88.

In September 2021, Suhrkamp will posthumously publish “Thirteen Everyday Fantasy Pieces” under the title Was alles so vorommen .

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The Austrian writer Franz Schuh described Bohrer in a spacious essay The Last Esthete. On the writings of Karl Heinz Bohrer as “currently the most important thinker of the aesthetic”. In this essay, Schuh discussed a number of works by Bohrer, which Bohrer had devoted to the topic of an aestheticizing horror and evil. They are: 1. Appearance horror and fear of expectation , 2. The aesthetics of horror. The pessimistic romanticism and Ernst Jünger's early work , 3. The limits of the aesthetic , 4. Languages ​​of irony - languages ​​of seriousness. The problem , 5. Aesthetics of the state , 6. Evil - an aesthetic category? , 7. The farewell. Theory of grief. Baudelaire, Goethe, Nietzsche, Benjamin and 8. Possibilities of a nihilistic ethic . In addition to his later essays, Bohrer also wrote an autobiography in two volumes: Granatsplitter (2012) and Jetzt (2017).

On the occasion of the Wembley-Elf game (1972) , the then London correspondent Bohrer coined the phrase that Netzer had presented his advances "from the depths of space". The formulation brought it to a standing idiom, not only in football discourse, and to the title of a movie . Bohrer is also associated with the coining of the term “do- gooder ”.

Awards

Fonts

Interviews

literature

  • Karlheinz Weißmann : Karl Heinz Bohrer , in: State political manual . Volume 3, Verlag Antaios, Schnellroda 2012. pp. 23-24. On-line

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. DER SPIEGEL: Critic and literary theorist: Karl Heinz Bohrer is dead. Accessed August 5, 2021 .
  2. See Helmut Böttiger : literary critic: Schlegel, Benjamin and the pause clown. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Matthias Beilein (eds.): Literature business in Germany. 3rd edition: new version. Edition text + kritik, Munich 2009, pp. 97–108, here p. 106; Kurt Oesterle : We spoke to [:] Karl Heinz Bohrer. Romance and revolt. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt , November 23, 1989, No. 270, no p.
  3. a b Philipp Oehmke : Huckleberry Finn from the ruins . In: Der Spiegel . No. 31 , 2012, p. 128-131 ( online - 30 July 2012 ).
  4. Michael Braun: Provocateur and Negativist. Karl Heinz Bohrer is the first holder of the Heidelberg Gadamer Professorship , in: Basler Zeitung , June 8, 2001.
  5. Publisher's advertisement , accessed on August 5, 2021.
  6. ^ The last esthete , in: Die Zeit 15/1998.
  7. Karl Heinz Bohrer: The absolute present tense. The semantics of aesthetic time , Frankfurt am Main 1994, pp. 32–62.
  8. Hanser, Munich – Vienna 1978; see Michael Rutschky : The Aesthetics of Terror. On Karl Heinz Bohrer's investigation. In: Neue Rundschau 89,3 (1978), pp. 457-464.
  9. The Limits of the Aesthetic , in: Die Zeit 37/1992.
  10. ^ Karl Heinz Bohrer (Ed.): Languages ​​of Irony - Languages ​​of Seriousness , Frankfurt am Main 2000, pp. 11–35.
  11. Karl Heinz Bohrer: After nature. On politics and aesthetics , Munich 1988.
  12. Karl Heinz Bohrer: Imaginations of Evil. On the justification of an aesthetic category , Munich 2004, pp. 9–32.
  13. Frankfurt am Main 1996.
  14. Ludger Heidbrink (ed.): Disenchanted time. The melancholy spirit of modernity , Munich 1997.
  15. ^ Patrick Bahners: Karl Heinz Bohrers autobiography
  16. Jürgen Kaube: Karl Heinz Bohrer: Against the insinuation of the intellectual. In: FAZ.NET . September 26, 2012, accessed January 12, 2014 .
  17. Georg Diez: Good + human = bad . In: Der Spiegel . No. 3 , 2016, p. 10 ( online - January 16, 2016 ).
  18. ^ Karl Heinz Bohrer: Speech of hatred [speech of thanks]. In: Akzente 26 (1979), pp. 293-296.
  19. Gustav Seibt : From the citizen monarchy. Laudation for Karl Heinz Bohrer. In: Sinn und Form 59,4 (2007), pp. 557-563.
  20. Variant on DVD: Alexander Kluge: The guillotine or the category of suddenness. With Karl Heinz Bohrer. In: 10 vor 11 (dctp), RTL plus, December 26, 1988, contained in: Lakes are islands for fish. TV works 1987-2008. Zweiausendeins / dctp, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-86150-885-4 , DVD Nº 1, Track Nº 2; on dctp.tv .