Ludwig Kahn

Ludwig Werner Kahn (born October 18, 1910 in Berlin ; died December 4, 2007 in Seattle , Washington ) was a German-American German studies scholar.

Life and activity

Kahn was a son of the lawyer Bernhard Kahn and his wife Doro, geb. Frischberg (1886-1964). One of his great uncle, whom he never got to know personally, was the philosopher Edmund Husserl .

After attending the Fichte-Gymnasium in Berlin, Kahn studied German , English , Romance studies and philosophy from 1928 to 1930 and from 1931 to 1933 at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität . Petersen was one of his teachers there. From 1930 to 1931 he spent a few months at University College in London and then a few months at the Sorbonne in Paris . Around 1931, Kahn began working on a dissertation on William Shakespeare's sonnets in Berlin .

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Kahn was ousted from the civil service because of his - according to National Socialist definition - Jewish descent. He went to Switzerland in 1934, where he completed his doctorate, which he was no longer able to formally complete in Germany due to the anti-Semitic university policy that had prevailed there under the National Socialists, at the University of Bern with Fritz Strich . After graduating as Dr. phil he went to Great Britain, where he settled in London .

In London, Kahn worked from 1934 to 1936 for the Warburg Institute and from 1935 to 1936 as an assistant lecturer at the University College of the University of London . There he also received a British MA degree in 1936.

In 1937 Kahn moved to the United States. He was naturalized there in 1943. In the USA he taught first as an instructor for German language and literature at the University of Rochester in New York from 1937 to 1940, then from 1940 to 1942 as an instructor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and from 1942 to 1943 as the Coordinator of Inter-American and at Vassar College (1943).

After his emigration, Kahn was classified as an enemy of the state by the National Socialist police. In the spring of 1940 the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus regarded as particularly dangerous or important, which is why they would be succeeded by the occupation troops in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Special SS commandos were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

In 1947 he was appointed professor of German language and literature at the City College of the City University of New York in New York (German and Comparative Literature): From 1947 to 1952 he taught there as an assistant professor and then from 1952 to 1961 as an associate professor and from 1961 to 1967 as full professor and head of the department (Professor and Department Chairman). In between he taught as a visiting professor at the TH Stuttgart in 1959/1960 .

Since 1967 Kahn taught as a professor of German language and literature (Gebhard Professor of German) at Columbia University . In 1968 and 1979 he was a visiting professor for German at Yale University . City of New York graduate center (1971).

From 1973 to 1976 he was director of the German House at Columbia University in New York and since 1974 a member of the Council for Research in the Humanities at Columbia University, New York. Since 1969, Kahn, who was also a member of the Germanistic Society of America, also held the post of associate editor of the German Review journal .

Kahn's estate has been in the German Exile Archive since 2003 .

Honors

Kahn was u. a. Senior Fulbright Research Fellow at the University of Stuttgart, Fellow of the John Guggenheim Foundation and recipient of the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class.

family

On July 12, 1941, Kahn married Tayana Uffner (1920–1980). The marriage resulted in two children Andrée (born 1945) and Miriam (born 1948).

Fonts

• Shakesepeare's sonnets in Germany. 1934.
• Shakespeare's sonnets in Germany. Attempt a literary typology. Bern and Leipzig 1935.
• Social Ideals in German Literature 1770–1830. 1938.
• Literature and a crisis of faith. Stuttgart 1964.

literature

• Christoph König (Ed.), With the collaboration of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 2: H-Q. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 .
• Who's who in American Jewry , 1980, p. 240.

Web links

• Ludwig Werner Kahn estate in the German Exile Archive of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Kahn on the special wanted list GB (reproduction on the website of the Imperial War Museum).