Käte Hamburger

Käte Hamburger (1896–1992) was an important Germanist and literary theorist who habilitated at the Technical University of Stuttgart after her exile in Sweden and subsequently worked there as an unpaid professor.

Käte Hamburger studied philosophy, history, art and literary history in Berlin and Munich and completed her doctorate on Friedrich Schiller in 1992. She actually aspired to a university career, but this was difficult for her as a young woman. In 1934, Hamburger fled to Göteborg in Sweden. There she earned her living as a language teacher and cultural journalist. She would have liked to pursue a university career in Sweden after the Second World War, but this was not possible.

In 1956, on the initiative of Stuttgart literary scholar Fritz Martini, she returned to Germany, specifically to Stuttgart.

In March 1957, Hamburger completed her habilitation at the Technical University of Stuttgart - her „The Logic of Poetry“is still well-known today. She initially taught as a private lecturer, as she was already too old for a professorship in terms of civil service law. From 1959, she taught general and comparative literature as an adjunct professor until her retirement in 1976. Looking back, she described her move to Stuttgart as a „decisive and happy turning point“ in her life.

Hamburger received international recognition above all for her combination of literary theory, linguistic analysis and philosophical questions, which she used in „The Logic of Poetry“ to determine the specifics of literary speech and provide essential impulses for fiction theory, genre theory and literary structuralism. She attempted to develop criteria with which the fictionality of a text could be recognized solely on the basis of textual characteristics.

Käte Hamburger died on 8 April 1992 and was buried in the Prague Cemetery