Peter Ganz

Peter Felix Ganz (3 November 1920 in Mainz, Germany - 17 August 2006 in Oxford, England) was a British Germanist and Professor at the University of Oxford.

Peter Ganz was the son of Dr Hermann Friedrich Ignaz Ganz and Dr Charlotte (Lotte), née Fromberg. He attended the in Mainz but was forced to leave it since his family was classed as Jewish. In November 1938, he was held for six weeks in the concentration camp at Buchenwald but was able to emigrate to England after that. After internment in the Isle of Man, he joined the Pioneer Corps, then worked for CSDIC with Fritz Lustig. At the end of the war he worked at Farm Hall listening to the captured Nuclear scientists as the atom Bomb went off including Heisenberg Otto Hahn and others. In 1949, he married Rosemary Allen (died 1986). They had two sons: Adam Ganz (a writer who also wrote a play on his father's experiences at Farm Hall) and David Ganz (until 2010 Professor of Paleography at King's College London), and two daughters: Deborah Ganz and Rachel Ganz. In 1987, he married Nicolette Mout.

In 1973, he received the Große Bundesverdienstkreuz in acknowledgement of his services in establishing scholarly exchange between English and German Germanists, and in 1993 an honorary doctorate of the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Peter Ganz worked as Assistant Lecturer at Royal Holloway College, London 1948-49; Lecturer in German Philology and Medieval Literature at Westfield College, London 1949-60; Fellow, Hertford College, Oxford 1963-72; Professor of Medieval German Language and Literature and Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford 1972-85 (Emeritus) where his successor was Nigel F Palmer (until 2013); Resident Fellow, Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel 1985-88. He co-founded the Anglo-German Colloquium, a biennial meeting of British and German medieval Germanists, and edited the Oxford German Studies (1978–90) and the PBB (1976–90).

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