Wolfgang Kayser

Wolfgang Kayser (born 24 December 1906 in Berlin; died 23 January 1960 in Göttingen) was a German Germanist and scholar of literature.

Kayser earned his doctorate in 1932 with a thesis on the poetry of Baroque poet Harsdörffer, and his habilitation in 1935, writing about the history of the German ballad. During the Nazi era he showed allegiance to the Nazi Party. In 1933 he joined the SA and in 1937, the NSDAP

In 1938 he became a Privatdozent in Leipzig. In 1941 he was appointed director of the German Cultural Institute in Lisbon, which role he described as that of "an adjunct professor in the Imperial Service." He also held a lectureship in German at the University of Lisbon. During that period he was already at work on what would become his pioneering textbook, Das Sprachliche Kunstwerk: Eine Einführung in Die Literaturwissenschaft Zehnte Auflage (The Language of Art: An Introduction to the Literature).

Dismissed from service after 1945, he thereafter worked mainly as a freelance lecturer, author and translator. In 1948 The Language of Art was published, which had a strong influence on post-war German literature. In 1950 he received a professorship at the University of Göttingen, where he worked until his death in 1960.

As German literary studies shook off the control of the politicization that had held sway during the Nazi era, and scholars turned toward increasingly European and multidisciplinary literary scholarship, Kayser gained an international reputation. In 1954 he was made a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature in Darmstadt.

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