Käte Hamburger


Käte Hamburger was a Germanist, literary scholar and philosopher. She was a professor at the University of Stuttgart.
Käte Hamburger earned her doctorate in 1922 in Munich. Expelled by the Nazis because of her Jewish heritage, she immigrated to Sweden in 1934, where she lived until 1956, earning her living as a language teacher, journalist and writer. She resumed her university career on her return to Germany, writing about Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others.
Her examination of the ontological status of literary objects in Die Logik der Dichtung established her renown in the field of literary theory. Along with Eberhard Lämmert and Franz Karl Stanzel, Käte Hamburger contributed in the 1950s to a reorientation of Germanistics in Germany in the direction of a rational and analytic methodology.

Literature