Culture
🇩🇪 GermanyHelmut Lethen, German Literary Scholar and Cult Author, Dies at 87 in Vienna
Helmut Lethen, the German literary scholar and cultural scientist who became a cult author in the 1990s with his epochal study "Verhaltenslehren der Kälte" (Behavioral Doctrines of the Cold), has died at the age of 87. His publisher Rowohlt Berlin announced that Lethen died on Thursday in Vienna, Austria.
Lethen was born in 1939 in Mönchengladbach, Germany. He taught at Utrecht University from 1977 to 1996, then took over the chair for Modern German Literature in Rostock. From 2007 to 2016, he directed the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna.
He gained widespread recognition for his 1994 study "Verhaltenslehren der Kälte – Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen" (Behavioral Doctrines of the Cold – Life Experiments Between the Wars). In it, using authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Jünger, and Helmuth Plessner as examples, Lethen showed how behavioral doctrines that emphasized a habitus of hardness were propagated during the Weimar Republic and the interwar period.
Source: Spiegel Kultur
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