Hinrich C. Seeba

Born and raised in Hannover, Germany, Professor Seeba studied German, Greek and Philosophy at the universities of Göttingen, Zürich and Tübingen; he passed his Staatsexamen in 1966 and received his Dr. phil. in 1967, both from the University of Tübingen. He started teaching at Berkeley in 1967 and served twice as departmental chair, from 1977-81 and again from 1989-91. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1970/71 and visiting professor at the Free University Berlin in 1992, at Stanford University in 1994, and at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, in 1999. He was chair of the Society & Culture group in the Center of German and European Studies from 1991-95. He officially retired in 2005, but taught for three more years, until 2008, as Professor of the Graduate School. His teaching and research areas include 18th to 20th century German literature with emphasis on the enlightenment, the Napoleonic era, the Vormärz, contemporary trends in German literature, intellectual and institutional history, national and cultural identity formation, the theory of literature and interpretation (hermeneutics), cultural criticism, and problems of historiography. His publications include books on Hofmannsthal (1970), Lessing (1974) and two volumes of Kleist’s dramas in the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag (1987 and 1991, with extensive commentary), as well as two books collecting some of his essays: Denkbilder. Detmolder Vorträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Literatur (2011) and Abgründiger Klassiker der Moderne. Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Heinrich von Kleist (2012), both in the Aisthesis Verlag in Bielefeld. He is co-editor of Festschriften for Heinz Politzer (1975) and Richard Brinkmann (1981) and the author of articles on Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, F. Schlegel, Kleist, Grillparzer, Heine, Nestroy, reception theory, the Vormärz, historiography, cultural nationalism, the history of Germanistik, Jewish exiles, New Subjectivity, and German Studies in the United States. His most recent projects include studies in linguistics of thought (“Sprachlichkeit des Denkens. Ein Paradigma der Hermeneutik in der kulturwissenschaftlichen Praxis,” 2012), in the role of the German language among Jewish exiles (“‘Disrupted Language’: Zur Heimat der Sprache unter Emigranten,” 2013), in the cultural significance of social circles (“Geselligkeit. Bildungskultur und bürgerliche Emanzipation,” 2013) and of traveling (“Flucht in ferne Paradiese. Zur Theorie und Geschichte des Reisens in der Literatur,” 2014).