In his contribution to the anthology “How, why and at what end did I become a literary historian?” (1972) reported Kurt Wölfel of the astonished interest with which he, as a child, looked at the large mirrors that were set up in front of exits or at blind bends. He contrasted these mirrors, in which one does not see oneself at the moment, with the obsession with which, as an adolescent and still as a young scientist, he had primarily looked in literature for reflections of one’s own existence.
He was born in 1927; no one in his family had attended grammar school or university until then. A year after the end of the war he had started to study “in a lost country, a civilization apparently destroyed, in angry hatred of the recent past and its political representatives”. The literature, his extensively consumed drug, should have nothing to do with all of this, it should be “the utterly turned away”.
It didn’t stop there, for him literature became an exit mirror in which he deciphered the images of bourgeois society, the dimension that he called the “inside of its history”. He studied it especially in its rise in the 18th century, the age of Enlightenment and revolution. Like many authors of this epoch, such as the Göttingen experimental physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, he sharpened his awareness by looking to England, where he worked as a lecturer in Birmingham and Leicester, and in 1964 he became a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Franconian was no stranger to him, he came from Würzburg.
One of the master’s theses that he supervised was that of Monika Grütters
Jean Paul, the author who began to move into the center of his research early on, was born in the Fichtelgebirge, in Wunsiedel in eastern Upper Franconia. In his collected “Jean Paul Studies” (1989) you can read how he proceeded when he traced the republicanism of Jean Paul and its relationship to the French Revolution. He did not focus on the author’s opinions in letters or conversations, but rather on his works; he asked about the relationship between political subject and poetic form.
In his own form of writing, he stayed true to the dream of his youth of becoming a writer in a very learned way. When he wrote about “Cosmopolitan Solitude” and the walk as a poetic act for Jean Paul, a virtual self-portrait was hidden in the exit mirror of the precise commentary. From 1982 until his retirement in 1992 he practiced his kind of philology, in which learning and walking were balanced, at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn.
One of the master’s theses that he supervised was that of today’s Minister of State for Culture, Monika Grütters, on “Idyll and Infinity”. The fact that he, together with his colleague Thomas Wirtz, was the editor of the wonderful “Gewimmels” (1996) from Jean Paul’s estate, suited him, as well as the fact that he wrote the entry for “Capriccio / Laune” in the dictionary “Aesthetic Basic Concepts”. He persisted in writing about the tragedy of the Enlightenment, a Schiller biography as narrow as it was concise, even after he had formally left the post of professor, and he was also reluctant to give up the poetics of the walk. Kurt Wölfel died on August 9 near Bonn. He was 94 years old.