Heinz Schlaffer explained a few years ago that the university was one of the best ideas of German intellectuals in the 18th century. Well into the 19th century and perhaps even longer, it performed tasks that in other countries the courts, the aristocracy or the metropolises would have fulfilled: it was the place where the educational history of the individual and the bourgeois elite took place have completed. “It’s no coincidence,” says Schlaffer, “that Goethe’s ‘Faust’ is considered the main work of German literature: his hero is a professor, his world – even if he tries to escape it – the university. Its pathos extends to the student movement.” The pathos also extended beyond that. Because Heinz Schlaffer was a professor himself. At the youthful, heroic age of 32, he received a chair in modern German literature at the University of Marburg. Shortly afterwards he published a book called “The Citizen as Hero” (1973), which became a basic text in the humanities, which were often inspired by Marxism at the time: it told about a world in which people write about heroes, while themselves talk about a fixed one Employment dreams.
Obituary for Heinz Schlaffer – Culture
