Hans Reiss, who died on April 2 at age 97, outshone the dry facts of his vita as greatly as the 373 pages of his lively autobiography (2009) outweigh his entry in Wikipedia. Though confined in recent years to a wheelchair in the Heidelberg apartment that he shared with his wife Linda, a gifted artist, he carried on a spirited correspondence with his many friends in Germany and abroad; and his conversation was never less than animated, whether with colleagues on intellectual topics or with my ten-year-old granddaughter, whom he charmed.
Hans’s autobiography (Erinnerungen aus 85 Jahren), which amounts to a survey of international Germanistics over the past fifty years and includes conversations with major figures from European political, religious, and intellectual life, describes his flight in 1939 at age sixteen from his parents’ home in Mannheim to Ireland, where he studied literature at Trinity College Dublin. With his Ph.D. in German he taught first at Trinity College and then at the London School of Economics and the University of London. In 1958 he moved to McGill University in Montreal and later, from 1965 until his retirement in 1988, chaired the German Department at the University of Bristol. Active during his retirement years as a guest professor and lecturer at some 80 universities, he and Linda moved in 2009 to Heidelberg, where he spent his final years.
While highly regarded as a Goethe scholar—his Goethe’s Novels (1969, 1971) was voted “Outstanding Book of the Year 1972”, and in 1997 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Goethe-Gesellschaft Weimar—his interests embraced a much larger intellectual range with influential books on Kant’s Political Writings (1970), aesthetics, political romanticism, and modern writers from Nietzsche to Brecht: all written in the same clear and often witty style as his conversation.
Hans will be sorely missed by many—not only as a dear and loyal friend and supportive colleague but also as a representative of that dwindling group of European intellectuals with a broad grasp of both detail and context.
Theodore Ziolkowski