What is the epic preterite?

Käte Hamburger and Universität Stuttgart

Born in Hamburg into a bourgeois family, Hamburger was among the first generation of women in Germany to be able to study at university properly. In 1928 she went to Berlin and became the private assistant of Paul Hofmann (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Berlin University). As a Jew, she fled from National Socialist Germany in 1933 and spent 22 years in exile in Sweden, where she worked as a teacher and author.

At a conference in Berlin on Thomas Mann in 1956, she was invited by Fritz Martini, then Full Professor of Literature and Aesthetics at Stuttgart, to come to Stuttgart College of Technology. At first she was involved in the so-called "educational subjects" and the General Studies programme, but soon enhanced the reputation of the College of Technology through her excellent lectures and seminars, and supported the expansion of the humanities.

Thus from 1957 to 1977 she worked as a professor at Stuttgart, impressing both student and non-student audiences with her precise thinking and conceptual precision, as well as with her knowledge of a broad spectrum of European literature. As a philosopher and scholar of aesthetics she focussed on those authors who had written philosophical works or at least had been influenced by philosophy, such as Schiller, Novalis, Jean Paul, Sartre and Rilke, whose work she saw as poetic philosophy.