Egon Schwarz is Professor Emeritus of German and Rosa May Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Washington University, where he he taught for 32 years. He is an expert on 19th and 20th century German literature and has made important contributions to the study of German literary figures such as poet Rainer Marie Rilke and novelist Herman Hesse. His book Verbannung (1964) was the first major study of the literary exiles who left Germany because of Hitler's regime, and his autobiography, No Time for Eichendorff (1979), details Schwarz's life in this hemisphere after he and his parents were forced to flee from Europe during World War II.
He approaches literature from a historical perspective, studying history's influence on literary works as well as the influence of an audience on the meaning of a work. This approach was evident in the 1970 publication of an article on why young Americans during the 1960s elevated German author Herman Hesse to the status of cult hero. Schwarz argued that Americans discovered aspects of Hesse's work that had gone unnoticed by German scholars and the German reading public. In approaching the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in his book, Stifled Protest: Politics and Poetry in the Work of Rainer Maria Rilke (1972), Schwarz created an ongoing controversy in Germany and Switzerland over his thesis that the mystical poetry of Rilke was influenced by the times in which the poet lived.
Schwarz, a native of Vienna, emigrated to South Ameica in the 1940s and subsequently moved to the U.S., where he received his bachelor's and master's degree from Ohio State University in 1950 and 1951 respectively and his doctorate in German literature from the University of Washington in 1954. He taught at Harvard University for seven years before joining the Washington University faculty in 1961. Schwarz retired from teaching in 1993.
Return to Past Assembly Series Speakers
Return to Washington University's Assembly Series Home Page