In Memoriam: Wolfgang Nehring

Ereignisse sind die Wellen, die den Geist bedrohen, aber auch tragen.

—Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Wolfgang Nehring was my Doktorvater. The term has now become somewhat antiquated in the digital/virtual world, but his role in my academic upbringing could not be called anything else. It was full of father-son reflections, tensions, and, ultimately, pride. After I completed my doctorate at ucla, our intellectual relationship became distant. Wolfgang was not given to sentimentality, and he let time have its way. Yet, when we would meet again, after a few years, no time seemed to have passed—we began conversations where they had seemingly left off, debates on our authors and our work would reach a point where they would promise another reunion, another few years, another debate. And so on.

His magnificent expertise in the culture of the Viennese fin-de-siècle, bis in die Fingespitzen as one might hyperbolize in German, was both an extension of and motivation for this intellectual gentleman. His contemplative manner showed his students what the dignity of our calling could still be. Yet he was completely contemporary and open-minded, allowing me and others uncommon freedom to plot truly personal routes in our doctoral studies. One of Wolfgang’s favorite writers, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, had historically admired the work of my dissertation subject Alexander Lernet-Holenia, a last representative of the Jung Wien movement. Yet Lernet-Holenia had faded from his once great popularity and had fallen out of the canon when I began to research his works in the late 1980s. Nevertheless, Wolfgang defended and supported my choice, as I utilized the amazing tools he had given me to make my academic statements. He honored me by also writing on the author’s work, as if he were preparing academia for the planned reemergence of Lernet-Holenia through my dissertation. Within five years of putting fingers to my very first computer keyboard, I had a published book, and soon after, the Internationale Alexander Lernet-Holenia Gesellschaft came into being in Vienna. He was this generous with all his doctoral students, and he never forgot that our individual intellectual personalities required the room to learn how to walk and then run and even to fall.

But my association with Wolfgang began much earlier than this. His introductory course on German Romanticism, his other specialization, was the first I took when I re-enrolled at ucla to continue my undergraduate studies, which I had interrupted several years earlier to pursue an acting career. I subsequently changed my major and found self-actualization in the worlds that Wolfgang opened for me, but it was only much later that I comprehended his actual importance to German and Austrian Studies.

Wolfgang studied German-language and classical literature and philosophy in Bonn, Tübingen, and Vienna. As professor in the Germanic Languages Department at ucla (and having taught at Bonn University and Boston College), Wolfgang held a particular place among Germanophone scholars in his time. He warned against becoming a methodological ideologue and represented an enlightened pragmatism in his research and teaching: “Since I dislike all kinds of dogmatism, I do not prefer any particular approach to literary analysis. I believe that the methodology must be chosen and adjusted in response to the individual text.” Wolfgang stood by this principle and, as he mentored students who, for example, resolutely embraced Deconstruction, Feminism, Postmodernism, New Historicism and other theories, also gave them the courage to explore and read the text, the film, the world with fresh eyes. I was often awed by his cool and always honest, very honest judgments, and his ease in admitting that education was always a two-way street and that he had learned from his students.

Many years later, I hoped to thank him for the courage he had helped me find and the knowledge with which he had let me be defiant by coediting a book on Hofmannsthal’s play Der Schwierige. He said nothing about it. He did not have to. A true Doktorvater is part father, and therefore even important things can remain unsaid, because there is trust and concern and appreciation...