Bernd Seidensticker

Bernd Seidensticker is a German classical scholar, known chiefly for his work on Greek tragedy.

Biography

Seidensticker was born in 1939 in Hirschberg im Riesengebirge, a town in Silesia which is now Jelenia Góra in southwestern Poland.
After being educated at the Athenaeum Stade in Lower Saxony, Seidensticker studied classical philology and German at the University of Tübingen and the University of Hamburg, under professors such as Hartmut Erbse, Wolfgang Schadewaldt and Bruno Snell. In 1965, he passed the Staatsexamen and became an assistant lecturer at the University of Hamburg. He obtained his doctorate at Hamburg in 1968, with a thesis written under the supervision of. This thesis, which concerns stichomythia and other forms of compressed dialogue in the tragedies of the Roman playwright Seneca, was then published and widely reviewed, including outside Germany.
In 1973–1974, Seidensticker held a junior fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, D.C. In 1978, he obtained his habilitation with a thesis on comic and humorous elements in Greek tragedy: this was also published as a book and widely reviewed. One section of this book, on comic elements in Euripides' Bacchae, was also published separately in an English version in the American Journal of Philology. Seidensticker was then appointed professor at Hamburg in 1980, before becoming professor at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1987.
In 1989, Seidensticker held a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, and he also held guest professorships at the University of Texas at Austin, at the University of California, Berkeley, at Harvard University, and at the University of Michigan. In 1993 he was elected a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and in 1999 he was elected a corresponding member of the interdisciplinary . He served from 1995 to 1997 as chair of the, and then from 1997 to 1999 as its vice-chair. He served for many years as editor of the journal .
He retired from his professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin in March 2004.