J. P. Stern

Joseph Peter Maria Stern, FBA was a Czech-born British literary theorist and an authority on German literature.

Biography

Born into a Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia, he was educated in Prague, Vienna, at Barry County School in Glamorgan and at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he took his M.A. in 1947. During the war, he served in the Czechoslovak army in exile. He took up a lectureship at Bedford College, London, and then at Cambridge University in 1952, returning to St. John's.
He was Professor of German at University College London from 1972 to 1986. A prolific scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature, he wrote on Nietzsche, Kafka, Jünger, Rilke and Mann, and edited the series Landmarks in World Literature. One of his most influential works was On Realism. He was also known for his study Hitler: The Führer and the People, which was translated into several languages.
He married Sheila McMullan in 1944, having met her as a student in 1940.
He died in Cambridge on 18 November 1991 and was cremated on 25 November 1991 at Cambridge Crematorium, and his ashes were interred at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge. His wife's ashes, following her cremation on 29 November 2005, are also interred there.