Péter Szondi


Péter Szondi was a celebrated literary scholar and philologist, originally from Hungary.

Biography

Szondi's father was the Hungarian-Jewish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Léopold Szondi, who settled in Switzerland after his 1944 release after five months in Bergen-Belsen.
From 1965 onwards, Péter Szondi was full professor and director of the newly founded Seminar for General and Comparative Literature at the Free University of Berlin, the first comparative literature institute in the Federal Republic. He was also a visiting professor at Princeton and Jerusalem. Szondi contributed significantly to the internationalization of literary studies, which had not been seen in Germany since 1933. He turned his back on national philologies and opened the humanities to European literature. Guests at his institute included scholars and poets who were friends of his, such as Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem, René Wellek, Bernhard Böschenstein, Jean Starobinski, Jean Bollack, and Jacques Derrida. Szondi's works have been translated into several languages.
Péter Szondi committed suicide in 1971 by drowning himself in the Halensee in Berlin on 18 October, leaving unfinished his book about the work of his friend Paul Celan, who had killed himself the year before.

Works

Über eine "Freie Universität". Suhrkamp, 1973Die Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels im 18. Jahrhundert. Suhrkamp, 1973Celan-Studien. Suhrkamp, 1972 = Celan Studies, trans. Susan Bernofsky with Harvey Mendelsohn, Stanford University Press, 2003. Hölderlin-Studien. Insel, 1967Satz und Gegensatz. Insel, 1964Der andere Pfeil. Insel, 1963Versuch über das Tragische. Insel, 1961Theorie des modernen Dramas. Suhrkamp, 1956