Hans Egon Holthusen

Who was Hans Egon Holthusen?

Hans Egon Holthusen was a German lyric poet, essayist, and literary scholar.

Holthusen was born in Rendsburg the Province of Schleswig-Holstein, the son of a Protestant clergyman. He studied German philology, history, and philosophy at the universities of Tübingen, Berlin, and Munich, gaining reputation as a Rilke scholar with the publication of his Rilkes Sonette an Orpheus: Versuch einer Interpretation in 1937, at the age of 24.

Holthusen was a member of the SS and of the Nazi Party. During the Second World War, between 1939 and 1944, he served in the German army. In the early 1960s Holthusen worked at the Goethe-Institut in New York City, subsequently obtaining a professorship at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, a post which he held until 1981. In 1960, Mascha Kaléko refused the Berlin Theodor Fontane Price because Holthusen was a jury member.

Holthusen died in Munich.

There exists an unpublished 233-page English-language biography covering the first sixty-seven years of his life or so; a comprehensive bibliography of his works came out posthumously in 2000. His personal papers are preserved at the Library of the University of Hildesheim in Lower Saxony.