›Complicirte mannigfache Harmonie‹
Erinnerungen an Eberhard Lämmert
[‘Complex and Varied Harmony’: Remembering Eberhard Lämmert]

Eberhard Lämmert: literary scholar, university president, and political actor.  Five short and partly very personal texts paint a striking picture of Eberhard Lämmert’s life and work—and give, at the same time, a fascinating account of German (scholarly) history.

As a literary scholar and president of the Freie Universität Berlin, Lämmert became a political actor during the 1960s student protests. In his unforgotten speech at the Germanistentag in Munich, 1966, he revealed the structural imbrication of the discipline of German literary studies and National Socialism. Equally unforgettable was Lämmert’s appearance in front of a Berlin court in 1967, where his testimony led to the acquittal of Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Lämmert became the founding director of Berlin’s Zentrum für Literaturforschung (ZfL), which became a place of cooperation between West and East German scholars. As both an innovator and keeper of traditions, Lämmert adapted his literary research in accordance with the present. He understood storytelling as a universal cultural practice. The astute, liberal, cheerful, and empathetic contributions to this volume are an homage to a man and literary scholar who made history.