Rainer Nägele, Alfred C. and Martha Mohr Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature Emeritus passed away on May 12, 2022, at the age of 78.
Rainer Nägele studied at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and the University of Göttingen (West Germany) before receiving his Ph.D. in 1971 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was a faculty member at Yale from 2006 until his retirement in 2016. His many brilliant and innovative books and numerous essays, as well as his remarkable intellectual performances in the classroom, taught many generations of undergraduates and graduate students how to read, write and think. He made major contributions to the scholarship on countless seminal authors – such as Pindar, Sophocles, Hölderlin, Goethe, Keller, Nietzsche, Rilke, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Brecht, Trakl, Kafka, Celan, Artaud, Böll, Handke, Müller, Martin Walser, and on Freud, Lacan, and Benjamin. His last major book publications are Der andere Schauplatz (2013) and Darstellbarkeit (2008).
Professor Nägele will be dearly missed by his colleagues and students. A memorial event will be held in the Fall of 2022.