Péter Szondi (Hungarian: [ˈpeːtɛr ˈsondi]; 27 May 1929, Budapest – 18 October 1971, Berlin) was a celebrated literary scholar and philologist, originally from Hungary.

Biography

The grave of Szondi, his parents Leopold and Ilona "Lili" Livia, née Radványi (1902-1986), and his sister Vera (1928-1978), a medical doctor, at the Fluntern cemetery in Zurich.

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.^[1]

In 1965, Péter became a Professor at the Free University of Berlin, where he led the Institute for General and Comparative Literature. His fields were the history of literature and comparative literature.

He 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.^[2]

Works

• Über eine "Freie Universität". Suhrkamp, 1973
• Die Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels im 18. Jahrhundert. Suhrkamp, 1973
• Celan-Studien. Suhrkamp, 1972 = Celan Studies, trans. Susan Bernofsky with Harvey Mendelsohn, Stanford University Press, 2003. ISBN 9780804744027
• Hölderlin-Studien. Insel, 1967
• Satz und Gegensatz. Insel, 1964
• Der andere Pfeil. Insel, 1963
• Versuch über das Tragische. Insel, 1961
• Theorie des modernen Dramas. Suhrkamp, 1956
• "Hope in the Past: On Walter Benjamin", reprinted in Benjamin, W. (trans. Howard Eiland), Berlin Childhood Around 1900, 2006, Belknap Press [Harvard UP]. ISBN 0-674-02222-X

References

External links

• Peter Szondi and Critical Hermeneutics, an issue of Telos (140, Fall 2007)