Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (June 28, 1928 – August 3, 2019), born in Hamburg, Germany, was an American philosopher and professor of German Studies and Humanities at Stanford University.https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?pid=193835038& ; Stanford German studies scholar Kurt Mueller-Vollmer dies at 91, Stanford News, Melissa de Witte, September 11, 2019: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/09/11/stanford-german-studies-scholar-kurt-mueller-vollmer-dies-91/ Mueller-Voller 2015 Curriculum Vitae, ; Mueller-Vollmer studied in Germany, France, Spain and the United States. He held a master's degree in American Studies from Brown University, and a doctorate in German Studies and Humanities from Stanford University, where he taught for over 40 years.Ibid. His major publications concentrate in the areas of Literary Criticism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Romantic and Comparative Literature, language theory, cultural transfer and translation studies.Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present. Edited with an Introduction and Notes. (New York: Continuum/Crossroad, 1985. XI, 380 pp.), jacket notes; Curriculum Vitae, ; Mueller-Vollmer made noteworthy scholarly contributions elucidating the theoretical and empirical linguistic work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, including the discovery of numerous manuscripts previously thought lost or otherwise unknown containing Humboldt's empirical studies of numerous languages from around the world.see: Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachwissenschaft. Ein kommentiertes Verzeichnis des sprachwissenschaftlichen Nachlasses. Mit einer Einleitung und zwei Anhängen (Paderborn, München, Wien, Zürich: F. Schöning Verlag, 1993)
Mueller-Vollmer was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2000. He was also bestowed with the Wilhelm-von-Humboldt-Foundation Award presented in a public ceremony at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, on June 22, 2007.
Life Early life Born in Hamburg, Germany, June 28, 1928, Mueller-Vollmer grew up in the cities of Cologne and Hamburg, Germany, where, in learning the local dialects of those cities, it was said he developed an early interest in and proficiency for languages and language study. This included a summer English language school on the Frisian island Wyk auf Foehr. Though the classes were cut off by the approach of World War II, they helped to set in motion Mueller-Vollmer’s early acquired proficiency in English.Obituaries: San Francisco Gate, Stanford University, supra.
Mueller-Vollmer and his family survived bombing attacks both in Hamburg and Cologne. Drafted out of high school into the German Army and compelled to serve in an anti-aircraft unit near Cologne, Mueller-Vollmer recounted how he managed to escape through the surrounding woods. Having memorized a map of the Cologne area, Mueller-Vollmer made his way to a small town inhabited by a sympathetic Pietistic religious group where the mayor prepared new identity papers for him. Mueller-Vollmer used these papers to help make his way through checkpoints to reach the invading Allied forces for whom he then served as a translator.Obituaries, supra, and as recounted to family members.
Education Following World War II Mueller-Vollmer completed his high school studies at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in Cologne, receiving the Scheffel Prize for the best Abitur (comprehensive final exam) essay in the city of Cologne Obituaries, Mueller-Vollmer Curriculum Vitae, ; He then attended the Albertus Magnus University of Cologne where he focused on history, philosophy, German and Romance languages, and became acquainted with renowned scholars and academicians in these fields including Bruno Liebrucks, Gottfried Martin, Karl-Heinz Volkmann-Schluck, Richard Alewyn, Fritz Schalk, and Johannes Hoffmeister.
In 1951-52 Mueller-Vollmer enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, attending lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Hyppolite, Gaston Bachelard, and Robert Minder. During the summer of 1952 Mueller-Vollmer traveled to Valladolid, Spain to study Spanish language and literature at the Colegio de Santa Cruz.
Following completion of his university studies in Cologne in 1953, Mueller-Vollmer received a Fulbright Fellowship to attend Brown University, where he focused on American Studies and philology. At Brown, under the guidance of the eminent historian of colonial America, Professor Edmund S. Morgan, Mueller-Vollmer received his Master’s Degree in American Studies.Obituaries, Mueller-Vollmer 1915 Curriculum Vitae, ; These studies with Professor Morgan helped lay the groundwork for Mueller-Vollmer’s future research on the transfer and contributions of German Romantic discourse and literature to early 19th century American literary culture and philosophy.Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, Transatlantic Crossings and Transformations: German-American Cultural Transfer from the 18th to the End of the 19th Century (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2014), p. 15.
From 1956-1958, Mueller-Vollmer received a Ford Foundation fellowship to continue his graduate studies in a newly conceived interdisciplinary graduate Ph.D. program in Humanities at Stanford University. Under the aegis of Professor Kurt F. Reinhardt - an émigré from Germany who had studied at the University of Freiburg-in-Breisgau under the philosopher-phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Mueller-Vollmer was awarded a Ph.D. in German Studies and Humanities in 1962.Obituaries, Mueller-Vollmer 2015 Curriculum Vitae, ; Mueller-Vollmer’s Ph.D. dissertation presented for the first time in English a critical exposition of the historian and hermeneutic philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey’s literary theories.Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, Toward a Phenomenological Theory of Literature: A Study of Wilhelm Dilthey's Poetik, (The Hague: Mouton, 1963).
Personal life Residency Following his studies in Providence, Rhode Island at Brown University, Mueller-Vollmer resided for the remainder of his life near Stanford University, first in Menlo Park, then in Palo Alto. Mueller-Vollmer often took interim residence, taught and traveled in Europe, residing especially in Hamburg and Goettingen, as well as in Paris, Berlin and Cologne.Obituaries, 2015 Curriculum Vitae, ;
Prompted by childhood memories of Nazi oppression and terror, Mueller-Vollmer had a visceral distrust of ideologies, propagandist tendencies (the abuse and malicious use of language), and authoritarian regimes. In transitioning to his new life in America and California, and following in the spirit of naturalists and romanticists, Mueller-Vollmer came to regard America, and California in particular, as an environment that encouraged free thought and expression.see "Unzeitgemässheit. Zur Struktur der Utopie bei Fichte, Marx und Nietzsche," in: Karl Marx und Friedrich Nietzsche: Acht Beiträge. Reinhold Grimm, Jost Hermand, Hrsg. (Königstein im Taunus: Athenaeum Verlag, 1978), 78-97. ; personal memoirs as related to family members and students.
Mueller-Vollmer was a linguist who, in addition to his native German language and various dialects such as Plattdeutsch and the Cologne dialect, spoke and wrote English with native fluency. His numerous publications, courses and public lectures were divided between German and English. As well, Mueller-Vollmer spoke and wrote in French and was conversant in Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Latin.Obituaries and Mueller-Vollmer 2015 Curriculum Vitae, ; ; Mueller-Vollmer bibliography.
Students and colleagues have attested to Mueller-Vollmer’s demanding standards of scholarship and critical thinking. He also writes poetry.Obituaries, supra; Festschrift: Poetik-Humboldt-Hermeneutik. Studien für Kurt Mueller-Vollmer zum 60.Geburtstag.Hrsg. von H. Mueller-Sievers und J. Trabant, Tübingen, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, 231pp.(Special Issue of Kodikas/Code Ars Semiotica. Vol.11, No. Jan/June 1988); Cora Lee Kluge, book review for Zu Hermeneutik, Literaturkritik und Sprachtheorie (On Hermeneutics, Theory of Literature and Language) (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018), Monatshefte, Vol 111, Number 4 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), p. 624.
Native Americans Mueller-Vollmer’s scholarship into Wilhelm von Humboldt’s research of North and South American native American languages, as well as the impact of 18th and 19th century missionaries on these languages, led Mueller-Vollmer, in taking a personal interest in the historical plight of Native Americans, to contribute to their charities Obituaries, supra; see "Die Visibilität der Zeichen und die Gewaltsamkeit des Übersetzens: Zu Augustins Hermeneutik und Sprachauffassung," in Zu Hermeneutik, Literaturkritik und Sprachtheorie, supra, p. 283.
German-American School During the 1980s and 1990s Mueller-Vollmer took an active role in establishing and maintaining a German-American private primary and secondary bilingual school established in the vicinity of Stanford University.Obituaries, supra.
Death He died at his home on August 3, 2019. He was survived by his wife, Patricia Ann Mueller-Vollmer and his two sons.
Teaching career Stanford University Beginning as an instructor in German in 1958, Mueller-Vollmer’s academic and teaching career at Stanford – along with guest professor locations in the United States and Europe - spanned over 50 years. He was appointed 1962-1964 as Assistant Professor of German, 1964-1967 as Associate Professor of German, 1967 until retirement in 1995 as Professor of German and Humanities.
Guest professorships Mueller-Vollmer also held a number of guest professorships both in the United States and Europe including at: the University of Hamburg (1962); at the University of Bonn (1976); at the University of Washington at Seattle (1983); at the Institute for Germanic Philology, Uniwertsytet Jagiellonski, Kraków, Poland (1985); as visiting scholar: "Center for Advanced Studies in Translation" at the Georg-August- Universität Göttingen, Germany (1993); at Göttingen as Senior Fulbright Guest Professor (1997); at Göttingen as Participant in Research Project of the "Center for the Advanced Study in the Internationality of National Literatures" at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen where he was responsible for the project "Madame de Staël in America" as part of a larger research undertaking: "Internationale Vernetzung: Personen, Medien und Institutionen als Vermittlungsinstanzen von Literatur" (1998-1999); further extended stays at Göttingen in 1998, 1999, 2000; at the University of California at Berkeley, Department of German (Spring, 2005, 2006).Mueller-Vollmer 2014 Curriculum Vitae, ;
Scholarship, research and writing career Fields of study Mueller-Vollmer’s scholarly work included: philosophy and phenomenology; German and European philosophy; the history of ideas; literary theory; philosophy of language; philosophical and literary hermeneutics (interpretation theory); poetics; German and European literature from the 18th and 19th centuries; history and methodologies of the humanities and human sciences; linguistics; translation and discourse theory; European and American Romanticism; American Transcendentalism and 19th century German-American cultural transfers and literary discourse; the internationality of literature; European modernism; modern poetry; and the philosophical and empirical work of Wilhelm von Humboldt. In his teaching and writing Mueller-Vollmer moved freely among these different areas.
Areas of private scholarship