Helmut Lethen, influential cultural studies scholar, dies at 87

Germanist and cultural studies scholar Helmut Lethen has died at the age of 87. His publisher, Rowohlt Berlin, announced that Lethen passed away on Thursday, August 13, in Vienna.

Lethen gained significant recognition for his 1994 epoch study ‘Verhaltenslehren der Kälte’ (Lessons in the Behavior of Coldness), which examined how social habits of hardness were propagated during the Weimar Republic and the interwar period. He also authored the 2006 portrait of Gottfried Benn, ‘Der Sound der Väter’. In 2014, he received the Leipzig Book Fair Award in the non-fiction category for ‘Der Schatten des Fotografen’, a work exploring the war photography of Robert Capa.

Born in Mönchengladbach in 1939, Lethen held various academic positions, including teaching at the University of Utrecht from 1977 to 1996 and later holding a chair for Contemporary German Literature in Rostock. From 2007 to 2016, he directed the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna.