Alois Wolf

Alois Wolf was born in Micheldorf in Oberösterreich, Austria on 5 September 1939. He studied German and English at the universities of Innsbruck and Vienna, and received his Ph.D. at Innsbruck in 1953 with a thesis on the Middle High German author Gottfried von Strassburg.

Wolf subsequently studied Old Norse, and lectured from 1955 to 1959 at the universities of Hull, Strasbourg, Innsbruck and Salzburg. He completed his habilitation at Salzburg in March 1965 with a thesis on Medieval German literature. He was subsequently a professor at the universities of Münster and Kiel. From 1973 to 1994, Wolf was Professor of German Philology at the University of Freiburg. During this time he held visiting professorships at the universities of Wisconsin–Madison and Fribourg.

Wolf specialized in Germanic studies. He received the Theodor Körner Prize in 1961, the Kulturpreis des Landes Oberösterreich in 1996, and was a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He was married and had two children.

Wolf retired from the University of Freiburg in 1994. He died in Freiburg on 1 November 2020.

• Rudolf Simek