Robert Ludwig Kahn

Kahn was born as Ludwig Robert Kahn in Nuremberg, the second child of Beatrice (née Freudenthal)[1] and Gustav Kahn, a Jewish businessman.[2] He was educated at a Jewish school in Nuremberg from 1929 to 1933, then from 1933 to 1939 at the Höhere Israelitische Schule (later named after its founding director Ephraim Carlebach), the Jewish gymnasium in Leipzig.[3] The parents had moved to Leipzig, which had a large Jewish community and was located in "red Saxony", as life in Nuremberg was becoming increasingly unbearable for Jews. However, they were not free from Nazi persecution.[4] In 1938, Kahn's older sister Susan Freudenthal (née Gertrud Suse Kahn[5]) emigrated to the United States, aided by her uncle, Josef Freudenthal. Shortly after the November pogroms, the father was arrested and imprisoned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp[4] but released again in February 1939.[3]

The family attempted to escape from Germany, but plans to emigrate to the United States failed. In May 1939, Kahn was sent to England with a Kindertransport.[4] He attended Kendra Hall School in Croydon from 1939 to 1940 and West Ham Municipal College in 1940.[3] He was then interned in a camp on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien and sent on to a camp in Canada. He was able to take classes in this camp,[6] and passed the Junior and Senior Matriculations at McGill University in 1941 and 1942, respectively.[3] Around this time, he changed the order of his names, calling himself "Robert". He was taken in by a Jewish couple who gave him the opportunity to pursue university studies.[6] He studied at Dalhousie University and obtained his BA in 1944 and his MA (in history and philosophy) in 1945. His thesis topic was "Goethe and the French Revolution".[7] He was awarded the Avery Distinction and the Joseph Howe Poetry Award at Dalhousie.[3]

After the end of World War II, Kahn found out what had happened to his parents: Kahn's father died in March 1942, after his two sisters had been taken by the Nazis.[8] Kahn's mother was deported to Auschwitz in February 1943 and was killed there.[6]

From 1945 to 1948, Kahn studied German Literature and Philology at the University of Toronto,[3] and received a doctoral degree in German Literature in February 1950, with a thesis about Kotzebue.[9][10] His advisor was Hermann Boeschenstein.[3][8]

Kahn worked at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1948 to 1962, starting as Instructor (until 1950 Acting Instructor) of German Language and Literature, becoming Assistant Professor in 1955 and Associate Professor in 1960.[3] In 1961/1962, he held a fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for research at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach in Marbach am Neckar.[3][7] From 1962 until his death in 1970, Kahn was Professor of German at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he served as Chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages in 1963/64 and as Chairman of the Department of Germanics from 1964 until 1970,[3] when he was replaced after controversy about his leadership.[11] Kahn took his own life on March 22, 1970,[3] on his ranch[11] in Round Top, Texas,[3] shortly after the beginning of spring break.[11] Kahn's suicide has been blamed on defamation by other faculty members[1] and connected to survivor guilt.[8]

In 1951, Kahn married Lieselotte Margarete Kupfer (1921-2013),[12] who became known as Lisa Kahn, also a poet and scholar of German studies. They had two children: Peter G. Kahn (born 1953)[1] and Beatrice Margarete Kahn (born 1959).[12] Robert Kahn became a US citizen in 1956,[1] Lisa in 1958.[12]

Some of Kahn's poems were published during his lifetime in German and American magazines, and his nürnberg wunderschöne stadt. ein zyklus, which has been described as reminiscent of Paul Celan's Todesfuge,[13] was broadcast on the German radio station Saarländischer Rundfunk in 1968.[14] Kahn was invited to the 1966 meeting of the Group 47 in Princeton[15] (that made Peter Handke famous)[16] and read some of his poems there. Other authors reading at this meeting included Erich Fried, Günter Grass, and Walter Jens.[17] A collected edition of Kahn's poems, Tonlose Lieder[18] (Songs without music) edited by Lisa and illustrated by Peter Kahn, was published in 1978.[13] Besides his own poetry in German, Kahn also translated poems of Nelly Sachs into English.[15]

The Society for Contemporary American Literature in German's annual poetry prize has been named after Robert L. Kahn from 1988 to 2013[19] and is now called the Lisa & Robert Kahn Prize for Poetry in German.[20]

Kahn's main research topics were German literature in the age of Goethe and Romanticism.[7] He published articles about authors such as Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis and about themes like the concept of romanticism.[14] He edited the first volume of the East German Akademie-Verlag's edition of the works of Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World,[21][14] and contributed to the fourth volume, which included related content.[22] At the time of his death, he was contributing to Ernst Behler's edition of Friedrich Schlegel's letters.[14]