About philological cognition

Peter Szondi, the son of fate analyst Lipót Szondi, who is still better known than him in Hungary, was born in 1929 in Budapest. He went to school here until he was fifteen, then in 1944 the whole family was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Freed from there, he was able to emigrate to Switzerland. He completed his university studies here and also received his doctorate here as a student of Emil Staiger, then became a professor at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He is still considered the founder of comparative studies as a university study in Germany, even though he was only able to teach for a few years at the institute he founded. In 1971, he planned to return to Zurich, where he also won a chair, but he could no longer occupy it: he ended his life at the age of forty-two. Due to his early death, his oeuvre includes only a few volumes, a large part of which was completed with the publication of his university lectures. However, the generation of scholars following in his footsteps and his critics nevertheless agree that Szondi's oeuvre is not distorted, and - as Christoph König stated - the author has remained a leading figure in literary studies to this day.