Walter Höllerer

Walter Höllerer (19 December 1922 – 20 May 2003) was a German writer, literary critic, and literature academic. He was professor of literary studies at the Technical University of Berlin from 1959 to 1988. Höllerer was a member of the Group 47, founder of the German literary magazine Akzente (1953) and the Literary Colloquium of Berlin (1963). Walter Höllerer was born in Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Bavaria. He joined the Wehrmacht and became a soldier in 1942 during the Second World War. After 1945 he studied philology, philosophy, history, German studies, and comparative literature at the Universities of Erlangen–Nuremberg, Göttingen, and Heidelberg; in 1949 he earned a Doctor title in Gottfried Keller School. He worked as a lecturer assistant from 1954 to 1958 at the Goethe University Frankfurt. In 1954, he attended regular sessions with the 47, which was a group of young German authors who spoke about post-war Germany from the west BRD. During the early 1960s he moderated literature broadcasts on a free broadcasting channel of Berlin. From 1959 to his retirement in 1988 he was a professor of literary studies at the Technical University of Berlin. Meanwhile, he looked and researched a lot of professors from the United States. During his research and work he published poems and novels, and put together critical statements for other literature works. In 1954 Höllerer put together the bimonthly literary magazine Akzente, one of the most important literature forums in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1961 Höllerer published the newspaper Sprache im technischen Zeitalter ("Language in the Age of Technology"), in 1963 he founded the Literary Colloquium of Berlin. Through his hard work as a publisher and critic and a professor at TU Berlin he helped with the era of literature. In 1965 Höllerer married a photographer from Mangoldt, Renate, she previously had two sons. In 1977 he founded literary archives in Sulzbach-Rosenberg, which he then embedded the magazine Akzente into the archives.