Reinhard Lettau (10 September 1929, Erfurt – 17 June 1996, Karlsruhe) was a German-American writer.

Career

He was a professor of German Literature first at Smith College and then, from 1967 to 1991, at the University of California, San Diego. He was an active member of the Group 47. He gave incendiary speeches at the Free University of Berlin denouncing the Springer Press. He was thereupon expelled from East Germany because he was a foreigner—by that time, he carried an American passport. His provocative behavior continued in the US: In 1972, he was suspended from teaching, without pay, at UC San Diego after hitting a Marine Corps officer on the head with a rolled-up newspaper. Lettau objected to the Marines recruiting on campus. He returned to Germany in 1991 after German reunification. He received the War Blind Prize for radio plays in 1979, the Berlin Literature Prize in 1993, and the Bremen Literature Prize in 1995. He had studied German, philosophy, and literature in Heidelberg and at Harvard. His dissertation at Harvard in 1960 was titled "Utopie und Roman; Untersuchungen zur Form des deutschen utopischen Romans im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert." His advisor was Bernhard Blume. The thesis analyzed utopian novels in the 20th century. He later published on Marcuse. In addition to his academic writing, Lettau was "critically recognized as a major twentieth-century prose stylist." He was a member of the PEN-Centre in Germany, and of the Deutsche Akademie der Darstellenden Künste. He was Poet in Residence at the University of Essen (Germany) in the winter term 1979/1980. He married Gene Carter in 1954; they had three daughters, Karin (1957), Kevyn (1959), and Kathy (1965). They were divorced in 1968. He lived from 1965 in Berlin-Schöneberg together with Véronique Springer, the daughter of the Galerist Rudolf Springer. They were married in 1969 after moving to San Diego in 1967. They were divorced in 1972. His third wife was Dawn Teborski; they married in 1979 and returned to Berlin in 1991 after Lettau took early retirement at UC San Diego because of health problems. In 1996 he traveled to Karlsruhe for his mother's 90th birthday. He was hospitalized after a fall and died there of pneumonia. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery No. III of the congregations of Jerusalem's Church and New Church (Friedhof III der Jerusalems- und Neuen Kirchengemeinde) at Mehringdamm No. 21 in Berlin-Kreuzberg.

Books

His books include: