Siegbert Salomon Prawer (15 February 1925 – 5 April 2012) was Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.

Life and works

Prawer was born on 15 February 1925 in Cologne, Germany, to Jewish parents Marcus and Eleanora (Cohn) Prawer. Marcus was a lawyer from Poland and Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's largest synagogue. His sister Ruth was born in 1927. The family fled the Nazi regime in 1939, emigrating to Britain. Educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and Jesus College, Cambridge, he was lecturer at the University of Birmingham from 1948 to 1963, Professor of German at Westfield College, London, from 1964, and became Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford in 1969. He was awarded his PhD by Birmingham University in 1953 (PhD, University of Birmingham, Department of German, 1953, 'A critical analysis of 24 consecutive poems from Heine's Romanzero'). He was a Fellow (then an Honorary Fellow) of Queen's College, Oxford, and an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He had academic interests in German poetry and lieder, Romantic German literature, especially E. T. A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine, comparative literature and also in film, particularly horror films. His sister was the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. He made a cameo appearance in the Merchant-Ivory film Howards End (for which his sister wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay). Prawer died on 5 April 2012 in Oxford, England.

Publications