WALTER HINDERER studied philosophy, history and German and English literature in Tübingen and Munich and wrote one of the first dissertations on Hermann Broch.  Before coming to Princeton in 1978 he taught at Universities in Pennsylvania, Colorado, California and Maryland.  He was a fellow at the following research institutions: 1976-77, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison; 1985-86, Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg), Berlin; 1995, Rosenzweig Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.  In 1995 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, in 1998 the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, and in 2006 the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and the Arts.

His research interests center on German literature, philosophy, history, and politics of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.  He has written extensively on German drama, poetry, literary criticism and theory, on rhetoric and political literature, and contributed numerous reviews, essays and articles for the feuilleton sections of the weekly “Die Zeit”, Hamburg, of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, Frankfurt, and the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, Munich.  He taught graduate courses on German Classicism, literary and theoretical discourses from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, Büchner and Kleist, German drama and poetry, Heine and Young Germany, and contemporary German literature.  He was a trustee of the American  Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, D.C. from 1995-2006; he was a member of the board of the Kurt Weill Foundation for  Music in New York from 1994 - 2012 ; and the Foundation for Research in Romanticism in Munich from 1992 -2012; he was President (1996-2001) and is a member of the executive committee of the International Erich Fried Society for Language and Literature in Vienna.  His publications include: Auftakte und Nachklaenge Romantischer Musik. Ed. by W.H., Wuerzburg, 2012.  Vom Gesetz des Widerspruchs. Über Heinrich von Kleist, Würzburg, 2011.  Friedrich Schiller und kein Ende, Würzburg, 2009.  Geschichte der politischen Lyrik in Deutschland.  Ed. by W.H., Würzburg, 2007.  Die deutsche Exzellenzinitiative and die amerikanische Eliteuniversität, Berlin 2007.  Friedrich Schiller und der Weg in die Moderne. Ed. by W.H., Würzburg, 2006.  Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik. Ed. by W.H., Würzburg, 2002.  Geschichte der deutschen Lyrik vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. by W.H., Würzburg, 2001.  Von der Idee des Menschen.  Über Friedrich Schiller, Würzburg, 1998.  Kleists Erzählungen. Interpretationen. Ed. by W.H., Stuttgart, 1998. Codierungen von Liebe in der Kunstperiode.  Ed. by W.H., Würzburg, 1997. Arbeit an der Gegenwart.  Zur deutschen Literatur nach 1945, Würzburg, 1994.  Über deutsche Literatur und Rede. Historische Interpretationen, München, 1981.  Der Mensch in der Geschichte. Ein Versuch über Schillers “Wallenstein”, Kronberg/Ts., 1980.  Büchner-Kommentar zum dichterischen Werk, München, 1977.