Kurt Mueller-Vollmer Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

He died at his home on August 3, 2019. He was survived by his wife, Patricia Ann Mueller-Vollmer and his two sons.

Mueller-Vollmer’s scholarship into Wilhelm von Humboldt’s research of North and South American native American languages, as well as the impact of 18th and 19th century missionaries on these languages, led Mueller-Vollmer, in taking a personal interest in the historical plight of Native Americans, to contribute to their charities

Mueller-Vollmer’s scholarly work included: philosophy and phenomenology; German and European philosophy; the history of ideas; literary theory; philosophy of language; philosophical and literary hermeneutics (interpretation theory); poetics; German and European literature from the 18th and 19th centuries; history and methodologies of the humanities and human sciences; linguistics; translation and discourse theory; European and American Romanticism; American Transcendentalism and 19th century German-American cultural transfers and literary discourse; the internationality of literature; European modernism; modern poetry; and the philosophical and empirical work of Wilhelm von Humboldt. In his teaching and writing Mueller-Vollmer moved freely among these different areas.

Mueller-Vollmer also critiqued such diverse thinkers and schools as St. Augustine, 18th century German Missionaries in America, G. W. F. Hegel, K. Marx and F. Nietzsche, Ferdinand de Saussure, H-G. Gadamer, K-O. Apel and J. Habermas, and various schools of contemporary literary criticism such as New Criticism, Formalism, Reception Theory, Structuralism and Postmodernism.

In Transatlantic Crossings and Transformations: German-American Cultural Transfer from the 18th to the End of the 19th Century, Mueller-Vollmer presents a study of the process of German-American cultural transfer during the 18th and 19th centuries and the role this process played in the formation of an American national and cultural identity, to which the New England Transcendentalists significantly contributed.

In 2014, Mueller-Vollmer published Transatlantic Crossings and Transformations: German-American Cultural Transfer from the 18th to the End of the 19th Century. This work, including a focus on aspects of translation and discourse theory and New England Transcendentalism, studies eighteenth and nineteenth century German-American cultural transfers which, according to Mueller-Vollmer, played an important part in the formation of earlier American national and cultural identity.

Mueller-Vollmer was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2000. He was also bestowed with the Wilhelm-von-Humboldt-Foundation Award presented in a public ceremony at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, on June 22, 2007.

As an example, in his 1996 Stanford seminar, Vico’s New Science: Introduction to the Humanities, Mueller-Vollmer, using Vico’s New Science (Nueva Scienzia) as a starting point, proceeded to regard the humanities as an “other,” and – not unlike formulating hypotheses or approaches in the sciences – to advance toward an understanding based on what pre-knowledge one might already possess. A threshold issue would be how to bridge the gap between modern and ancient world views such as prevailed in Homer’s era.

The introductory volume for this series, published in 1993, incorporates Mueller-Vollmer’s catalogues and provides an overview and description of Humboldt’s linguistic manuscripts and papers, and diverse grammatical and other empirical studies Humboldt produced for languages in Asia, Europe and the Americas. These include manuscripts and other papers located by Mueller-Vollmer’s searches. In this volume Mueller-Vollmer also recounts major aspects of the search for these manuscripts.

In a 1991 lecture on his research into recovering Wilhelm von Humboldt’s lost linguistic research manuscripts, Mueller-Vollmer noted that human studies characteristically involve the relationship between the establishment of fact on the one hand, and the task of interpretation and reconstruction on the other.

During the 1980s and 1990s Mueller-Vollmer took an active role in establishing and maintaining a German-American private primary and secondary bilingual school established in the vicinity of Stanford University.

Mueller-Vollmer also held a number of guest professorships both in the United States and Europe including at: the University of Hamburg (1962); at the University of Bonn (1976); at the University of Washington at Seattle (1983); at the Institute for Germanic Philology, Uniwertsytet Jagiellonski, Kraków, Poland (1985); as visiting scholar: “Center for Advanced Studies in Translation” at the Georg-August- Universität Göttingen, Germany (1993); at Göttingen as Senior Fulbright Guest Professor (1997); at Göttingen as Participant in Research Project of the “Center for the Advanced Study in the Internationality of National Literatures” at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen where he was responsible for the project “Madame de Staël in America” as part of a larger research undertaking: “Internationale Vernetzung: Personen, Medien und Institutionen als Vermittlungsinstanzen von Literatur” (1998-1999); further extended stays at Göttingen in 1998, 1999, 2000; at the University of California at Berkeley, Department of German (Spring, 2005, 2006).

Beginning as an instructor in German in 1958, Mueller-Vollmer’s academic and teaching career at Stanford – along with guest professor locations in the United States and Europe – spanned over 50 years. He was appointed 1962-1964 as Assistant Professor of German, 1964-1967 as Associate Professor of German, 1967 until retirement in 1995 as Professor of German and Humanities.

From 1956-1958, Mueller-Vollmer received a Ford Foundation fellowship to continue his graduate studies in a newly conceived interdisciplinary graduate Ph.D. program in Humanities at Stanford University. Under the aegis of Professor Kurt F. Reinhardt – an émigré from Germany who had studied at the University of Freiburg-in-Breisgau under the philosopher-phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Mueller-Vollmer was awarded a Ph.D. in German Studies and Humanities in 1962. Mueller-Vollmer’s Ph.D. dissertation presented for the first time in English a critical exposition of the historian and hermeneutic philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey’s literary theories.

Following completion of his university studies in Cologne in 1953, Mueller-Vollmer received a Fulbright Fellowship to attend Brown University, where he focused on American Studies and philology. At Brown, under the guidance of the eminent historian of colonial America, Professor Edmund S. Morgan, Mueller-Vollmer received his Master’s Degree in American Studies. These studies with Professor Morgan helped lay the groundwork for Mueller-Vollmer’s future research on the transfer and contributions of German Romantic discourse and literature to early 19th century American literary culture and philosophy.

In 1951-52 Mueller-Vollmer enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, attending lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Hyppolite, Gaston Bachelard, and Robert Minder. During the summer of 1952 Mueller-Vollmer traveled to Valladolid, Spain to study Spanish language and literature at the Colegio de Santa Cruz.

Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (June 28, 1928 – August 3, 2019), born in Hamburg, Germany, was an American philosopher and professor of German Studies and Humanities at Stanford University. Mueller-Vollmer studied in Germany, France, Spain and the United States. He held a master’s degree in American Studies from Brown University, and a doctorate in German Studies and Humanities from Stanford University, where he taught for over 40 years. His major publications concentrate in the areas of Literary Criticism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Romantic and Comparative Literature, language theory, cultural transfer and translation studies. Mueller-Vollmer made noteworthy scholarly contributions elucidating the theoretical and empirical linguistic work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, including the discovery of numerous manuscripts previously thought lost or otherwise unknown containing Humboldt’s empirical studies of numerous languages from around the world.

Born in Hamburg, Germany, June 28, 1928, Mueller-Vollmer grew up in the cities of Cologne and Hamburg, Germany, where, in learning the local dialects of those cities, it was said he developed an early interest in and proficiency for languages and language study. This included a summer English language school on the Frisian island Wyk auf Foehr. Though the classes were cut off by the approach of World War II, they helped to set in motion Mueller-Vollmer’s early acquired proficiency in English.

Together with Professor Armin Paul Frank, Mueller-Vollmer authored a volume of studies on the internationality of literature in British America and the United States from the 1770s to the 1850s that takes into account both cross-Atlantic and inter-American literary transfers and transformations. These studies discuss how the Americanization of literature written in English occurred whereby America’s emerging national literature became different from but still connected to European counterparts, mostly British and German. As well, the studies note that many Anglo-American writers, including the Transcendentalists, R. W. Emerson for example, drew inspiration from German Romantic authors and their sources.