It is with deep sadness that the Department of German at the University of Michigan announces the passing of Professor Gerhard “Gerry” Dünnhaupt on November 17, 2024, in Toronto. A dedicated scholar, beloved teacher, and preeminent bibliographer of early modern German literature, Professor Dünnhaupt leaves behind an extraordinary legacy of scholarship, mentorship, and friendship. Below, we share an obituary honoring his life and many accomplishments.
Gerhard “Gerry” Dünnhaupt
15 August 1927 (Bernburg an der Saale) – 17 November 2024 (Toronto)
Gerhard Dünnhaupt, Gerry to his friends, was a Büchermensch, a book lover. He loved books as beautiful physical objects, he loved to read books, he loved to collect books, and he loved to produce and write books. Books also were the focus of his stellar academic career and of his engaging and successful academic teaching.
Gerry was born into a family of printers and newspaper publishers in Bernburg an der Saale (Anhalt). He received his Abitur in 1945 at the Fürstliches Ludwigs-Gymnasium in nearby Köthen. At the end of the War, he was conscripted as Luftwaffenhelfer—minors who were forced to serve as auxiliary staff of the German air defense. While entering the family business, he completed a typesetter apprenticeship at the Bauhaus in Dessau and earned his Meisterbrief (master certificate) as printer in Leipzig in 1949. He relocated to western Germany the same year when the partition of Germany became permanent; he worked in the publications department of the University of Gießen where he managed the print shop. In 1952, Gerry emigrated to Canada and settled in Toronto, a city that would remain his Wahlheimat for the rest of his life. He received a job offer as printer right away. He continued to work in printing and advertising for over a decade. In these early years, Gerry started to buy and collect early modern books, and his collection became highly regarded by scholars and other collectors.
In 1964, he decided to pursue academic studies in Italian and German literature at the University of Toronto, where he received his B.A. He earned his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1972 with a dissertation on the German translations and adaptations of the epics by Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto. The same year, he was offered a position as assistant professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, to teach German and Comparative Literature. In 1976, he accepted an appointment at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he was promptly promoted to full professor. He held guest professorships at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Cornell University, and University of Göttingen. He retired from the University of Michigan in 1992. For a few years, he maintained an appointment as adjunct professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In a conversation shortly before his death, Gerry joked that he had been a professor emeritus for much longer than he had been on active duty.
In spite of his relatively short academic career, his scholarly output was extraordinary. He authored countless articles and book reviews about early modern European literature. He often wrote about his native Principality of Anhalt, especially about the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft that was initially based in Köthen. In 1973, he published Diederich von dem Werder: Versuch einer Neuwertung seiner Hauptwerke, to this day the definitive monograph on this author. Subsequently, he published two reprint editions of texts by Diederich von dem Werder, both with substantial introductions. Gerry founded Rarissima Litterarum, a book series providing high-quality reprints of important but rare early modern German texts, and he edited eight volumes himself, mostly after his official retirement in 1992. This was a valuable project at a time when early modern texts were not yet available online in a digitized format. Furthermore, he published two Reclam editions of plays by Andreas Gryphius, Horribilicribrifax Teutsch and Absurda Comica, oder Herr Peter Squentz.
Gerry’s crowning achievement was the three-volume Bibliographisches Handbuch der Barockliteratur (1980–82). He identified the one hundred most important German authors of the seventeenth century and provided full descriptions of all their known works and editions, complete with listings of library holdings. He revised these personal bibliographies and expanded the project to include an additional one hundred writers in the six-volume second edition, entitled Personalbibliographien zu den Drucken des Barock (1990–93). On 4,500 pages, he gave detailed descriptions of around 10,000 books. Gerry spent many years visiting a large number of research libraries in Europe and North America to examine their holdings. By doing so, he established a vast global network of librarians and fellow scholars who were eager to assist him with his Herculean task. To this day, Gerry’s work is viewed as the key to assessing German literary production in the seventeenth century.
In recognition of Gerry’s accomplishments, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) awarded him the prestigious triennial Breslauer Prize for Bibliography in 1985. In 1990, he was elected as Fellow and Life Member of the Royal Society of Canada. He also was an honorary life member of the Modern Language Association of America. When the Renaissance Society of America met in Toronto in March 2019, many of his friends, colleagues, and students organized a series of panels in Gerry’s honor, with Gerry in attendance. Much to Gerry’s delight, the proceedings were edited by Mara R. Wade and published in 2023 as Collections and Books, Images and Texts: Early Modern German Cultures of the Book, a title that reflected on his life’s work.
One of his most influential publications was “Der barocke Eisberg: Überlegungen zur Erfassung des Schrifttums des 17. Jahrhunderts” (1980), where he argued that aside from a small number of canonical texts most books that were printed in the seventeenth century still were largely unknown. He also was one of the first to argue for investigating the libraries of German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire and adjacent states, territories no longer in then present-day Germany, thereby extending the purview of early modern literature. Helping to make this iceberg melt perhaps was Gerry’s most significant accomplishment. The detailed research included in his bibliographic handbook gave us a sense of the wealth of the extant literature and helped us gain access to it. More importantly, his six-volume Personalbibliographien became the backbone for the project simply called dünnhaupt digital. The aim of the project, which is housed in the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), was to digitize about 2,000 works from their holdings that were described by Gerry and to make them accessible to a large number of scholars and students. Thus Gerry’s book became the catalyst for a digital humanities project, which will ensure that Gerry will live on as “the Dünnhaupt.”
One of the highlights of his career was the three-day Martin Luther Quincentennial Conference that he organized at the University of Michigan in September 1983. Gerry’s extensive network allowed him to bring leading Reformation scholars to Ann Arbor where they gave memorable presentations and engaged in lively debates. He edited the proceedings and published the volume The Martin Luther Quincentennial in 1985.
Gerry had a large circle of friends, both inside and outside of academia, and he took time to cultivate these relationships. At Michigan, Gerry usually showed up at the department around nine or nine-thirty in the morning. He chatted with the office staff, drank coffee (although real coffee was only served at his home), went to teach his classes, took time to meet with students and to mentor them, and talked to his colleagues. Gerry always had a positive outlook—he never seemed to be in a hurry or in a bad mood. When asked how he got his work done, his simple answer was that he worked on his scholarly projects from four to eight in the morning, every day. This level of self-discipline allowed him to create an enormous body of work while being generous with his time to others.
Even after Gerry’s retirement, his intellectual curiosity never slowed down. He researched whatever caught his eye, particularly if it related to the early modern world, and gave public lectures highlighting his insights. He kept up with internet technology and performed a lot of research online. Furthermore, he authored and edited a large number of Wikipedia articles. Back in Toronto, he took a renewed interest in music and music performance. When he sold his substantial collection of Baroque books in 1996, he used the proceeds to establish a fellowship for graduate students in musicology at the University of Toronto, thus remaining an engaged patron of early modern studies in his Wahlheimat. Until the final weeks of his life, he loved to meet with friends to have stimulating conversations, as the accompanying portrait taken at the end of October 2024 indicates.
Gerry was an accomplished scholar, but also was a mentor, teacher, and friend to many of us. He knew how to live well, had a full and amazing life, and will be sorely missed.
Peter Hess, University of Texas at Austin
Mara R. Wade, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
