Still growing interest in hermeneutics notwithstanding, the texts that constitute its history, especially its “prehistory” prior to Schleiermacher, remain little known, because relatively inaccesible, to English readers. Peter Szondi's introduction to hermeneutics, with its attention to what eighteenth-century German hermeneutic scholars may still have to teach us, will help to remedy this situation.

Szondi was born in Budapest on May 27, 1929, to the well-known psychologist Leopold Szondi. The family fled to Switzerland in the 1930s. The young Szondi's studies, chiefly at the University of Zurich where he came under the influence of Emil Staiger, led in 1961 to a professorship at the Free University of Berlin. Soon thereafter he was appointed director of the university's Institute for General and Comparative Literature, a post he retained until his death, by his own hand, on October 18, 1971. In this capacity he welcomed scholars from Starobinski, Goldmann, and Bourdieu to Derrida, de Man, and Hartman, placing the Institute in the vanguard of poststructuralist ferment. His complex intellectual affiliations, which also included Lukács, Benjamin, and Adorno, are best pursued by consulting the special issue of boundary 2 (Volume XI, Number 3 [Spring 1983]) that grew out of a colloquium organized to honor Szondi's work in 1978.

Szondi's books include his dissertation, Theorie des modernen Dramas (1956), available in an English translation by Michael Hays {Theory of the Modern Drama [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987]), Versuch über das Tragische (1961), Hölderlin-Studien (1967), Celan-Studien (1972), and several volumes of essays, a selection of which has been translated by Harvey Mendelsohn (On Textual Understanding and Other Essays [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986]).