Ehrhard Bahr

Ted (Ehrhard) Bahr, an emeritus professor in Germanic Languages, passed away peacefully in his sleep on April 5, 2020.  He was 87 years old. He was an active member of the department for 47 years.

Professor Bahr received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and was a member of the UCLA faculty since 1966. He was an internationally distinguished expert on Goethe, and specialized not only in 18th- century German Literature, but also in 20th-century literature and Critical Theory. Professor Bahr published over 300 scholarly articles and reviews, as well as books on Goethe, the Marxist theoretician Georg Lukács, the philosopher Ernst Bloch, and the poet Nelly Sachs. He also produced editions of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels (1982) and a three-volume history of German literature (1987-88). His co-edited volume on the French Revolution, The Internalized Revolution, appeared in 1992. He was a past President of the Interdisciplinary German Studies Association and of the Goethe Society of North America.

An additional special interest of Ted Bahr’s is German exile culture in Los Angeles between 1933 and 1955. Besides authoring scholarly studies in this area, he served as a consultant to the exhibition “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, and at the Altes Museum in Berlin. Professor Bahr was also a consultant for the exhibition Exiles and Émigrés at LACMA in 1997.

Professor Bahr co-edited and authored “The Internalized Revolution: German Reactions to the French Revolution, 1789-1989”, which was re-issued by Routledge (London, 2016). He wrote two chapters in a book on the “Faust Tradition,” published by Purdue University Press in 2016: “The Chapbook of Doctor Faustus as Source and Model,” and “Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus as Political Document.” His book “Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles” remains an academic bestseller.