Professor Emeritus Walter Hinderer to Receive Golden Goethe Medal

Walter Hinderer will receive the Golden Goethe Medal, which has been given since 1910 as the highest honor of the Goethe-Gesellschaft, at a public ceremony on May 28th at the National Theater in Weimar. Previous recipients of the Golden Goethe Medal include Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Lew Kopelew, and Victor Lange, who taught at Princeton from 1957 to 1977. Hinderer joined the faculty of the German Department at Princeton in 1978. He is one of the premier scholars of the Goethezeit. One of his areas of expertise is the so-called Weimarer Musenhof, founded by Anna Amalia and frequented by figures such as Goethe, Wieland, Herder, and Schiller.

Besides teaching at Princeton, Hinderer was a fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1976–1977), the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (also Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin) (1985–1986), and the Rosenzweig Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1995).

Hinderer has been the recipient of a number of other highly distinguished awards, including the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1995), the Alexander von Humboldt Prize (1998) and the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art (2006).

84. Hauptversammlung der Goethe-Gesellschaft - Programm (http://www.goethe-gesellschaft.de/hauptversammlung.html)