As the Rowohlt publishing house announced on Monday, the publicist and historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch died on Sunday, March 26, at the age of 81.
In his works, Schivelbusch dealt with mentality-historical constellations of the 20th century. “Die Zeit” called him a “master of cultural-historical research”.
After studying literature, sociology and philosophy in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, among others with Theodor W. Adorno and Peter Szondi and Hans Mayer, Schivelbusch, as he called it himself, embarked on a career as a private scholar.
In its “Story der Eisenbahnreise”, awarded the German Non-Fiction Book Prize, he combined the history of technology, sociology and psychoanalysis to show how the new means of transport established its own order of space and time War defeated, is considered a standard work. In 2021, the commemorative volume “The Other Side. Living and researching between New York and Berlin”.
Schivelbusch has received several awards for his research and writing, including the Heinrich Mann Prize from the Academy of Arts in Berlin, the Science Prize from the Aby Warburg Foundation and the Lessing Prize from the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.
