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New Arnold Heidsieck Scholarship Announced

American Friends of Bucerius and the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius are pleased to announce a new scholarship will be founded, at the behest of the late Professor Arnold Heidsieck, to give students from German universities the opportunity to study abroad in the United States.

Starting in 2014 the scholarship will be used to support living and travel expenses for undergraduate students (Arnold Heidsieck Scholars) from German universities who wish to spend a year studying at an American university. Application details and deadlines will be posted on the ZEIT-Stiftung website shortly.

 

About Arnold Heidsieck

Arnold Heidsieck was a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (USC) and a preeminent scholar in German and European intellectual history and literature; he particularly focused on Jewish Prague-born 20th-century writer Franz Kafka in his work. Heidsieck’s seminal book, The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka’s Fictions: Philosophy, Law and Religion (Camden House, 1994), illustrates how the modernist innovations in Kafka’s fiction were formed by nonliterary influences in the areas of cognitive psychology, philosophy, jurisprudence, and theology. Among many papers studying Holocaust literature and memory, Heidsieck also wrote about Jakob Littner’s, Journey Through the Night, examining how the eyewitness account of a Holocaust survivor had been published as fiction for some five decades until finally being reissued as a memoir in 2000.

One of eight children, Heidsieck was born in Leipzig, Germany, on February 20, 1937, and grew up in Breslau, now Wrocław, Poland. He studied theology at the University of Tübingen before earning his Ph.D. in 1966 at the Free University of Berlin, where he studied under German literary scholar Wilhelm Emerich. In 1967, Heidsieck came to the United States to teach languages and literature at New York University, where he stayed for seven years before teaching for a short time at Stanford University. He joined USC in 1975 and later served as chair of the USC Department of German.

Professor Heidsieck died in Venice, California in September 2009 at the age of 72.