"Human speech seems to have been encoded, sealed into formulaic structures, and pressed into service for mechanistic operations" ("Menschliche Rede scheint chiffriert worden zu sein, versiegelt in Formeln, hineingepreßt in mechanische Funktionen"), he once wrote.
[1][2][3] Gerhard Storz was born in Rottenacker, a village along the upper reaches of the Danube in the hills to the south west of Ulm.
[5] After the conclusion of his theatre career, in 1935 Storz moved to Schwäbisch Hall, where he took a position at the "Gymnasium bei St. Michael" (secondary school) as a teacher of German and Latin.
On 1 June 1933 Gerhard Storz became a member of the party sponsored Nazi Teachers' Association ("Nationalsozialistische Lehrerbund" / NSLB).
[2] Characteristically, for much of this time he also help a position as director of studies at the newly established teacher training academy housed in the former monastery on the Comburg (hill) on the north side of the town.
As Minister for Culture in a recently formed state Storz oversaw a major reform programme of the secondary schools.
He expanded the network of education colleges and involved himself in plans for the (re-)establishment, during the 1960s, of universities in Konstanz in Ulm.
[2] Between 1966 and 1972 he served as president of the Darmstadt-based German Academy for Language and Literature ("Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung") (of which he had been a member since its foundation in 1949).
Between 1948 and 1968 he collaborated with Fritz Martini, Friedrich Maurer and Robert Ulshöfer to produce the academic journal, "Der Deutschunterricht" (loosely: "Teaching German").
Between 1945 and 1948 he joined with Dolf Sternberger and Wilhelm E. Süskind to provide contributions to Die Wandlung (loosely "The Changeling") in a series which later appeared as a book under the title "From the Dictionary of Inhumanity" ("Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen"), analysing the changes and manipulations of the German language implemented by the National Socialists.