Hans Robert Jauss

As a young soldier in the Second World War, Jauss spent two winters on the Russian Front in the SS (SS-Nr.

In November 1948 at Heidelberg, the twenty-seven-year-old Jauss, after postwar imprisonment, began studies in Romance philology, philosophy, history and Germanistik (German literature and linguistics).

In 1957, with the treatise Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Tierdichtung, he obtained his habilitation for Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg.

It was in these years (1959–1962) that Jauss, along with Erich Köhler, founded a series of medieval texts entitled Grundriß der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters (Outline of Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages).

In 1963, he also played a prominent role in establishing the research group "Poetik und Hermeneutik" with two other colleagues from Gießen (Hans Blumenberg and Clemens Heselhaus), along with Wolfgang Iser from Würzburg.

Working on numerous committees, Jauss was particularly involved with setting up the "subject area" (Fachbereiche) of literary studies (Literaturwissenschaft), an innovative structure at the time but soon to be emulated throughout Germany.

Five professors, surrendering the privileges of departmental chairmanship in their different language fields, organised themselves into a research group that soon became known internationally as "The Constance School": Wolfgang Iser (English), Wolfgang Preisendanz (German), Manfred Fuhrmann (Latin), Hans Robert Jauss (Romance), and Jurij Striedter (Slavic).

In 1995, Jauss' SS dossier was first published by the Romance scholar Earl Jeffrey Richards, as part of an evaluation of attacks by former Nazis on Ernst Robert Curtius.

In 2014, the University of Konstanz commissioned the historian Jens Westemeier to examine Jauss's political and war-time past, leading to its re-evaluation.