Ottmar Ette (born 14 December 1956 in Zell am Harmersbach, Black Forest, Germany) is Professor of Romance languages and Comparative literature at University of Potsdam.
In 1990, Ottmar Ette completed his dissertation at University of Freiburg on the Spanish-American modernist and Cuban national icon José Martí.
In 2001, Ette received the "Hugo Friedrich und Erich Köhler"-award for his work on Roland Barthes from Freiburg University.
To Ottmar Ette, Romance philology is a wide-ranging and inclusive academic field of inquiry which connects a number of disciplines and languages as it tells us about literary knowledge of human life.
Since 2009, he has also been co-editor of the electronic journal Istmo (Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos), (ISSN 1535-2315).
Ottmar Ette's programmatic essay "Literaturwissenschaft als Lebenswissenschaft - Eine Programmschrift im Jahr der Geisteswissenschaften"[8] sparked wide-ranging reactions and discussion in Germany.
Literature, Ette claims, is an essential repository of human knowledge on life, especially with respect to ethically relevant experiences such as living-together or "conviviality", migration and belonging, or survival in times of existential danger.