The grandson of the architect Martin Elsaesser, he spent his childhood in Upper Franconia and in 1951 moved with his family to Mannheim, where from 1955 to 1962 he attended a Humanist Gymnasium (academic secondary school), before studying English and German Literature at the Ruprecht-Karl University in Heidelberg.

In 1971, he received his doctorate in Comparative Literature with a thesis[2] on Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle’s Histories of the French Revolution from the University of Sussex.

He subsequently edited a similar journal (Monogram) from 1971 to 1975 in London, encouraged by Peter Wollen and supported by a grant from the Education Department of the British Film Institute.

In 1976, he established at UEA, together with Charles Barr, one of the first independent centres for Film Studies in the UK, with a full undergraduate, MA and PhD program.

In 1992, he initiated an international Master's and Doctoral Program, a book series (Film Culture in Transition, published by Amsterdam University Press and University of Chicago Press) and he was co-founder of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), set up after the US-American model of a Humanities Graduate School.

His book New German Cinema: A History won both the 1990 Jay Leyda Prize (awarded by Anthology Film Archives in New York City) and the Katherine Singer Kovács Prize in Film and Video Studies (awarded by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies).

His Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary received once more the Katherine Singer Kovács Prize for best film book of 1998.

[11] A further commemorative publication was issued for his 65th birthday, with contributions by colleagues and former students: Mind the Screen: Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser.