Richard Carl Exner PhD (1929 - 2008)

Born 13 May 1929 in Niedersachswerfen, Germany

Husband of Helen Muriel (Tingley) Ganopole — married 7 Oct 1972 (to 12 Mar 1979) in Santa Barbara, California

Died 16 Jul 2008 at age 79 in Berlin, Germany

Biography

Richard was married three times:

1. Mary A. Burkhart, 11 Mar 1955, Los Angeles, California - divorced
2. Muriel McClintock (nee Tingley) - divorced
3. Annegret Stein

Obit:

Dr. Richard Exner, German poet, prose author, translator, and scholar of German literature, died on July 16, 2008, in Berlin, but his legacy is alive and well.

Born in Niedersachswerfen, Germany, on May 13, 1929, Richard Exner came to the United States in 1950, receiving a PhD in German Literature from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1957. Before joining the Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1965, Richard Exner taught at the University of Southern California, the University of Rochester, Princeton University, and Oberlin College.

On the occasion of his nomination for the UCSB Faculty Research Lectureship, his career as scholar, teacher, and poet was summed up succinctly by the department chair: “Professor Exner is the rare combination of a sensitive and incisive literary critic and a poet in his own right. He is shaping not only the reception of German literature in the United States but also contemporary literature in Germany and Austria, both by his criticism and his poetry.”

As an author who not only published numerous scholarly books and articles on German literature, but also translations of English poetry into German and of German poetry into English, Richard Exner was much sought out by graduate students in German, French, and English. Several students who now teach at Brown University, at Southwestern University, and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, came to UCSB from the East Coast only to study with Richard. One of them wrote: “Richard Exner was the most sensitive reader of texts, a passionate teacher and a generous adviser, someone whose take on the world combined enlightened skepticism and humor with an enduring curiosity.”

As colleagues, we knew him as an incisive and helpful critic of our work and as an entertaining raconteur on social occasions. Once when we were sitting together at his house and talking with a group of graduate students about our experiences as PhD students, Richard, in his characteristic ironic and self-deprecating manner, told an anecdote about his relationship to Ludwig Markuse, the Berlin philosopher and critic of the 1920s whose star student Richard had been at the USC Department of German. Richard had given Markuse his essay on Freud, a careful and, he thought, brilliantly formulated execution of a class assignment. The philosopher returned it saying: “Exner, spare me your prose. Just let me have the quotations.”

The book Poetry Poetics Translation: Festschrift in Honor of Richard Exner, edited by his colleagues Laurence A. Rickels and Ursula Mahlendorf when he retired in 1992, is testimony to his international renown as both a scholar and a poet. It contains contributions by more than 40 friends, students, and colleagues from this country and abroad. In the introduction, the editors write about his work as a poet: “What spoke out in Exner’s poetry from the 1980 publication of Fast ein Gespr¤ch, Almost Talking to One Another, was a voice that certainly his generation recognized as its own, the voice of conscience that would not let the horrors of Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima settle with history like one more veil of dust.”

After his retirement, Richard Exner lived in Munich and Berlin, publishing and reading his poetry to an ever widening circle of readers and listeners. He is survived by his partner, Annegret Stein, and two daughters, Bettina Exner Mara and Antonia Exner.

-- Santa Barbara Independent, by Wolf Kittler, Dec 24, 2008

Sources

• California, Marriage Index - marriage to Burkhart
• Find A Grave: Memorial #119617624 - buried in Valyermo, Los Angeles County, California