Born in Wismar (Germany) in 1927. Died February 26 2022.

Harald Weinrich studied Romance philology, classical philology and philosophy at the universities of Münster, Freiburg im Breisgau, Toulouse and Madrid.

He received his doctorate in Münster in 1953 with a thesis on Don Quixote'sIngenium, and in 1959 took his habilitation in Münster after several years as an assistant in Marburg and Münster.

Appointed Full Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Kiel, he was subsequently called to Cologne, where he held the Chair of Romance Philology from 1965 to 1968. In 1968, he moved to the new University of Bielefeld, which he had co-founded , where he held a chair in Linguistics and, from 1972-1974, was director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) he had set up there.

From 1978 to 1992, he held a chair in German as a Foreign Language at the University of Munich.

As a visiting professor, Harald Weinrich taught in the USA at the Universities of Michigan (1963-1964) and Princeton (1977), and in Italy at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he held the Galileo Chair (1992-1993). A Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 1987-1988, the following year he was appointed to the newly-created European Chair at the Collège de France. From 1992 to 1998, he held the Langues et littératures romanes chair at the Collège de France.

Harald Weinrich is a member of the scientific academies of Darmstadt, Düsseldorf and Göttingen, the Accademia della Crusca in Florence and the Academia Europaea.

Outside academia, he is a member of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and the German PEN-Club.

He has won several literary prizes, including the Sigmund Freud Prize, the Konrad Duden Prize, the Karl Vossler Prize and the Hansischer Goethe-Preis.

He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Bielefeld, Heidelberg and Augsburg.