SIEGFRIED J. SCHMIDT 1940-2025

Prof. Dr.Dr.h.c. Siegfried J. Schmidt died on March 3 after a long and serious illness.

He spent the summers of his childhood on his grandparents’ farm in Grafendorf near Friesach in Carinthia. After studying philosophy, German studies, history and history of art, he was appointed to the newly founded Chair of Text Theory at Bielefeld University in 1971 at the age of 31. This was followed by appointments in General Linguistics, Theory of Literature, German Studies, Communication Theory and Media Culture at the Universities of Siegen and Münster.
Siegfried Schmidt was a scientist, writer and artist. He often worked on literary-artistic and scientific projects at the same time. In addition to his own contributions to concrete poetry and experimental literature, he wrote about authors, primarily from Austria. He was an early supporter of Christine Lavant and Friederike Mayröcker. Also, he was on friendly terms with Heinz Gappmayr, Oswald Wiener, Franz Josef Czernin and Ferdinand Schmatz.

His work includes more than thirty monographs that have been translated into many languages. He was the initiator and editor of the influential magazines SPIEL, POETICS and DELFIN.
Siegfried Schmidt was a founder of empirical studies in literature and at the same time probably the most important communication and media theorist of our time. His work made a decisive contribution to the spread of constructivism in the German-speaking world – Ernst von Glasersfeld, Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela also owe their impact to the “Discourse of Radical Constructivism”, which he published.

His thinking is characterized by an anti-fundamentalist attitude, always ready to question the theoretical status quo and open up new ways of thinking. A major concern of his was the promotion of the next generation. Many scholarships would not have been awarded without his expert opinions and many books would not have been published without his support.

He has been a visiting professor and lecturer at many universities. For example, for more than ten years at the University of Klagenfurt, which in 2004 awarded him an honorary doctorate for the development of text theory, empirical literary studies and constructivist media theory. In the late 1990s, for example, he was invited for the Innsbruck Lectures on Constructivism. In 2015, Siegfried J. Schmidt delivered the Ernst von Glasersfeld Lecture at the University of Innsbruck.

The Ernst von Glasersfeld Archive will honour his memory.