Friedrich Kittler was born 1943 in Rochlitz/Saxony. He fled the German Democratic Republic in 1958 to West Germany, where he attended secondary school 1958-63 in Lahr/Black Forest (Naturwissenschaftlich-neusprachliches Gymnasium). From 1963 to 1972, he studied German Studies, Romance Languages and Philosophy in Freiburg/Breisgau (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität). In 1976 he earned his PhD with a dissertation on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and became an Assistant Professor in German at Freiburg for the next decade.
1982 Visiting Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley; 1982-83 Visiting Associate Professor, Stanford University; 1983-86 Membre associé, Collège international de philosophie, Paris. In 1984, he completed his Habilitation at the University of Freiburg/Breisgau. 1986 Visiting Lecturer at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and Visiting Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara; from 1986 to 1990 he co-chaired a Federal Research Initiative on literature and media at the University of Kassel; in 1987, he was again Visiting Professor at UCSB.
That year, he became Full Professor of German at the University of Bochum (Ruhr-Universität Bochum); in 1993 he went to Berlin to accept a chair in Aesthetics and History of Media at the Humboldt-University.
In 1993, he received the media arts prize for theory from the ZKM Karlsruhe (Zentrums für Kunst und Medientechnologie); from 1995 to 1997, he headed a Federal Research Group on Theory and History of Media. 1996 Distingished Scholar, Yale University; 1997 Distinguished Visiting Professor, Columbia University/New York.
Also of interest, in this connection, are the critical reviews by Frank Hartmann, who has written several times about Friedrich Kittler's project:
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