Robert Ludwig Kahn

Robert Ludwig Kahn
Kahn's 1945 Dalhousie University yearbook photo
Born	Ludwig Robert Kahn (1923-04-22)April 22, 1923 Nuremberg, Bavaria, German Republic
Died	March 22, 1970(1970-03-22) (aged 46) Round Top, Texas, U.S.
Cause of death	Suicide
Citizenship	American
Spouse	Lisa Kahn ​ (m. 1951)​
Academic background
Education	Dalhousie University
Alma mater	University of Toronto
Thesis	Kotzebue, His Social and Political Attitudes. The Dilemma of a Popular Dramatist in Times of Social Change (1950)
Doctoral advisor	Hermann Boeschenstein
Academic work
Discipline	Germanist
Institutions	University of Washington, Rice University
Notable students	Hanna Lewis, Egon Schwarz [de]
Main interests	German literature
Notable works	Edition of Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World

Robert Ludwig Kahn (April 22, 1923 – March 22, 1970)^[1] was a German-American scholar of German studies and poet. He grew up in Nuremberg and Leipzig as the son of Jewish parents who sent him abroad to England on a Kindertransport in 1939. After the end of World War II, Kahn learned his parents had perished in the Holocaust, which was a traumatic experience that caused him to lose his faith. He never recovered from survivor guilt.

After internment as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man and in Quebec, Canada, he was able to study at Dalhousie University with the help of a Halifax couple. He then obtained a PhD in German literature from the University of Toronto in 1950. Kahn's research interests were German literature in the Age of Goethe and Romanticism, and he was one of the editors of Georg Forster's works. Kahn held academic positions in German studies at the University of Washington and later as professor of German at Rice University from 1962, where he served as department chairman for several years until shortly before his 1970 suicide.

Kahn's poetry was not widely read during his lifetime. A collection of his German-language poetry was published in 1978, edited by his widow, the poet Lisa Kahn.