Reinhard Döhl

Döhl studied German literature, philosophy, history, and political science in Göttingen. At the invitation of the philosopher Max Bense, a professor at the University of Stuttgart, he moved to Stuttgart in late 1959, after having been charged with blasphemy following the publication of his poem »missa profana« but acquitted in court. Döhl wrote his dissertation on Hans Arp, engaged early on with interdisciplinary topics, and completed his habilitation in 1979 with the thesis »Neue deutsche Literatur unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Medien« (New German Literature with Special Reference to the Media) From 1965 until his death, Döhl taught at the University of Stuttgart, first as a research assistant and later as a professor of German studies.

In the 1960s, he was a member of the Stuttgart group led by Max Bense. The core of the group consisted of Bense, Helmut Heißenbüttel, and Döhl, as well as the typographers Klaus Burkhardt and Hansjörg Mayer, who were united by a shared interest in experimental literature and artistic production using new media and writing systems. The circle quickly expanded beyond the city limits, and so Ernst Jandl, Franz Mon, and Ludwig Harig, among others, can be counted among the group’s wider circle. In 1965, Döhl created a landmark work of concrete visual poetry, the »Apple with a Worm,« in which the word »apple,« arranged without spaces, forms the image of an apple, with the word »worm« hidden in the lower right corner. Since then, the apple has found its way not only into anthologies on concrete art but also into many school textbooks.

Reinhard Döhl cultivated a wide range of contacts with writers and artists—including those from France, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, and Japan—that had existed since the 1960s. This extensive network gave rise to numerous collaborative literary and artistic projects. The avant-garde movements of the 20th century, the principle of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and artistic dialogue were always central aspects of Döhl’s work as a literary and media scholar and artist. Furthermore, he explored the literary and artistic possibilities of the internet at a very early stage and discovered the computer as a suitable medium for fulfilling the central demands of dialogical literature and art. Since the 1990s, he has maintained his own website, www.reinhard-doehl.de, as well as, together with Johannes Auer, the Internet reader Als Stuttgart Schule machte, a comprehensive archive of texts, commentaries, and materials on the group around Max Bense, and has published almost exclusively online since 1996.

In addition to poetry, Döhl also wrote prose, artistic and scholarly texts, and radio plays. His works have been translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, Czech, Russian, English, and Japanese. As a scholar of literature and media studies and a university professor, he engaged intensively with experimental literature and art at the beginning of the 20th century, particularly with DADA, as well as with the medium of the new radio play. This engagement resulted not only in the development of a radio series but also in scholarly publications on the subject that remain highly significant today.

Reinhard Döhl’s estate library arrived at the ZKM in several shipments between 2005 and 2020 and comprises a large selection of titles from his professional and personal libraries.