Obituary of Ingeborg Glier
NEW HAVEN - Ingeborg Glier, 83, Professor Emerita of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, died peacefully on November 14, 2017 in the Connecticut Hospice after a long illness.
Ingeborg was born June 22, 1934 in Dresden, Germany, to the late Dr. Erich and Gertrud Glier. The family was bombed out during the war and in 1947 fled the Soviet Zone to settle in Memmingen, Bavaria, where Ingeborg grew up. She began to study at the University of Munich in 1952, but in 1954 she received a stipend to an experimental school, St. Catherine's in Windsor Great Park, England, and in 1955 she won a Foreign Fellowship to Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. She received her doctorate from Munich in 1958 with a dissertation on the English playwright John Webster, but then turned to medieval German love poetry, of which she made important studies. With the late professor Michael Curschmann of Princeton University, she co-edited a three-volume anthology of German medieval literature. She also edited and updated a medieval volume in a standard history of German literature as well as a venerable guide to German metrics, which made her well-known among all German students of literature.
She came to Yale as a visiting professor in 1972 and in the following year became only the third woman to be appointed to a tenured professorship at Yale.
Ingeborg was widely learned and taught not only medieval courses but also topics in modern literature, such as Thomas Mann and literature by women. With her command of research techniques, libraries, and archives she was constantly helpful to students, who regarded her with great affection, especially the women students for her guidance and comfort. She retired in 2004. She combined rigor with kindness, and a long series of students and colleagues profited from her sharp, analytic reading of their work. Ingeborg was an outstanding scholar, a dedicated teacher and mentor, and an exceptionally humane person who will be sorely missed.
She is survived by a sister, Brigitte Glier-Konkol in Memmingen. Arrangements are entrusted to the B.C. Bailey Funeral Home in Wallingford. Burial will be in Grove Street Cemetery. Donations in memory of Ingeborg can be made to WHSU radio, the Salvation Army, or Connecticut Hospice.
