Maik Hamburger

Maik Hamburger (12 February 1931 – 16 January 2020) was a German translator, writer and dramaturge, regarded as one of the leading Shakespeare scholars of his generation in the German-speaking world.

Biography Early life Michael Pitt "Maik" Hamburger was born on 12 February 1931 in Shanghai, where his parents were living and working at the time. His father, Rudolf Hamburger (1903–1980), was a German architect originally from Lower Silesia. His mother, born Ursula Kuczynski (1907–2000), had accompanied her husband to China. His maternal grandfather was economist and demographer Robert René Kuczynski. Hamburger's family was Jewish.

Both his parents were committed to antifascist communism, and his mother had joined the party in 1926. Both parents at some stage became involved in spying for Soviet intelligence; the Shanghai construction boom may have been the chief reason for their decision to relocate to Shanghai during the first half of 1930. Rudolf Hamburger's espionage career was probably not of huge value to the Soviet Union: Ursula Kuczynski, however, would become well known to English and American espionage watchers some decades later, as the Oxfordshire-based "handler" of nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs between 1943 and 1950.

The marriage of Hamburger's parents came under increasing pressure, ending in divorce in 1939. By the time he was ten, he had lived successively in China, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Switzerland, before ending up in England in 1940, after his mother had married Len Beurton, also a Soviet agent, and one who came with the added attraction of a British passport for his new wife. While still a toddler, Maik Hamburger was separated from his parents and sent to live with his father's parents (now relocated from Germany to Czechoslovakia) for seven months, while his mother was sent to Moscow for a half-year training session in "espionage spycraft". There had been a concern that if baby Michael had accompanied her to Moscow he might inadvertently have blown her cover later by blurting out words in Russian. in Oxford in 1940 he appears initially to have attended school in the city. From 1944 to 1948, he attended Eastbourne College in East Sussex. Later his mother moved into a village outside the city while her son—possibly in connection with his maternal grandfather's senior lectureship at the London School of Economics—lived "as a cultural omnivore" in London, attending performances at the city's famous theatres and sitting in the top gallery at each of them where, as he later recalled, you "could sit on a hard bench for sixpence and view the action from an overhead perspective".

Studies He enrolled later at the University of Aberdeen and embarked on a Philosophy degree course. One of his teachers, as Professor of Moral Philosophy, was Donald M. MacKinnon (1913-1994), known to friends and students alike as "Mac", a "corpulent eccentric" whose teaching was based around Kant and Hegel. whose contributions involved invoking Wittgenstein, Ryle and Ayer to prove that "90% of what Kant and Hegel wrote was senseless twaddle" ("aus sinnlosem Geschwätz besteht"). Here he started to study for a degree in physics. An important member of the group was the student Adolf Dresen,

Work as a translator After leaving Leipzig, between 1956 and 1966 Maik Hamburger lived in East Berlin, where he supported himself as a freelance translator and journalist.

Teaching career Maik Hamburger pursued a parallel career in teaching. During the East German years he taught at the Leipzig Theatre Academy (Theaterhochschule) and at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. He also taught at the Berlin University of the Arts and led theatre workshops at Santa Barbara, Stanford and Montreal. He was a member of PEN Centre Germany. In 2007 he received the honour of a stipendium from the Hermann Hesse Foundation of Calw.

Death Hamburger died in Berlin on 16 January 2020.