Rita Schober

Rita Schober (née Tomaschek; 13 June 1918 – 26 December 2012) was a German scholar of Romance studies and literature.

Early life and education Rita Tomaschek was born and grew up in Rumburg (as Rumburk was then known), a small manufacturing town near the northern tip of Bohemia, in what was at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The town was overwhelmingly ethnically and linguistically German. (It became predominantly Czechoslovak after 1945.) Her father was a clerical worker. Her mother worked in garment manufacturing. Between 1928 and 1936 Rita Tomaschek attended the secondary school (Realgymnasium) in Rumburg, before moving on to study at the German University in Prague between 1938 and 1940, and then again during 1944/45. One of the children whom she taught was Peter H. Feist (1928 – 2015) who later became a distinguished East German art historian.

By the summer of 1945 Rita Hetzer, now aged 27, was a widow. She had married Hans Hetzer, another art historian, in 1940, but he had gone missing in 1943 and was presumed to have been killed while taking part at the Battle of Stalingrad. In March of that year she had received her doctorate from Prague University. The work was supervised by Erhard Preißig who surprised and delighted her early in 1945 by offering her an academic job, working for him. The opportunity to embark on a university career at a time like this represented a dream come true. Unfortunately, however, Erhard Preißig died in Prague a few months later. In any case, the post–war ethnic cleansing made it impossible for ethnic Germans to stay in newly liberated Czechoslovakia. Like tens of thousands of others, Rita Hetzer emigrated. Although a literary giant in his native France and well-studied by readers and scholars in the English-speaking world, Zola had till this point been little known in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century, and the Rütten & Loenning, most of it completely newly translated, was the first post-war German language set of the works. In East Germany the government had unwittingly inherited some of the literary tendencies of the Hitler years, and Zola's work was condemned in some official circles as "Gossenliteratur" ("Gutter literature") which should not be permitted to fall into the hands of the people for fear of poisoning their minds. Nevertheless, the massive project was permitted to progress, and between 1952 and the later 1976 (when the Rougon-Macquart translation project was completed), teaching and promoting Emile Zola's writings became the centre-piece of Rita Schober's academic life. In 1974 - unusually for an East German publishing venture - the newly translated series was even sold to West Germany where, as in the east, Zola had hitherto been neglected in academic circles, She was evidently regarded by the East German authorities as politically reliable, and her leadership role in the Rougon-Macquart cycle also necessitated international contacts with specialist literary academics in France. She was also well respected for her work on theories of literature, especially structuralism.