The Horst and Ingrid Daemmrich Fund established for the Junior Year in Munich program

JYM is pleased to announce that Arthur Daemmrich and JoAnna Loughlin have established the “Horst and Ingrid Daemmrich fund for JYM Student Research and Internships” in honor of their parents. This fund will allow JYM, for the first time, to provide selected participants with support for research projects and unpaid internships, an area of growing interest and need for our undergraduate students.

Horst and Ingrid Daemmrich met in the library as graduate students at the University of Chicago, where they discovered a shared joy in the German language and a passion for literature. They would go on to influential academic careers, both independently and as co-authors of books and articles that advanced the comparative study of themes and motifs in literature.

Born in 1930 in Pausa, in eastern Germany, Horst found refuge in reading works of the enlightenment during the dark days of the Nazi dictatorship. After escaping at age 17 to West Germany, he packed a trunk of books and boarded a freighter to seek a university education in the United States. In Detroit, he worked his way through undergraduate studies at Wayne State University as a Hudson’s department store sales clerk.

The daughter of German immigrants, Ingrid was born in Albany, NY, in 1936. She wanted to be a teacher from the moment she lined up her younger brother and sisters in an imaginary classroom. A Radcliffe College graduate, she won a Fulbright scholarship before completing her doctoral degree.

In 1962, the couple married and settled in Detroit, where they began a close scholarly collaboration. Ingrid taught at the Detroit Institute of Technology, while Horst rose from assistant to full professor in Wayne State University’s German department. In the early 1970s, they were involved with the JYM program, and Horst served as lead of the Freiburg exchange in 1972-1973.

Over the next three decades, while moving to Philadelphia in 1981 to teach at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University respectively, Horst and Ingrid expanded on their idealistic view of literature as the gateway to human understanding. In 1987, they published their Handbook of Themes and Motifs in Western Literature, which became a reference guide for scholars worldwide. Their 1994 Spirals and Circles reexamined classicism and realism from a thematic perspective.

After Ingrid’s death in 2018, Horst continued his literary research, publishing Self-Realization just before his death in 2021.

Horst conveyed their shared perspective in a 1979 Wayne State University commencement address: “Read and you will discover beauty and truth, contemplation and action, aesthetics, and ethics. Reading will open realms that remain closed to us in ordinary life.”

To celebrate their lives and passion for German languages and literature, the Horst and Ingrid Daemmrich Fund was established in 2023 to support students in the Junior Year in Munich program undertaking independent research projects or participating in unpaid internships. JYM shares Horst and Ingrid Daemmrich’s passionate commitment to the humanities, and we extend our deepest gratitude to their children for this generous support of our program.