Ulrich "Ulo" Goldsmith, professor emeritus of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures and the department of comparative literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder, died in Boulder on Tuesday at age 90.
A memorial service will be held Wednesday, May 10, at 2 p.m. in Old Main Chapel on the Boulder campus.
According to Adrian Del Caro, GSLL chair, Goldsmith leaves a humbling legacy as one of CU's greatest humanists.
"To students and colleagues in the humanities, he was an inspirational cosmopolitan, prodigiously gifted as a scholar, witty, humorous and ever supportive of new voices in the realm of poetry," Del Caro said.
Goldsmith was born in Freiburg i. B., Germany and moved to England in 1932 to study at the London School of Economics. He remained an exile in England after 1933 because of the anti-Semitic legislation passed by the Third Reich.
In 1940 he moved to Canada, classified as a "friendly enemy alien," earning his master聮s in German Literature from Toronto University. In 1950 he earned his Ph.D. in German from UC-Berkeley.
Goldsmith began working at CU-Boulder in 1957, where he first chaired the department of Germanic languages and literatures and later co-founded and chaired the program in comparative literature. He retired from CU in 1979.
Professor Goldsmith's publications on German and comparative literature began appearing in 1950 and continued until the time of his death. He was well known as a scholar of Stefan George and published a book on the German poet in 1959. A volume of his publications on German, French and English literature appeared in 1989 under the title "Studies in Comparison," edited by Hazel E. Barnes, William M. Calder III and Hugo Schmidt.