Author. A notoriously provocative author, talk show host and former professor of English literature and culture, he won the 2002 German Book Prize in nonfiction. Born in Werne an der Lippe in the Ruhr aras of Germany, his mother sent him to Switzerland to live with Mennonites and escape the intense bombing of World War II. He returned home at age 11 absent schooling and speaking only an obscure dialect of Swiss German but soon excelled in school, caught up with his education and received top honors for his gynasium final exams. Fascinated by Anglo-Saxon culture and literature, he studied English in Munster, London, Philadelphia, and Freiburg, and then was appointed Professor of English Literature in Hamburg in 1978. Unconventional at the university, he staged entire Shakespeare plays with his students and initiated creative writing courses, unheard of in Germany's educational system; became known nationally with another spectacular but very unprofessorial work in the Anglo-Saxon tradition--his book Der Campus ("The Campus", 1995), which mocked Germany's rigid academia and the perils of an education system stifled by its climate of political correctness, professorial collusion and mediocrity--the novel won him few friends among academia but led the best-seller lists in Europe and was made into a popular film. Suffering from Parkinson's disease, he resigned his university position in 1997, moved to southern Germany near Freiburg and continued to write. In 1999 his book, "Bildung: alles, was man wissen muss" ("Education: everything you need to know"), espoused the unfashionable humanist idea of Bildung, the general education of an individual in all fields of knowledge and attacked a culture that he saw changing for the worse; it became a surprise bestseller in a country increasingly unsure of its identity. He then became a regular on the talk-show circuit and apparently relished the limelight. In May of 2001his book "Männer - Eine Spezies wird besichtigt" ("Men - a species is examined") won him the 2001 German Book Prize. As his disease progressed he became increasingly isolated, socialized less and invested his remaining energies in his work.