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Obituary: Prof. em. Dr. Wilhelm Köller († 12.12.2025)
Obituary for Prof. em. Dr. Wilhelm Köller
(23.4.1941 - 12.12.2025)
Wilhelm Köller was Professor of Linguistics and Language Didactics at the University of Kassel from 1975 to 2006. The academic work he left behind is simply impressive. The title of an early monograph from 1988 indicates the direction of his intellectual approach: "Philosophie der Grammatik. On the meaning of grammatical research." Wilhelm Köller was never concerned with the mere description of linguistic structures, but with their function in the communicative world. "What was this invented for?" he asked back in 1983 in "Functional grammar teaching" with regard to tense, genus and mode.
Wilhelm Köller received his doctorate with the work "Semiotik und Metapher" (1975), and the metaphorical is encountered again in 2012 in "Sinnbilder für Sprache. Metaphorical alternatives to the conceptual exploration of language". The metaphor is an expression of what is not literally meant, but at the same time it is able - usually for this very reason - to get to the heart of the matter in an absolutely striking way. It always contains a perspective, and it is this perspectival aspect of speaking and writing that interested Wilhelm Köller ("Perspektivität und Sprache. Zur Struktur von Objektivierungsformen in Bildern, im Denken und in der Sprache", 2004).
There is a common thread running through Wilhelm Köller's work, which is succinctly expressed in the subtitle of one of his essays: "On language's function of opening up the world". His aim was nothing less than to investigate how language guides our cognition of the world. The question can be tailored to a specific linguistic or linguistic-philosophical issue or to a person, it can be examined, for example, against the background of word field theory (more traditional) or frame theory (more current) or constructivist considerations, in relation to the thoughts of Ludwig Wittgenstein or taking into account the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, depending on whether one is more of a semanticist, philosopher or historian of science. Wilhelm Köller, however, was interested in the question as such, in all of its thematic implications, and these do not stop at disciplinary boundaries. If this means having to include Plato and Aristotle as well as Carnap and Wittgenstein, Augustine, Saussure, Kant, the Schlegels, Nietzsche, Jakobson, Bühler, Peirce and Weinrich, then Wilhelm Köller did just that. The T-stretch of the index of names in "Perspectivity and Language" reads like this: Talleyrand, Teiresias, Lucien Tesnières, Thales of Miletus, Theodorus of Studion,Thomas Aquinas, Thucydides, Ludwig Tieck, Till Eulenspiegel, Charles de Tocqueville, Leo Tolstoy, Adolf Trendelenburg, Jost Trier and Kurt Tucholsky - linguists, philosophers, theologians, writers, fictional figures from mythology and literature, from over two and a half millennia.
His works always had a clear thematic vanishing point: the question of the refraction of what we call "reality" into infinite facets, especially when language is responsible for this. For the reader, reading Köller's texts meant "participating in thinking in broad strokes", as one of his colleagues in Kassel wrote. According to this colleague, Wilhelm Köller's goal in life was "to sort and organize what we all do linguistically every day so that we can gain more clarity about ourselves".
Many of Wilhelm Köller's monographs have been published by De Gruyter, most of them in the Studia Linguistica Germanica series. One of the editors' reviews of "Die Zeit im Spiegel der Sprache" (2019) states that the work has a quality that "can only be judged as outstanding". Such judgments were typical of Wilhelm Köller's work, as was the view of his work as an interplay of epistemological, anthropological and cultural dimensions. Wilhelm Köller's characteristic treatment of his topics from antiquity through the Middle Ages to modern times and beyond is unparalleled.
When reading Köller's texts, one can be sure that the author does not pursue theoretical or methodological positions just because they are fashionable. He was always concerned with the scientific matter that needed to be explored. In discussions with him, one could not afford a lack of precision, because Wilhelm Köller's questions were always aimed at what was still unclear about the matter under discussion ( - on the occasion of his farewell, a colleague said that the most characteristic phrase of Wilhelm Köller's discussion style was "Yes - but...").
This attitude of "Yes - but..." served not only the academic discussion, but also Kassel German Studies as an institutional institution: Wilhelm Köller played a decisive role in the restructuring of the institute. The establishment of a professorship for primary school didactics of German language and literature, for example, was due to the fact that he and a colleague personally explained the need for such a professorship to the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art.
However, despite all his arguments and discussions, Wilhelm Köller always remained what distinguished him alongside his intelligence and intellectual conciseness: incredibly warm-hearted and close to people. Just as he never put on airs in front of colleagues, his arguments were never directed against any one person.
Shortly before his death, he sent the corrections for his last book to the publisher. It is entitled: "So what is language?