Dr. Arnd Bohm
July 20, 1953 - May 22, 2020
Members of the Department of English Language and Literature mourn the passing of their dear colleague Arnd Bohm after a protracted illness.
Arnd received his BA Honours from the University of Alberta in 1974, his MA (also from the University of Alberta) in 1975, and his PhD in German from Johns Hopkins University in 1984. Arnd came to Carleton University as a faculty member teaching German and Comparative Literature. He joined the Department of English Language and Literature in the late 1990s. He retired in 2015, having taught at Carleton for 30 years.
It is difficult to do justice to the range of Arnd’s scholarly interests. In 2007 he published his award-winning monograph, Goethe's Faust and European Epic: Forgetting the Future. This title hints at the depth and breadth of Arnd’s learning, which ranged across historical periods, national traditions, and languages. He published essays on writers such as Thomas Mann, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, J.M. Coetzee, William Wordsworth, Johann Gottfried von Herder, G.E. Lessing, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and countless others. Chats with Arnd seemed always to lead to the discovery that he had already published on whatever subject you were working on.
Arnd was a generous colleague whose keen, satirical wit coexisted with real generosity towards his colleagues. This generosity bore fruit in his teaching and in his longstanding work with CUASA, including a term as its president.
Arnd will be buried in Edmonton, near his family. He is survived by Waltraut Bohm (mother); Martin Bohm (brother); Barbara and Vincent Morban (sister and brother-in law); his nieces and nephews: Marla Bohm (Stephen Pollard, son Seth), Warren Bohm (Courtney Palmer), Garrett Bohm, Theresa Bosko (Stephen, daughter Oriana, son Peter); and numerous relatives, friends, and colleagues in Edmonton, Ottawa, elsewhere in Canada, and in the United States and Germany. Among those mourning his loss are long-time friends Norman Gee (Moira Day), Christopher Head, Jennifer Head, Jean Strong, Joan Neilson, and Marc Harris. Arnd was predeceased by his infant sister Angela (in 1953), father Arno (in 2016) and sister-in-law Lyda (in 2019).
The entire Carleton community feels his loss.