Writer Inge Jens in Tübingen
Photo: Jan-Philipp Strobel / dpa
The literary scholar Inge Jens is dead. According to her son, Christoph Jens, she died on Thursday at the age of 94.
She fell asleep peacefully, it said in a statement.
Inge Jens was the wife of the Tübingen rhetoric professor Walter Jens, who died in 2013.
"We bid farewell to a great author who, with her books and lectures, has shaped the intellectual life of the Federal Republic in many ways," said a statement from the Rowohlt Verlag.
"The university mourns Inge Jens," tweeted the University of Tübingen, where the literary scholar had taught.
As can be seen from the communication of their son, Inge Jens is buried next to her husband Walter Jens in the honorary grave of the Tübingen city cemetery.
Sit in front of the nuclear weapons depot
Inge Jens was best known for editing and commenting on Thomas Mann's diaries and the bestseller "Frau Thomas Mann - the life of Katharina Pringsheim".
In 2009 her autobiography "Incomplete Memories" was published, and in 2016 she published a report on her husband's dementia under the title "Slow Disappearance".
Inge Jens’s scientific and journalistic commitment is complemented by civil society.
Together with her husband, she became a figurehead of the peace movement in the 1980s.
In 1984 she took part in sit-ins in front of the Mutlangen nuclear weapons depot (Ostalbkreis). During the Gulf War in 1990, the couple hid deserted US soldiers in their house and were tried for aiding and abetting deserters.
Mozart at the funeral
In a major interview with the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” a few months ago, Inge Jens also spoke about death.
She doesn't bother with it all the time, she said.
“But I am thinking about my understanding of the hereafter.
And then, to my astonishment, I realize how much it is still childlike: that there is heaven and hell, that God watches over everything.
The idea that my husband or my son would run towards me up there beaming with joy and say, nice that you are there - but I don't have that. "
The 94-year-old had planned her funeral in advance, including a music request: excerpts from the Brahms Requiem.
But she talked to the cantor, Jens told Die Zeit.
“He said they had to rehearse the Brahms Requiem from scratch.
I said: don't do it, we'll take Mozart. "
rai / dpa
