Dagmar Barnouw (1936–2008)

Dagmar Barnouw was born in Berlin, Germany. With her family, she survived the bombing of Dresden in the basement of their home. Afterwards, the family became refugees and fled west to the American zone to escape the Russian army.
They stayed in a series of small, muddy villages in northern Bavaria before moving to Ulm. In 1962, after earning an undergraduate degree in Germany, she came to the USA as a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University. The following year, while returning to Germany, she met Jeffrey Barnouw, her future husband, with whom she later had a son. She earned her PhD in German literature at Yale University in 1968 and taught at several universities, including the University of Heidelberg; Purdue University; the University of Pittsburgh; Brown University; and the University of Texas at Austin.
She joined the faculty of the University of Southern California in 1988 as a professor of German and comparative literature. During her career, she wrote about 150 papers and published 12 books on topics ranging from the cultural politics of Thomas Mann to feminist and utopian science fiction.

Post-World War II Germany was a recurring theme, and her last book was War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans (2005).