Hans Robert Jauss (; 12 December 1921 – 1 March 1997) was a German academic, notable for his work in reception theory (especially his concept of horizon of expectation) and medieval and modern French literature. His approach was derived from the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Early years and education Jauss was born in Göppingen, Württemberg, Germany, and died on 1 March 1997 in Constance, Germany. His family came from a long line of teachers. His religious background was pietism. Jauss’s Gymnasium studies took place in Esslingen and Geislingen between 1932 and 1939. As a young soldier in the Second World War, Jauss spent two winters on the Russian Front in the SS (SS-Nr. 401.359) and the Waffen-SS. In 1942, he was a member of the "SS-Freiwilligen-Legion Niederlande". In 1943, he was Obersturmführer in the "11th SS-Freiwilligen-Legion Nordland". In 1944, he was Hauptsturmführer in the SS reserve. Subsequently, he was part of the "33rd Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS Charlemagne". In 1944, he was able to begin his studies and complete his first semester in occupied Prague. In November 1948 at Heidelberg, the twenty-seven-year-old Jauss, after postwar imprisonment, began studies in Romance philology, philosophy, history and Germanistik (German literature and linguistics). Teachers at that time who made an impact on his thought included Martin Heidegger and Hans Georg Gadamer. He was to remain there until 1954. In these years he made study trips to Paris and Perugia. The themes of past and the present, time and remembrance, were already engaging Jauss’s research from the time of his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg in 1952. His dissertation, under the direction of the philologist Gerhard Hess, was entitled Zeit und Erinnerung in Marcel Prousts «À la recherche du temps perdu» [Time and Memory in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time]. In 1957, with the treatise Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Tierdichtung, he obtained his habilitation for Romance philology at the University of Heidelberg. Career In 1959, Jauss took up his first teaching appointment as associate professor and director of the Romance Seminar at the University of Münster, Westfalen. In 1961, he moved to the University of Gießen, where, as full professor, he helped in the restructuring of the Romance Seminar. It was in these years (1959–1962) that Jauss, along with Erich Köhler, founded a series of medieval texts entitled Grundriß der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters (Outline of Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages). In 1963,