Petsch studied in
Berlin with
Erich Schmidt and at the
University of Würzburg, where he received his doctorate in 1898 on "Volksrätsel" ('the traditional riddle') and completed his
habilitation in 1900 on "Formelhafte Schlüsse im Volksmärchen" ('formulaic endings in folk-tales'). He belonged to the pioneering Berlin school of Germanic studies associated with
Wilhelm Scherer. In 1914 he held a lectureship in
Liverpool. Then he was appointed full professor at the Königliche Akademie zu Posen — German Academy in
Poznán. When Germany lost Poznán through the
Treaty of Versailles, Petsch lost his job. In October 1919, Petsch became a professor at the
University of Hamburg, taking up the first chair of modern German literary history, and he taught beyond retirement age until 1945. He was a founding figure there in
Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft ('general literary study'), which moved away from focusing on history and authorial biography in favour studying the nature, typology and form of literature. Petsch dealt intensively with the work of
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and
Goethe, in particular accruing 32 publications on
Goethe's Faust. In 1924 he was a co-founder of the Hamburg Goethe Society. In the field of folklore he focused on fairy tales. Petsch joined the
Nazi Party in 1933, the year they came to power, and was in November 1933 one of the signatories of the professors' commitment to Adolf Hitler at German universities and colleges. In 1937, Petsch argued that Nordic poetry of the "echt germanischen Form" ('genuinely Germanic form') was particularly close to German literature. He viewed
Selma Lagerlöf,
Sigrid Undset, and
Knut Hamsun as poets fitting the Germanic tradition who wrote in "artgemäßen Denkbahnen" ('species-appropriate ways of thinking'), by contrast with German writers like
Alfred Döblin and
Thomas Mann, whom Petsch saw as decadent. For Petsch, Hamsun in particular was the greatest Nordic storyteller, as one of the "wärmsten Bewunderern und Verteidigern" ('warmest admirers and defenders') of Nazi Germany abroad. Among Petsch's students were Paul Böckmann and Fritz Martini. Because of his early membership of the Nazi Party, Petsch was suspended by the British occupation authorities at the age of almost 70 in May 1945, dying a few months later. == Key works ==