Robert Stumpfl was born in
Vienna,
Austria-Hungary on 6 June 1904. His father was a senior official in the
Foreign Ministry of Austria-Hungary. He studied English, German and
Scandinavian at the universities of
Vienna and
Kiel, gaining his
Ph.D. at Vienna in 1926 under the supervision of
Rudolf Much. His dissertation was on Protestant theatre in Austria during the
Reformation (16th century). In the 1920s the prospects for an academic career in Austria were dim, and Stumpfl subsequently lectured in German at the
University of Edinburgh. Returning to Austria Stumpfl married Johanna Nikolaia Karoline Spitzy in Vienna on 7 July 1931. He completed his
habilitation at the
University of Berlin in 1936 under the supervision of
Julius Petersen. His thesis for the habilitation,
Kultspiele der Germanen als Ursprung des mittelalterlichen Dramas (1936), suggested strong
Germanic influences on the emergence on
medieval theatre and diverged from the then-standard notion that drama had evolved out of the Christian liturgy. The Germanic line of research had earlier been pursued by
Jacob Grimm and
Gustav Freytag. Stumpfl was a professor at the
University of Heidelberg. Stumpfl joined the
Nazi Party on 1 May 1933. Stumpfl died in a car accident at , Austria on 11 August 1937. ==See also==