My wife, Carol Diethe, who has died aged 81, had an unusual academic career: in the 1970s she initially taught German language and literature at Middlesex Polytechnic (later University), but after its German department collapsed, taught the history of ideas on a literature-based course devised entirely by herself.
Her PhD was on German expressionism, and she wrote on 19th-century German women’s literature, including the work of the novelist and poet Louise-Otto Peters, who is thought of as the first German feminist.
