Professor Dr. Gero von Wilpert (13 March 1933 – 24 December 2009) was a German author and professor for German Literature at the University of Sydney. Wilpert was born in Tartu (Dorpat), Estonia. Like all Baltic Germans, he was forced to leave Estonia after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the takeover of the country by the Soviet Union (1939 - 1940). From 1953 to 1957 he studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he was at times a docent. He then settled near Stuttgart to work as independent author and lecturer. Von Wilpert published several editions of an encyclopedia of literary descriptions Sachwörterbuch der Literatur. He also wrote a comprehensive Lexicon of World Literature and earlier had published a German Literature in Illustrations and a Journal on Schiller.
Professor Dr. Gero von Wilpert died in Sydney.
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“The thinking person has the strange characteristic to like to create a fantasy in the place of the unsolved problem, a fantasy that stays with the person even when the problem has been solved and truth made its appearance.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)