KLIMKEIT, HANS-JOACHIM. Hans-Joachim Klimkeit (1939–1999) was born in Ranchi, Bihar, in India, the son of a German Lutheran missionary. Klimkeit spent his youth in different parts of the subcontinent, and from early on he became acquainted with such languages as English, Hindi, Urdu, Bhojpuri, and Tamil. In 1955 Klimkeit moved to Germany, where he passed his school-leaving examination in 1958. Afterwards he took up studies of Protestant theology, first at a small ecclesiastical academy, then, from 1959 onwards, at the university of Tübingen. There, besides theology, he also studied mathematics and, more importantly, philosophy with the hermeneutician Otto Friedrich Bollnow and Indology with Helmuth von Glasenapp, who both would have a lasting impact on him. In 1961 Klimkeit went to study at Bonn under the phenomenologist Gustav Mensching, whose successor he became in 1972.

Klimkeit took his Ph.D. with a thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach's ideas about miracles from the point...