Hermann Glaser was born in Nuremberg, and though he became a national figure, his Middle Franconian provenance was always an important part of his public personality. His father was a secondary school teacher. He studied History, Philosophy, Germanistics and Anglistics at Erlangen and, for two terms, Bristol. It was from Erlangen that he received his doctorate in 1952. His dissertation concerned the place of Hamlet in German Literature. His university studies concluded, in 1953 he embarked on ten years as an enthusiastic and creative secondary school teacher, first for one year in Coburg and then, as the economic and political divisions between East and West Germany increasingly came to be matched by physical divisions, back in his birth-city of Nuremberg. During that decade he also achieved literary success as the author of a number of school text books with a focus on German and world literature. By 2012 his "Kleine Geschichte der modernen Weltliteratur in Problemkreisen" ("loosely, "Little history of modern world literature in difficulties"") had reached a remarkable nine editions.