Walter Hinderer studied philosophy, history, and German and English literature in Tübingen and Munich and wrote one of the first dissertations on Hermann Broch. Before coming to Princeton in 1978, he taught at universities in Pennsylvania, Colorado, California, and Maryland. He was a fellow at the following research institutions: 1976-77, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison; 1985-86, Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg), Berlin; 1995, Rosenzweig Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. In 1995 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 1998 the Alexander von Humboldt Prize.

His research interests center on German literature, philosophy, history, and politics of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. He has written extensively on German drama, poetry, literary criticism and theory, and rhetoric and political literature. He teaches graduate courses on German classicism, literary and theoretical discourse from the Enlightenment to romanticism, Büchner and Kleist, German drama and poetry, Heine and Young Germany, and contemporary German literature.

He is a trustee of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, D.C.; the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York; and the Foundation for Research in Romanticism in Munich; and he is a member of the executive committee of the International Erich Fried Society for Language and Literature in Vienna.

Currently he is writing a study on dream discourses in Philosophy, Medicine and Literature from German Enlightenment to Romanticism, and preparing another publication on the playwright Friedrich Schiller. His recent publications include Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik (ed.). Wuerzburg, 2002; Geschichte der deutschen Lyrik vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (ed.). Wuerzburg, 2001; Von der Idee des Menschen. Ueber Friedrich Schiller. Wuerzburg, 1998.