Ulrich Horstmann finished his studies in English and Philosophy in 1974 with a doctoral thesis on Edgar Allan Poe. He was a lecturer at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. After habilitation in 1983 he lectured at the University of Münster until 1987. Since 1991 he has been a professor of English and American literature at the University of Giessen. He lives in Marburg on the Lahn river.

Since 1976 Ulrich Horstmann has published, alongside scientific work, essays, novels and plays of his own, as well as translations from English. In 1983 he became known for his treatise The Beast, in which he promoted a philosophical position which was diametrically opposed to the peace movement Zeitgeist of those years: He advocated a philosophy of "escape of mankind" which aims for an early self-destruction of the human race by means of the accumulated nuclear weapons found in arsenals around the world. He pushed the pessimism and misanthropy of his mentor Schopenhauer to the extreme. Horst's work was not, as some had suspected, a particularly bitter satire, as was shown by the author's subsequent publications which were written with an attitude of nihilism and extreme distaste for the world.

Ulrich Horstmann is a member of PEN Germany and has received the Kleist Prize in 1988 after being nominated by Günter Kunert.

Horstmann puts forth the theory that mankind has been pre-programmed to eliminate itself in the course of history...and also all its memory of itself...through war (thermonuclear, genetic, biological), genocide, destruction of its sustaining environment, etc.