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Department of German,
Russian and East European Studies

Meike Werner

Centennial Chair of German Studies | Professor of German and European Studies
Director, Max Kade Center for European and German Studies

Meike Werner is Professor of German and European Studies, Director of the Max Kade Center for German and European Studies, and director of Graduate Studies in German. In 1996, she received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in German at Yale University. After teaching at Brandeis University, she joined Vanderbilt University in 1997.

Werner has published on German literature, print media, intellectual history, and the history of Germanistik from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Her teaching spans from the literature of the Middle Ages to early twentieth century modernism and the late twentieth century (post-wall) literature. She also teaches courses in European Studies and Jewish Studies. With a passion for archives, Werner’s research is often focused on non-canonical forms of writing, and on unpublished letters and diaries. She also teaches archival methods to graduate students, many of whom go on to work in literary archives in Germany and elsewhere.

Werner’s books include Gruppenbild mit Max Weber (2023), Peter Demetz. Was wir wiederlesen wollen. Literarische Essays 1960-2010 (2022); Ein Gipfel für Morgen (2021); Eduard Berend und Heinrich Meyer Briefwechsel, 1938-1972 (2013), Moderne in der Provinz (2003; English translation: Germany’s Other Modernism, 2023), and special issues for the Germanic Review, Goethe Yearbook, and Internationale Archiv für die Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL). In addition, she is the co-editor of Logischer Empirismus, Lebensreform und die deutsche Jugendbewegung | Logical Empiricism, Life Reform, and the German Youth Movement (2022); of The Art of Dreams (2016), of German Literature, Jewish Critics (2002), and of Romantik, Revolution & Reform. Der Eugen Diederichs Verlag im Epochenkontext 1900-1949 (1999), as well as Karl Korsch, Briefe 1908-1939 (2001). She is co-editor of Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL) and of Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur (STSL) | Studies and Texts on the Social History of Literature

Werner also co-curated two exhibits in Jena, one commemorating the centenary of the Eugen Diederichs Verlag (1996) and one on Jenas Aufbruch in die Moderne (2003). Currently, she is working on a book, entitled »Katakombenzeit. Wilhelm Flitner in Hamburg 1929-1969«, and an edited volume on »The Persistence of Reading in the Digital Age«

Werner is the recipient of a number of awards from, among others, the Thyssen Foundation, the DFG (German Research Foundation), the German American Academic Council (GAAC), the Goethe Institute, the Getty Research Institute, the Institute Vienna Circle and the Max Kade Foundation. In 2011, she was awarded Vanderbilt University’s Outstanding Graduate Mentoring Award, and in 2022 the Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring Award.

Specializations

19th and 20th centuries German culture and literature, modernism, print media, intellectual history, history of German Studies in the U.S.


Representative Publications

Books

  • Gruppenbild mit Max Weber. Gespräche über die Zukunft Deutschlands nach dem Krieg (2023)
  • Germany’s Other Modernism. The Jena Paradigm Paradigm, 1900-1914 (English translation of Moderne in der Provinz, 2023)
  • Peter Demetz. Was wir wiederlesen wollen. Literarische Essays 1960-2010 (2022)
  • Logical Empiricism, Life Reform, and the German Youth Movement. Logischer Empirismus, Lebensreform und die deutsche Jugendbewegung (with Christian Damböck and Günther Sandner, 2022)
  • Ein Gipfel für Morgen. Kontroversen 1917/18 um die Neuordnung Deutschlands nach dem Krieg auf Burg Lauenstein (2021)
  • Eduard Berend und Heinrich Meyer Briefwechsel, 1938-1972 (2013).
  • Moderne in der Provinz. Kulturelle Experimente im Fin de Siècle Jena (2003)
  • German Literature, Jewish Critics: The Brandeis Symposium (with Stephen D. Dowden, 2002)
  • Karl Korsch, Briefe 1908-1939, vol. 8 of The Complete Works of Karl Korsch. Co-ed. with Michael Buckmiller, and Michel Prat (2001)
  • Romantik, Revolution & Reform. Der Eugen Diederichs Verlag im Epochenkontext 1900-1949 (with Justus H. Ulbricht (1999)

Essays

  • »Frau mit Ehe. Elisabeth Czapski, verheiratete Flitner«, in Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte XIV/4 (2020).
  • »How far away was L.A.? Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades 1942/43. Rede zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung Thomas Mann in Amerika«, in Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 63 (2019), 463-472.
  • »Hans Magnus Enzensberger oder die Verabschiedung des literarischen Provinzialismus,« special topic with Jan Bürger for IASL 42.2 (2019): 380-436.
  • »Tanz der Gedanken und Gefühle. Karl Korsch in Jena: Freistudentenschaft | Serakreis | Sommerakademie,« in Karl Korsch zwischen Rechts- und Sozialwissenschaft (Jenaer Schriften zum Recht), ed. Jürgen Seifert and Klaus Vieweg (Stuttgart: Boorberg Verlag, 2017), 11-28.
  • »Introduction: Remembering the Kahlschlag«, Introduction to special section: Remembering the Kahlschlag: Peter Suhrkamp and His Publishing House after 1945, Germanic Review 89 (2014): 305-307.
  • »Jugend im Feuer. August 1914 im Serakreis«, Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte VIII/2 (2014): 19-34.
  • »Warum 1913? Zur Fortsetzung des Themenschwerpunkts ›Das Jahr 1913 in Geschichte und Gegenwart‹«. Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL) 38.2 (2013): 443-451.
  • »Modern Jena as a Model of Cultural Regeneration in Wilhelmine Germany«. Journal of the History of Ideas 74.2 (2013): 267-288.
  • »The Place of German Modernism«. With Stephen D. Dowden. In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History. Ed. Helmut Walser Smith (New York: Oxford UP, 2011), 481-498.
  • »Germanistik in the Shadow of the Holocaust. The Changing Profile of the Professoriate, 1942-1970.« In The History of German Studies in the U.S.A. Ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (New York: MLA, 2003), 409-20.
  • “Book History as the History of Literature,” Germanic Review 76.4 (2001): 283-89.