Europäisches
Kolleg
Jena

Das 20. Jahrhundert und seine Repräsentationen

Representing the 20th Century


Anja Thiele

Anja Thiele studied modern German literature, art history, philosophy, and communications in Erfurt and Jena from 2007 to 2014. She worked as a freelance journalist throughout her studies. In Jena she also worked as a research assistant at the Theater Studies program under Prof. Nina Birkner. Her Master’s thesis on Elfriede Jelinek was awarded a prize for outstanding academic achievement by the Philosophical Faculty of Jena University. From 2015 to March 2018 she has been a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Europäisches Kolleg Jena.

Contact

Historisches Institut
Fürstengraben 13
D-07743 Jena

E-Mail

Telefon: +49 (0)3641 944 493

Research project

Representations of the Shoah in East German Literature (working title)

This dissertation plans to investigate how the persecution and extermination of the Jews under Nazism was dealt with in literary fiction under the restrictive historical and cultural policies of the GDR. Starting from the theoretical assumption that literature, as part of historical culture, always interacts with society and contributes to the construction of a historical consciousness, the aim is to answer two different questions. The first question is to what extent political and social constraints influenced the literary discourse on the Holocaust in the GDR. The second question is to what extent the works in question themselves, by their genuine literary reflectiveness and powers of articulation, affirmed and co-created or subverted the official historical policy of the GDR with its institutionalized narrative of legitimation (antifascism, communist resistance).

The body of texts under consideration includes works of fiction by Jewish survivors as well as by non-Jewish writers from the entire forty years of the GDR’s existence. Key texts, e.g., by Jurek Becker, Rolf Schneider, Peter Edel and Christoph Hein, will be categorized and contrasted with Bruno Apitz’s Nackt unter Wölfen [Naked Among Wolves], the discourse-setting standard work of East German Holocaust literature. The research project is a desideratum, as no extensive monograph has been published on the topic to date.

Research interests

Literature, art, and social theory

Gender-based literary criticism

The transmission of literature through museums

Drama and theater of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Select publications

„Welch Wort in die Kälte gerufen“ – eine Lyrikanthologie über die Shoah im Kontext der DDR-Erinnerungskultur, in: Medaon – Magazin für jüdisches Leben in Forschung und Bildung, 10 (2016), 19, S. 1–15.

Die Aura in der (Literatur-)Vermittlung. Die Inszenierung einer Faust-Ausgabe in der Ausstellung Lebensfluten – Tatensturm im Goethe-Nationalmuseum, in: Britta Hochkirchen/Elke Kollar (eds.): Zwischen Materialität und Ereignis. Literaturvermittlung in Ausstellungen, Museen und Archiven, Bielefeld 2015, pp. 137-154.

Die eigene Stimme. Eine Reportage über die Autorin Claudia Grehn, in: Theaterhaus Jena – ‚My heart will go on‘. Dokumentation eines Flüchtlingsprojekts. Insert zu Theater der Zeit (2012), vol. 5, pp. 24-25.