Lunchtime Talk: A Publishing Alliance - Hannah Arendt’s collaboration with Kurt and Helen Wolff on getting Jaspers and Benjamin published in the US
With Visiting Scholar Marion Detjen
Monday, December 4, 2023
12:30 pm EST/GMT-5
RSVP required- email Tina Stanton: [email protected]Hannah Arendt was not only an author, but also an editor. She worked with great skill and dedication to publish and publicize authors in the USA to whom she felt committed. Her closest allies in this endeavor were the publishing couple Kurt and Helen Wolff, and after Kurt Wolff's death in 1963, Helen Wolff alone. I would like to present some archival findings from my research stay in the USA this semester and discuss which historical contingencies and contexts influenced the publishing alliance between the Wolffs and Hannah Arendt. The discussion will include Hannah Arendt's Jewish identity and the shared and separate experiences of Arendt and the Wolffs in emigration, as well as aspects of gender history and strategies for dealing with the commercialization of the book business in the 1960s.
Marion Detjen is a Visiting Scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center. She teaches migration history and global history at Bard College Berlin and works for Bard College Berlin’s scholarship program for displaced students. She is a graduate of the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales, and studied European history and German literature and linguistics in Berlin and Munich, where she received her MA and passed her first state exam. She worked for several years as a freelance curator, teacher, writer, and activist, before receiving her PhD from Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation on rescue helpers after the building of the Berlin Wall. 2009 - 2014 Marion worked and taught at Humboldt University Berlin, 2015 - 2107 on a DFG-position at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam. She is currently writing a book on the German-American publisher in exile Helen Wolff and her most favorite author Uwe Johnson. She is a regular contributor to the column „10nach8“ at ZEIT-Online as part of its editorial team, and a co-founder and board member of "Wir machen das," a coalition of action focused on the migration crisis, where she recently set up “Helen Wolff grants” to support female writers at risk in Afghanistan and other regions of crisis.
RSVP required- email Tina Stanton: [email protected]
For more information, call 845-758-6822.
Time: 12:30 pm EST/GMT-5
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