18 Jan 2021

New research project: Moritz Neuffer explores the personal archive of Hildegard Brenner

The historian Moritz Neuffer started work on the “Exploration of the Personal Archive of Hildegard Brenner, Literary Scholar, Cultural Historian, and Editor.” The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It is dedicated to the intellectual biography of Hildegard Brenner (born in 1927), whose scholarly and journalistic activities played a decisive role in the West German debates over literary and cultural theory in the 1960s and 1970s. Neuffer examines Brenner’s papers and recordings, which were handed over to the ZfL in 2019 and aims at developing an intellectual biography that approaches her life and work from diverse perspectives and understands academic, journalistic, and publishing practices as pivotal points for problems in the histories of theory, media, and gender.

Brenner, who began her career as a journalist and a non-fiction writer and later became professor of literary studies at the University of Bremen, also published the journal alternative from 1964 to 1982. This publication became widely known for its contributions to materialist aesthetics and French structuralism, but it also prominently treated East German and exile literature, as well as the labor movement. The journal’s editorial archive is located at the German Literature Archive in Marbach.

Beyond her own theoretical and historical works on Hölderlin, Benjamin, Brecht, and the National Socialist art policy, Brenner also initiated the book series collection alternative and published the only German-language translation of texts by Latvian theater actress and director Asja Lācis (1891–1979), with whom she actively corresponded. The extensive networks from which Brenner drew can be reconstructed through her personal archive, it includes, among other things, letters to and from Étienne Balibar, Roland Barthes, Wolf Biermann, Volker Braun, Lucien Goldmann, Julia Kristeva, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Macherey, Heiner Müller, and Helene Weigel, as well as correspondences with numerous publishers, magazines, and the radio stations for which Brenner produced programs taking their cues from the humanities.

Journalistic writing and different forms of publishing mediate between academic, mass media, and political contexts but often escape the attention of intellectual historiographies. The diverse contexts of Brenner’s publications emphasize the need to discuss the significance of non-canonized writing and publishing in the history of theory. Furthermore, both Brenner’s career and her work provide an opportunity to inquire into the history and historiographical representation of female intellectuals in the 20th century.

Moritz Neuffer studied history, German language and literature, and cultural studies at the universities of Hamburg, Paris VII, and the Humboldt University in Berlin. From 2017–2019, he was a docotral fellow at the ZfL with the project “Journalistic Forms of Theory. The journal “alternative” (1958–1982).” His dissertation was accepted by the Department of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt University, where he also worked as a research assistant from 2014–2016. In 2012/13, he was involved in the project to research the estate of Reinhart Koselleck at the German Literature Archive Marbach. Neuffer is a member of the “Working Group: The Cultural Study of Periodicals.”