This talk focuses on three publishers in the early 20th century: Samuel Fischer in Berlin, Eugen Diederichs in Jena, and Kurt Wolff in Leipzig. Samuel Fischer, who founded the S. Fischer publishing house in 1886 in Berlin, started out by publishing the young revolutionary literary movement of naturalism, most importantly Ibsen, Zola, and Gerhart Hauptmann. Eugen Diederichs, who founded his publishing house ten years later in Florenz and Leipzig, has been viewed very early on as antipode to S. Fischer’s Berlin modernism. His modernist publishing program was inspired by Nietzsche and the neo-Romantic movement. Finally, Kurt Wolff appeared on the publishing scene in 1913 and supported a new generation of young poets and writers, best known as Expressionists.

Within their programs of promoting modern German literature and culture, all three publishers published European and non-European literature in translation: Fischer, as mentioned, Zola and Ibsen; Diederichs published Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Whitman, even Chinese philosphy and religion; Wolff Claudel, Nikolai Leskov, and Sinclair Lewis. The presentation explores their competing concepts of world literature within German modernism, focusing on the tension between the concept of national and European and even global literatures.

Meike Werner is Associate Professor of German and European Studies and director of Graduate Studies in the Department of German, Russian & East European Studies. In 1996, she received an interdisciplinary Yale Ph.D. in German. 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 With a passion for archives, Werner’s research is often focused on non-canonical forms of writing, and on unpublished letters and diaries.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.


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