Welcome to the Meet the Fellows series, where we introduce the researchers in our fellowship programme and hear about their projects, academic paths, and work during their time with us. Today, we speak with Anna Weber from the 2024-25 cohort about her compelling doctoral research, academic journey, and experiences during the fellowship.
Anna studies autobiographies and memoirs by exiled German-speaking Jewish women writers in the post-war period, focusing on four notable authors—Vicki Baum, Gina Kaus, Gabriele Tergit, and Salka Viertel—who emigrated to the US or UK and wrote from the experience of exile. She shares insights into the challenges these writers faced in publishing their work and how her research critically examines autobiographical texts beyond historical testimony.
Anna also reflects on her academic inspirations, the impact of teaching during the rise of generative AI, and how the fellowship has boosted her confidence as she approaches the final stages of her doctoral journey.
About Your Research
Can you briefly describe your doctoral research project and what drew you to this topic?
I study autobiographies and memoirs by exiled German-speaking Jewish women writers in the post-war period. My focus is on four authors whose names might not be well known to an English-speaking audience, though they all spent several decades as emigrants in the United States or the United Kingdom: Vicki Baum, Gina Kaus, Gabriele Tergit and Salka Viertel. Born in Central Europe in the 1880s/90s, they enjoyed remarkable careers as writers or artists in Berlin and Vienna during the 1920s. However, Baum, Kaus, Tergit and Viertel were all affected by the rising threat of Nazism. Emigrating between the late 1920s and late 1930s, none of them ever returned. What initially drew me to their texts, and to German-Jewish autobiographical writing in exile more broadly, was a fascination with how lives are written, especially lives lived in the cataclysm of the 20th century. Writing in the aftermath of the existential rupture of exile, in dislocation between languages and cultures, how can a life be retrieved on the page?
What surprising findings or challenges have you encountered in your research, and how did they influence your approach?
My initial assumption was that the texts I study would have been regarded as important documents of historical testimony. However, once I entered the archive, it quickly became clear that this was a somewhat naïve perspective, owing much to the hindsight from which I approach these texts today. In reality, it took Kaus, Tergit, and Viertel nearly a decade each to find publishers for their autobiographies. The rejection letters they received in the process reveal the extent to which their work was devalued. Some publishers claimed the market was already saturated with similar books, while others feared the content might alienate or offend post-war German readers. Even more telling is the feedback they received from friends, advisors, agents, and editors, often dismissing their chosen approaches to narrating their own lives. Some readers claimed the manuscripts focused too much on personal experience and not enough on historical context, while others paradoxically argued the opposite: that there was too much focus on the times and not enough on the author herself. These findings prompted me to reorient my methodological approach. Rather than treating autobiographical texts as transparent or self-evident records of the past, my project argues that they must be examined with the same critical attention we give to other literary text, especially in terms of the conditions of their production, their genesis, and their reception.
Academic Journey and Motivation
What inspired you to pursue doctoral research in this field, and how did your previous experiences prepare you? Can you share a memorable moment from your academic journey?
I am deeply grateful to the late Laura Marcus, my thesis supervisor during my Master’s degree. The programme focused on 20th century English literature; however, I found myself increasingly interested in literary points of contact between the English and German language spheres. It quickly became clear to me that, in the 20th century, the main such point of contact was German-speaking writers’ exile from the Nazis. Many voices in exile literature, in turn, are German-Jewish voices. It does puzzle me that five years of studying English literature eventually led me to return, intellectually, to studying writers in my own native language, German, but I opted to write an essay on exilic storytelling in Stefan Zweig’s autobiography The World of Yesterday (1942) and Anna Segher’s autobiographically inspired novel Transit (1944). It was Laura who first suggested that I consider doctoral study. Her sudden and untimely death shortly after my graduation was a profound loss for me, and I questioned whether I wanted to continue without her guidance. I was fortunate, however, to meet my current supervisors, who have helped me carry forward the research questions I first began exploring under her supervision.
What have been the most rewarding and challenging aspects of your PhD journey?
Both one of the most rewarding and one the most challenging aspects of my PhD so far has been teaching, which I began just as generative AI became widely accessible. During my first two years, I worked as a junior member of the German Literature department (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at Stuttgart. I had considerable freedom in designing my seminars, from choosing topics and compiling reading lists to organising excursions. I taught courses on my core research interests, as well as related themes like the New Woman in the Weimar Republic, and my students’ contributions often led me to revisit and rethink aspects of my research. At the same time, I was aware that my students’ experience of their early days in academia was quite different from my own just a few years earlier, and I found myself navigating the new challenge of guiding them through their first academic assignments amid the rise of AI as a widespread research tool. After a year’s break from teaching during the Fellowship, I am curious as to how the situation has evolved. I look forward to returning to the classroom later this year, this time at King’s College London.
Fellowship Experience and Community
Looking ahead, what is your next step following the fellowship, and how has the fellowship influenced your work?
I am entering my writing-up year. Preparing my ideas for submission is daunting, and I am deeply grateful for boost of confidence the second fellowship seminar has given me in this regard. The generous camaraderie among the fellows reminded me of how much I enjoy intellectual work in its most basic sense: engaging with ideas.
Photo: Anna-Lena Kaufmann
