Alexander Stephan (Germanist)

Alexander Stephan (born August 16, 1946 in Lüdenscheid ; † May 29, 2009 in Berlin ) was a German-American German studies scholar .

Life

Alexander Stephan was Professor, Ohio Eminent Scholar, and Senior Fellow of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University .

Stephan studied American and German at the Free University in Berlin and at the University of Michigan and received his doctorate from Princeton University . He has taught at Princeton, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Florida . Stephan was most recently a research professor in literary studies at Ohio State University .

As a Germanist, Stephan dealt with modern German literature and area studies. His academic focus was on exile research, literature from the Weimar Republic and GDR literature . He had published monographs on Anna Seghers , Christa Wolf , Max Frisch and Peter Weiss . Stephan was the first German literary scholar to have access to the FBI files of exiled German writers such as B. Brecht , Feuchtwanger , Mann and Seghers received. His evaluations of these files showed how tense the relationship between the American authorities and the writers expelled from Nazi Germany was.

At the Mershon Center, Stephan focused on international security and European-American relations. He had dealt with the influence of American culture on the GDR and edited five collections of essays on Americanization and anti-Americanism in Germany and Europe after 1945.

Stephan was the founder of the book series Exilstudien / Exile Studies, a member of the German PEN Center and scholarship holder from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation . His publications have been discussed on German television and CNN , in magazines such as Der Spiegel and in international newspapers such as The New York Times , The New York Review of Books , The Nation , The Guardian .

In 2007 a Festschrift was published for Stephan, Kulturpolitik und Politik der Kultur / Cultural Politics and the Politics of Culture (Oxford), edited by Helen Fehervary and Bernd Fischer.

His wife, Halina Stephan, is a professor of Slavic Studies at Ohio State University. She works on Russian avant-garde and Polish theater and is the director of the OSU Center for Slavic and East European Studies.

Works

Books

• Supervised. Expatriated. Exiled. Writers and the state. Bielefeld, 2007.
• Targeted by the FBI. German writers in exile in the files of the American secret services. Stuttgart, 1995; Berlin, 1998 (p., Modified edition); engl. as communazis. FBI Surveillance of German Emigré Writers. New Haven, 2000.
• Anna Seghers: 'The Seventh Cross'. World and impact of a novel. Berlin, 1997 ISBN 3-7466-5199-9 .
• Anna Seghers in exile. Bonn, 1993.
• Max Frisch. Munich, 1983.
• Christa Wolf. Munich, 1976, 4th, extended and revised edition 1991.
• German exile literature. Munich, 1979.

Editions

• America on my mind. On the Americanization of German culture since 1945. (with Jochen Vogt), Munich, 2006.
• The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945. New York, 2006, p. 2007.
• America of the Authors. From Kafka until 09/11. Munich, 2006.
• Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees. Oxford, 2005.
• Refuge and Reality: Feuchtwanger and the European Émigrés in California. (with Pól O'Dochartaigh) Amsterdam, 2005.
• Americanization and Anti-Americanism. The German Encounter with American Culture After 1945. New York, 2005, p. 2007.
• Anna Seghers, The Decision. Novel. Work edition, Vol. I, 7. Berlin, 2003.
• Döblin, L. Feuchtwanger, A. Seghers, A. Zweig, Early 20th Century German Fiction. New York, 2003, p. 2003.
• Jeans, skirt and Vietnam. American culture in the GDR. (with Therese Hörnigk), Berlin, 2002.
• 'Red = brown'? Brecht Dialog 2000. National Socialism and Stalinism with Brecht and contemporaries. (with Therese Hörnigk) Berlin, 2000.
• Uwe Johnson, Speculations About Jakob and Other Writings. New York, 2000, p. 2000.
• Themes and Structures. Studies in German Literature from Goethe to the Present. A Festschrift for Theodore Ziolkowski . Columbia, 1997.
• Ulrich Plenzdorf, Günter Kunert, Anna Seghers, and others, The New Sufferings of Young W. and Other Stories from the German Democratic Republic. (with Therese Hörnigk) New York, 1997, p. 1997.
• Christa Wolf: The Author's Dimension. Selected essays. New York and London, 1993; Chicago, 1995.
• Editor of Exile Studies / Exile Studies. A monograph series. New York, 1993ff. (Vol. 1–10, Vol. 11 in preparation).
• Exile. Literature and the arts after 1933. Bonn, 1990.
• Writing in exile. On the aesthetics of German exile literature 1933–1945. (with Hans Wagener) Bonn, 1985.
• Peter Weiss. The aesthetics of resistance. Frankfurt, 1983, 2nd edition 1987, 3rd edition 1990.

TV

• Left Behind: Popular culture, religious fundamentalism and politics in the USA by George W. Bush , TV talk, 2005.
• Thomas Mann and the CIA , TV Feature, 2002.
• Exiles and the CIA , TV Feature, 2002.
• Brecht and the FBI , TV Feature, 2001.
• Targeted by the FBI. German authors in US exile , TV film (with Johannes Eglau), 1995.

Web links

• Literature by and about Alexander Stephan in the catalog of the German National Library
• Website of Alexander Stephan ( Memento from February 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (English)