Christa Bürger

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Signature on a letter

Christa Bürger (* 1935 ) is a German specialist in German . From 1973 to 1998 she was Professor of Literary Studies at the Institute for German Language and Literature I at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main . Her areas of work included, in particular, the reconstruction of the history of reception of Enlightenment literature and the emergence of the dichotomy of "high" and "lower" literature, later also the theory of aesthetic modernity , the social role of women writers in the epoch between the Enlightenment and Romanticism as well as a feminist theory of literature.

Christa Bürger was married to the Bremen literary scholar Peter Bürger (1936–2017), with whom she also worked closely on a professional level. The program for the symposium on Christa Bürger and Peter Bürger in the German Literature Archive in Marbach said in 2016: "As intellectuals, the literary scholars Christa Bürger and Peter Bürger made a decisive contribution to shaping the second half of the 20th century in Germany, which was turbulent in terms of political and educational reform."

Life and research

Christa Bürger grew up with her older sister in a three-room apartment on Niddastraße in Frankfurt am Main ; her father worked for the Reichsbahn at the Frankfurt freight yard. After attending an elementary school in Frankfurt and - due to the war - a two-class village school with relatives in the Rhön in the winter of 1943/44 , Christa Müller was finally able to switch to a grammar school in Frankfurt - as was her maiden name. There she passed the Abitur in 1956. Then she studied in Frankfurt a. a. with Josef Kunz (1906–1990) German studies, with the aim of becoming a teacher. After the state examination, she went from 1961 to 1963 as a lecturer at the University of Lyon . She attended the Study Seminar in Offenbach and taught from 1965 to 1973 as a secondary school teacher German, philosophy and French at secondary schools, first at the Clara-Schumann-Gymnasium in Bonn , at the same place where her husband Peter was active citizens as a university assistant at the University, until in 1971 he was offered a call to the recently founded University of Bremen in Bremen . A stopover was Erlangen , after which both lived in Bremen for decades.

During her time in Bonn, the preparatory work for her dissertation was carried out , which was published in 1973 by Athenäum Verlag under the programmatic title Text Analysis as Ideology Critique. On the reception of contemporary entertainment literature appeared in the same year as its ideology-critical examination of the subject didactics of German teaching ( German teaching - ideology or enlightenment ). Referring to both writings, Christa Bürger applied for a professorship at Frankfurt University in 1973 and was appointed by the Ministry of Culture to the then Institute for Didactics of German Language and Literature , where she researched and taught until her retirement.

Oriented towards the critical theory of the Frankfurt School , she held seminars and lectures on the history of German teaching and worked with students of the teaching profession to develop teaching models with the goal of education . Her teaching model for contemporary entertainment literature (1974) published by Diesterweg was temporarily excluded from teaching in 1976 in West Berlin by the school senator as "ideological and completely one-sided", but rehabilitated after contradictions by Volker Klotz and Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer . Together with Peter Bürger, she researched and published at the same time on the functional change in art and literature in the course of the Enlightenment , Sturm und Drang and Weimar Classics (i.e. on the emergence of the idea of ​​the autonomy of the work of art ). a. in the Suhrkamp book The origin of the bourgeois institution of art in court Weimar. Studies in the sociology of literature on classical Goethe .

In the 1980s, Christa Bürger expanded her research topics again and approached literary feminism by examining the life plans of women from four centuries (the subtitle of one of her books). She justified this "change of direction from literary studies to feminist essay " in her detailed autobiography, which reconstructs her academic career, Mein Weg durch die Literaturwissenschaft (2003) by pointing out that the theoretical framework she has always advocated is also suitable for "recognizing a letter, which does not exist at all for the history of literature. […] From the perspective of the dichotomization process , what women have written presents itself as something that does not achieve the status of literature. ”Numerous essays were broadcast on Deutschlandfunk - even after their retirement .

Christa Bürger lives in Berlin today .

Works (selection)

  • German lessons - ideology or education. Diesterweg, Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 978-3-425-01614-6
  • Text analysis as a critique of ideology. For the reception of contemporary entertainment literature. Athenaeum, Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 978-3-7610-0350-3
  • Contemporary light literature. Historical novel, non-fiction book, marriage novel, youth novel. Diesterweg, Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 978-3-425-06271-6
  • The origin of the bourgeois institution of art in courtly Weimar. Studies in the sociology of literature on classical Goethe. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1977, ISBN 978-3-518-07461-9
  • as editor with Peter Bürger and Jochen Schulte-Sasse: Naturalism, Aestheticism. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 978-3-518-10992-2
  • Tradition and subjectivity. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 978-3-518-07926-3
  • as editor with Peter Bürger and Jochen Schulte-Sasse: Enlightenment and literary public. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 978-3-518-11040-9
  • as editor with Peter Bürger and Jochen Schulte-Sasse: On the dichotomization of high and low literature. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 978-3-518-11089-8
  • with Herbert von der Heide: From Sturm und Drang to Classics. Materials on the functional change in literature. Metzler, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 978-3-476-30236-6 (teachers' book), ISBN 978-3-476-20294-9 (student workbook)
  • as editor with Peter Bürger: Postmodernism: everyday life, allegory and avant-garde. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 978-3-518-28248-9
  • Write life. The classic, the romantic and the place of women. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 978-3-476-00681-3
  • The hope of one day no longer thinking alone. Women's life plans from four centuries. Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 978-3-476-01461-0
  • with Peter Bürger: The Disappearance of the Subject. / The thinking of life. Fragments of a History of Subjectivity. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 978-3-518-29112-2
  • My way through literary studies. 1968 - 1998. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 978-3-518-12312-6
  • Goethe's Eros. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-458-35025-5
  • Excess and renunciation. Signs of life from Caroline Schlegel-Schelling to Simone de Beauvoir. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-8353-1945-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry by Christa Bürger at the German Association of Germanists
  2. Critique of life. Symposium on Christa Bürger and Peter Bürger in the German Literature Archive Marbach, 27./28. October 2016.
  3. Christa Bürger: My way through literary studies. 1968 - 1998. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 978-3-518-12312-6 , p. 123. - All details in the Life section are based on this publication.
  4. Christa Bürger, Mein Weg durch die Literaturwissenschaft, pp. 239, 249