Jürgen Wertheimer

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Jürgen Wertheimer in dialogue at the 7th Tübingen Book Festival (May 2011)
Jürgen Wertheimer as speaker at the Tübingen demonstration against cuts in education (May 2014)

Jürgen Edmund Wertheimer (born January 18, 1947 in Munich ) is a German professor for modern German literature and comparative literature at the University of Tübingen and an author.

Life

Wertheimer studied German, comparative literature, English literature and art history from 1969 to 1973 in Munich, Siena and Rome. In 1984/85 he completed his habilitation. From 1986 to 1987 he was professor associé for “Littérature allemande” in Metz. From 1991 to 2015 Wertheimer held a professorship for modern German literature and comparative literature in Tübingen.

Wertheimer has been co-editor of the comparative magazine " arcadia " since 1992 . In 1994/95 he was visiting professor at the Université Paris 8. From 1996 to 2004 he was the organizer of the Tuebingen poetics lectureship .

Since the summer semester of 2008, Jürgen Wertheimer has also been a co-initiator of the WertWelten cooperation project. In 2013 he was awarded the “Prix international de laïcité”, which is awarded by the Comité Laïcité République (Paris). He has been retired since 2015. Since 2017 he has headed the "Cassandra project. Crisis early detection through literature evaluation", supported by the Federal Ministry of Defense. In his most recent series of lectures he is a. a. with the Exodus myth , the phenomenon of literary outsiders (Hölderlin, Kleist, Kafka), trust as a basic cultural feeling and European cultural history. Since 2019 Jürgen Wertheimer has also been running the blog PPPlog - Perception, Perspektive, Performance together with the theater critic Cornelie Ueding.

Viewpoints

" Uniqueness " is artificial and is constructed and staged in the event of a conflict in order to negate, camouflage , hide or push aside diversity , according to Wertheimer in an article from 2002. Normal cases that need to be defended and emancipated are unspectacular Sentences like those possible that the clothing company Benetton has the young Yussef say in a collection catalog against the background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict : He is happy to be a mixed race. Wertheimer argues that Benetton does not want to sell an ideal world - or multicultural idyll, but rather, en passant, "to create a feeling for the inner diversity and complexity of normal life courses in areas of conflict."

In his award speech for the “Prix international de laïcité” (2013), Wertheimer advocates viewing literature as a power that is presumably underestimated, but which is the most efficient means against fundamentalism, i.e. the best means of maintaining the principle of secularism . Literature alone deals with the roots of systems of power. Literature wants large numbers of people who are critical of resistance and who are difficult to manipulate. Literature achieves this by allowing complexities, ambiguities and ambivalences of the present to emerge in the narrative and not offering any answers. Above all, literature could enable us to take a new look at the complex abysses of our own feelings, and last but not least, literature invites us to go on a search and form our own opinion. Apparently, literature can do a lot and, according to Wertheimer, it is able to do exactly what manipulators fear most, and rightly so: that precisely no coercion is imposed and people's lives are not covered with schoolwork. Literature is a means of enlightening and anticipating catastrophes, as well as a means with which an individual can protect himself against the vortex of dangerous currents of the systems by not only feeling obliged to one side, but by cultivating a real sense of the real.

Research priorities

  • translation
  • Culture transfer
  • Poetics of Affects
  • Difference research
  • Myths, ideologies, criticism
  • pluricultural society
  • Values ​​and attitudes
  • Dialogue of cultures, cultures of dialogue

Works (selection)

  • Europe - a history of its cultures . Penguin, Munich 2020. ISBN 978-3-328-60063-3 .
  • World language literature. The globalization of words. Konkursbuchverlag, Tübingen 2018. ISBN 978-3-88769-461-6
  • together with Isabelle Holz and Florian Rogge: Maidan. Tahrir. Taksim. The language of places. Protest, awakening, repression. Marixverlag, Wiesbaden 2017. ISBN 978-3-7374-1063-2
  • together with Gert Ueding (Ed.): Back to literature. Controversial essays. Dietz, Bonn 2017. ISBN 978-3-8012-0500-3
  • together with Niels Birbaumer : Trust. A risky feeling. Ecowin, Salzburg 2016. ISBN 978-3-7110-0096-5
  • Don Quixote's heirs. The art of the European novel: stations of the European novel. Konkursbuchverlag, Tübingen 2013. ISBN 978-3-88769-357-2
  • with Nicholas J. Conard : The Venus from the Ice. How our culture came into being 40,000 years ago. Knaus, Munich 2010. ISBN 978-3-8135-0376-0
  • When Mary invented God. Pendo, Munich 2009 (novel).
  • Sisyphus & Boomerang. Interim reports. Klöpfer & Meyer, Tübingen 2006.
  • Schiller's players and villains. Konkursbuchverlag, Tübingen 2005.
  • Everyday adventure. European novels from Cervantes to Zola. Stauffenburg, Tübingen 2004.
  • War of Words: The Cultural Conflict Lie. LiteraturWwissenschaft.de, Marburg 2003. ISBN 3-936134-05-7
  • You wake up and the nightmare begins ... 20th century European novels. Tübingen 2002.
  • Strategies of dumbing down, infantilism in the fun society. Edited together with Peter V. Zima . Munich: Beck 2002. (Beck'sche Reihe.) ISBN 978-3-406-45963-4
  • Don Juan and Bluebeard. Erotic serial offenders in literature. Munich: Beck 1999. ISBN 978-3-406-42116-7
  • “The most dangerous of goods, language”. On the crisis of the dialogue between the Enlightenment and Romanticism (Hölderlin, Diderot, Rousseau). Munich 1990.
  • Aesthetics of Violence. Their representation in literature and art. Jürgen Wertheimer (Ed.), Athenäum, Frankfurt a. M. 1986.
  • Dialogic speaking with Stefan George. Forms and changes. Munich 1978.

Awards and speeches

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Boualem Sansal explains the award on October 23, 2013
  2. ↑ See kupferblau-Tübinger Unimagazin 2015
  3. ↑ Jürgen Wertheimer (2002): Power of Words , in: conflict focus tolerance? Analyzes, explorations, clarifications . Michael Kessler, Wolfgang Graf Vitzthum, Jürgen Wertheimer (eds.), Tübingen: Stauffenburg-Verlag, pp. 243-261, pp. 254-255.
  4. ↑ Discours de Jürgen Wertheimer, lauréat du Prix international: “La révolte de la littérature contre le fondamentalisme ou La guerre des mots” , “Prix international de la Laïcité” awarded by the Comité Laïcité République, Paris, November 13, 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Wertheimer, Jürgen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wertheimer, Jürgen Edmund
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German professor for modern German literature and comparative literature at the University of Tübingen
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich