28 June 2018

Change of Directors in the Literature Archive at the Akademie der Künste

On 1 July 2018 the former head of the research department at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLM), Marcel Lepper, will assume direction of the Literature Archive at the Akademie der Künste. He is the successor to literary scholar Sabine Wolf, who held this position for more than ten years before becoming deputy director of the Akademie Archives.

On 1 November 2016, Sabine Wolf (b. 1961) began her tenure as deputy director of the archives at the Akademie der Künste. Following specialisations in German studies and archival science at universities in Leipzig and Berlin, Wolf worked in the Archives at the Akademie der Künste. In 2006 she became director of the Literature Archive. Sabine Wolf has curated several exhibitions, and has published essays and books on subjects concerned with literary history. Recent publications include DDR-Literatur. Eine Archivexpedition (co-edited with Ulrich von Bülow), Christoph Links Verlag, 2014 and Christa Wolf. Man steht sehr bequem zwischen allen Fronten – Briefe 1952-2011, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2016.

Marcel Lepper (b. 1977) was head of the research department at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach from 2008 to 2018; since 2018 he has been working as an adjunct professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Stuttgart. Building on his specialisations in German studies, history and philosophy at universities in Münster, Paris, Baltimore and Berlin, Lepper completed his dissertation at the FU Berlin in 2006. In 2015 he habilitated (university teaching qualification) at the University of Stuttgart in the German studies discipline. Research trips took him to the USA and to Great Britain. The main focuses of his work are Modern German Literature in an international context, the history of ideas, the history of science, textual criticism, and literary and archival theory. Lepper's publications include: Philologie. Zur Einführung, published by Junius, 2012, and Handbuch Archiv, co-edited with Ulrich Raulff for the J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2016.

With a present count of 368 individual inventories, the Literature Archive is not only the largest archival department at the Akademie der Künste, it is also a repository for one of the most extensive holdings of German literature. The literary heritage and cultural assets assembled here, dating from the end of the Wilhelmine era to the present ‒ that include the estates of Heinrich Mann, Georg Kaiser, Walter Jens, Walter Kempowski, Günter Grass, Imre Kertész, Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf ‒ offer a representative cross-section of German literature in the 20th and 21st centuries.