In the late eighteenth century, a group of Jews in Berlin wrote and published their autobiographies in the German language. For the fi rst time, they chose to write about themselves and tell their life stories, to a non-Jewish audience. Which experiences did they choose to write about? Which literary models could they chose from? And how where their writings received? A study of these texts will sketch a new, and at times surprising history of German-Jewish writing.
Liliane Weissberg is Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Science and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work concentrates on philosophy and literature from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, and her books include Geistersprache: Philosophischer und literarischer Diskurs im späten achtzehnten Jahrhundert (1990), Edgar Allan Poe (1991), Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (with Dan Ben-Amos, 1999), Romancing the Shadow (with J. Gerald Kennedy, 2001), and a critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1997).
