Kathryn Sederberg, Kalamazoo College

Description

Many German and Austrian Jewish refugees, including prominent writers, artists, intellectuals, and unpublished authors, wrote a diary during the 1930s and 40s as they fled National Socialism. This monograph centers the practice of diary writing during persecution, forced displacement, and exile, and the changes in writing and its functions as the writer is geographically displaced. Drawing on both published diaries and archival manuscripts, I analyze the role of the diary as a site where writers document their search for a new life. These narratives give account of new beginnings in a strange country, where the writing subject is shaped by processes of acculturation and new concepts of self, home, and belonging. The diary itself functions as a critical site for dealing with the loss of home and as a tool of agency and self-construction, becoming part of resistance and survival as diarists write to preserve and create memories.

About the Presenter

Kathryn Sederberg is an associate professor of German Studies at Kalamazoo College. Her research areas include twentieth-century German literature, life writing with a focus on diaries, war and gender, and National Socialism and its legacies. She has published in German Studies Review, German Quarterly, Biography, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, and Die Unterrichtspraxis/ Teaching German. She has had fellowships from the Mandel Center at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and in 2026 she was an EHRI-ERIC fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute. For excellence in teaching German, she was the recipient of a 2022 Certificate of Merit from the Goethe-Institut and the American Association of Teachers of German.

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This event is free to all faculty, grad students, and interested members of the public, but all participants must register in advance. Space is limited, so please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.

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About the German Studies Seminar Series

The German Studies Seminar provides a forum for discussing papers that cross disciplinary boundaries and that reconceptualize the materials and conventions of German Studies as a field, including beyond the frames of the German language and nation state.

The seminar’s co-organizers are Alice Goff (University of Chicago), Dustin Lovett (DePaul University), Imke Meyer (University of Illinois Chicago), Sophie Salvo (University of Chicago), Anna Souchuk (DePaul University), and Lauren Stokes (Northwestern University).

The seminar is generously sponsored by Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University, and the Department of History at Northwestern University.