Lesung: Enemy Literature – How American Intellectuals and European Émigrés Collaborated Against Nazi Germany
About the book (from Cambridge University Press)
An entire forgotten corpus of US writing on the Nazi German enemy boomed in a matter of a few years, peaked during World War II, and collapsed within months of the war ending. For a fleeting moment in history, significant parts of the intellectual world in the United States converged to provide a cool-headed analysis of the Nazi threat and a clear identification of the enemy. Starting in 1944, these writers also offered an elaborate plan for a postwar re-education that would transform the National Socialist German nation into a democratic ally. Readers alarmed by the current resurgence of authoritarianism will learn from the work of those activists who analyzed Nazi Germany during World War II. This book, the first monographic study of this literature, provides pointed introductions to the main intellectual projects, their unique collaborative spirit, and their epochal results.
About the author Dr. Frederic Ponten
Frederic Ponten is a research associate in Modern German Literature at the University of Regensburg. After studying in Siegen, Barcelona, Berlin, and Baltimore, he completed his Ph.D. in German Studies at Princeton University. He currently holds a 2025-26 Sylvia Naish Postdoctoral Fellowship from the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.
About Prof. Dr. Marike Janzen
Marike Janzen (University of Kansas) is joining REAF on campus from May to July as a Leibniz ScienceCampus Visiting Professor.
She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic, German, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. She also serves as the Director of the Max Kade Center for German-American Studies. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st-century German literature, literature of human rights, migration and refugee experience, literary publics, and the literature of the international left, as well as broader questions in comparative and world literature. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin.
Organized by the Regensburg European American Forum and the Leibniz ScienceCampus "Europe and America".