New research and exhibition project launched at the Viadrina Museum
This new research and exhibition project at the Viadrina Municipal Museum focuses for the first time on the multifaceted literary history of the town on the Oder, from the beginning of the early modern period to the end of the 20th century: there is much to discover. With the founding of the Viadrina – Brandenburg’s first university – in 1506, Frankfurt became a prominent intellectual and cultural centre. Since then, the town on the River Oder has been an important stage in the lives of many authors – including, even back then, a number of women writers: Many came from elsewhere, settled here and became part of Frankfurt’s society; others merely passed through the city briefly. Some of the writers born here gained recognition far beyond the city’s borders.
For centuries, Frankfurt’s local literary scene has linked the city in many ways with important figures and literary movements beyond the region. And so Frankfurt’s literary history reflects not only the long and eventful history of this city of trade, academia, garrisons and civil servants, but also German and European intellectual history.
The humanist Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523), who was already studying at the Viadrina in 1506, soon composed a laudatory ‘Song in Praise of the Mark’. The reformer Andreas Musculus (1514–1581), a professor of theology, parish priest at St Mary’s Church and, for a time, owner of the Junkerhaus – now home to the Viadrina Museum – had his popular ‘Devil’s Books’ printed by Johann Eichorn (1524–1583) at the university press: The *Hosenteufel* was followed by the *Fluchteufel* and, in 1556, the *Eheteufel*. The composers Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672) and Dieterich Buxtehude (1637–1707), however, preferred to use Latin texts by Musculus.
During the Baroque period, the poets of the First Silesian School gathered in Frankfurt. The poetess Christiana Mariana von Ziegler (1695–1760), who was crowned by the Emperor, and whose poems were set to music by Johann Sebastian (1685–1750) and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), lived in the city from 1741 onwards.
Another distinctive feature of Frankfurt’s literary history is Hebrew book printing, which took place here from the end of the 17th to the beginning of the 19th century: The recently acquired complete edition of a Babylonian Talmud, which was printed in Berlin and Frankfurt between 1734 and 1739, is on display in the museum’s permanent exhibition, amongst other items.
Ewald von Kleist (1715–1759), the Enlightenment thinker Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), Gottlob Samuel Nicolai (1725–1765) and Friedrich Christoph Nicolai (1733–1811), Heinrich Zschokke (1771–1848) and Christian Wilhelm Spieker (1780–1858) are also part of the city’s literary history. Of course, special mention must be made of Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), the 250th anniversary of whose birth will be marked in 2027.
Events in Frankfurt were also commented on prominently from afar: For instance, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) dedicated a poem to Prince Leopold of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1752–1785), who drowned in the Oder flood of 1785.
The Frankfurt-born late Romantic writer Franz von Gaudy (1800–1840), the fairy-tale poet Marie Petersen (1816–1859) and the writer Ernst von Wildenbruch (1845–1909) were very popular for a long time.
Gottfried Benn (1886–1956) and Alfred Henschke (1890–1928), known as ‘Klabund’, passed their A-levels shortly after 1900 at Frankfurt’s renowned Friedrichs-Gymnasium. Greek was taught there by the father of the translator Eva Rechel-Mertens (1895–1981), who published the first complete German translation of Proust’s *In Search of Lost Time* with Suhrkamp in 1957.
Paul Gurk (1880–1953) was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize in 1921. And in the mid-1920s, a ‘Literary Society’ was established in Frankfurt, which also published works.
The writer Susanne Kerckhoff (1918–1950), who took her own life in Berlin-Karolinenhof in 1950, had grown up in Frankfurt in the 1920s. Bernward Vesper (1938–1971), the son of the nationalist writer Will Vesper (1882–1962) and later fiancé of Gudrun Ensslin (1940–1977), was born in 1938 at Dr Hans Dege’s private clinic.
Hans Joachim Nauschütz (1940–2003), who had lived in what was then the district capital since the 1970s, was committed to fostering exchanges between German and Polish authors after 1990.&
As diverse as the literary traditions represented in Frankfurt an der Oder, and as varied as the writers associated with them may have been, so too are the stories and literary movements that have been initially compiled and examined as part of the project by the Berlin-based literary scholar and curator Lutz Dittrich, and which are subsequently presented in the new special exhibition.
The opening of the exhibition, with which the Frankfurt City Museum aims to enrich the content of the Kleist anniversary in 2027 (Kreuzungen – Intersections. 250 – Kleist), will take place on 10 September 2027 at the Museum Viadrina.
Various events and a colloquium are planned to accompany the literary history exhibition. Furthermore, as part of the project – which is funded entirely by third-party grants – a further volume of the *Frankfurter Studien zur Stadt- und Regionalgeschichte* is to be published.
