Kathrin Witter

Kathrin Witter is writing her dissertation about Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectics and the GDR. Her MA thesis on the philosophies of Adorno and Walter Benjamin regarding their concepts of what they would sometimes call ‘micrology’ was mainly concerned with questions of truth and representation and the relation of philosophy and philology. Beyond this question she has worked and published on G.W.F. Hegel, literary realism and authors like Thomas Mann, Ingeborg Bachmann and Heiner Müller. Further research interests include German idealism and classic Modernism and the ways in which their truth content may speak to our present. The anthology “Ultima philosophia. Zur Transformation von Metaphysik nach Adorno” was recently published with Neofelis and an article on Heiner Müller in the journal Schriftstücke (5/2023). Smaller pieces appeared in the Journal for the History of Ideas Blog, Riss. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Zeitschrift für Germanistik; and her journalistic writing can be read in venues such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Literarische Welt, Frankfurter Rundschau, Süddeutsche Zeitung and jungle world.

Kathrin joined the Princeton German Department in Fall 2018. Before, she obtained a BA in Cultural and Literary Studies at LMU Munich and a MA in Interdisciplinary Antisemitism Research at TU Berlin. She has worked as a Research Assistant for a documentary film on Walter Benjamin and an exposition at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum in Munich. She held a scholarship by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, a merit grant by the Princeton University Center for Human Values and the Nietzsche-Fellowship by the Klassik-Stiftung Weimar.

You can hear her speak about her dissertation here.