Birte Christ worked at Justus Liebig Universität Gießen from October 2009 to 2025. She held positions at the University of Bonn and the University of Freiburg. In 2012 and from 2014 to 2017, Birte held research fellowships at Amherst College, the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA, and the University of California, Irvine. In the winter semester 2020/21, she served as stand-in professor of American Literary and Cultural History at Tübingen University. She has been awarded a DFG Heisenberg Fellowship for five years for her project “The Politics of Popular Forms: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives in American Studies.” Dr. Christ will commence with her Heisenberg position at the University of Tübingen. Her teaching and research interests include law and literature, transmedial narratology, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, middlebrow literature and culture, poetry studies, and approaches to teaching American literature and culture.

ABSTRACT

Until today, American fiction in translation plays a central, in comparison outsized, role for reading in Germany and the German book market. This talk investigates the beginnings of this transnational literary relationship. It looks at how American novels in translation contributed to shaping a new German reading culture after World War II and argues that cultural arbiters carefully promoted American literature and authors in order to construct a very specific popular literary postwar canon. The talk focuses on American novels in the RO-RO-RO program between 1946 and 1949, printed in newspaper format, and how they are being framed for post-war readers in the accompanying afterwords. The framings of Hemingway’s In einem andern Land and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Frühling des Leben serve as case studies for the way in which post-war popular reading is conceptualized and what formal characteristics are rendered desirable, thereby promoting a popular canon that remains influential over many decades.