Kate Hollander Awarded Shotwell Prize
Graduate student Kate Hollander has been awarded the Shotwell Prize for her dissertation, which examines a community of German-speaking artists and intellectuals as they formed and participated in a flexible and portable micro-culture between 1900 and 1941. With roots in turn-of-the-century Vienna, this community flourished in Weimar Berlin, then sought refuge in southern Denmark after the rise of Hitler; it included the reformers Eugenia Schwarzwald and Karin Michaëlis, the actress Helene Weigel, and the writers Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Margarete Steffin. Hollander shows how this group of committed, though never orthodox, socialists tended towards collaboration in work, art, relationships, and life, but argues that their collectivity was always only partial and anticipatory, and explores how factors like differences in (and attitudes around) ethnicity, gender, and class both encouraged and hampered the group’s solidarity and egalitarianism. The dissertation uses primary sources like journals and letters, as well as literary and intellectual products like essays, poems, and plays, to show how this group worked and lived together in their three main milieux of Vienna, Berlin, and Svendborg, Denmark.
Please join us in congratulating Kate for this great achievement!