Senior Fellow in Research Area 3: "Future Perfect"

October 2025

Constellations of Alterity: Constructions of Race, Femininity and Jewishness in Germany's Long 19th Century

Based on a series of textual case studies, this project investigates the complex entanglements of ideas of gender, Jewishness and 'race' in German and Austrian culture between the Enlightenment and the fin-de-siècle, analysing their changing guises as responses to the rise and crises of capitalist modernity. While scholarship on different constructions of alterity and their interconnections is predominantly focused on their similarities and overlap, Achinger's project will explore these constructions as mutually illuminating even where they play very different discursive roles, as reflections of a society that is highly integrated, but riven by exclusions and contradictions. Among the primary texts under investigation will be C.W. Dohm's Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (1782/83) and T.G. v. Hippel's Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber (1792), the "Reden an die Christlich-deutsche Tischgesellschaft" (1811 ff.) and Arnim's Isabella von Ägypten (1812), G. Freytag's Soll und Haben (1855) and O. Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter (1903).

While the theoretical framework for this study will be strongly influenced by the tradition of Critical Social Theory from Marx through the Frankfurt School to more recent debates, it also aims to explore the scope for critical dialogue with more contemporary approaches to racialisation and the construction of gender. The four weeks Achinger will spend as a Senior Fellow at EXC 2020 will be devoted to exploring the respective contributions that Critical Theory and critical engagements with postcolonial theory can make to developing the concept of a situated universalism.

Christine Achinger studied Philosophy, Literature and Physics in Paris and Hamburg, where she was also involved in the non-commercial radio station FSK and in running the independent political library 'Hamburger Studienbibliothek', and worked at the concentration camp memorial site Hamburg-Neuengamme and in the 'Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden'. After completing an MA in 'Gender and Ethnic Studies' in London and a PhD in German Studies at the University of Nottingham, she joined the Department of German Studies at Warwick University in 2006. Her research interests and publications are in the areas of Critical Social Theory, literary theory, and histories and theories of antisemitism, racialisation and gender.

Achinger held Visiting Fellowships at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, the History Department at the University of Chicago and the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. Achinger currently also chairs the Moishe Postone Legacy Project, which seeks to make Postone's work available to all, and to promote engagement with his ideas.