Anke Pinkert received her M.A. in German Studies and History from the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in 1989. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on "Literary Intellectuals, Resistance, and the East German State" in 2000. After teaching at Macalester College (St. Paul, Minnesota) for one year, Prof. Pinkert joined the German Department at UIUC in 2000. Here she also holds appointments in Cinema Studies, Comparative and World Literature, and the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center.
Focusing on the aftermath of two turning points in modern German and European history, “1945” and “1989,” her research examines modes of violence, loss, and healing in cultural representations. She is currently completing a book entitled Postwar Phantoms, which suggests that the representational traces of war memories in early East German film form an elegiac cultural archive that challenges notions of postwar silence and the inability to mourn. She is also working on an article, “Writing Suicide,” which deals with the East German poet Inge Müller and the appropriations of her death in texts by Heiner Müller. Her new book project Postcommunist Travel and Displacement traces the negotiation of historical loss and posthistorical affirmative affects through the literary journeys and transcultural encounters of writers who left Eastern Europe before and after the collapse of socialism.
At the University of Illinois, she has taught courses and 19th and 20th century German literature, cultural studies, East and West German cinema, power and dissidence in the GDR, critical theory, memory and representation, and German language and translation.
Literary Intellectuals, Resistance, and the East German State: Legitimation and Dissent in the Works of Christa Wolf and Franz Fühmann. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago (2000).
Book
Postwar Phantoms: Mourning, Memory, and Film in East Germany
(forthcoming, Indiana University
Press)
Articles
“Rubble Film as Archive of Trauma and Grief: Wolfgang Lamprecht’s ‘Somewhere In Berlin,’” Trümmerfilme, eds. Wilfried Wilms, William Rasch (New York: Palgrave, forthcoming)
Confinement of War Violence: Psychiatric and Cultural Discourse
in Germany’s Soviet Occupation Zone (under review)
Can Melodrama Cure? War Trauma and Crisis
of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film (forthcoming in Seminar,
Special Issue: Discourses on Masculinity in German Culture)
Waste Matters: Defilement and Postfascist
Discourse in Works by Franz Fühmann, Germanic Review,
80.3 (Summer 2005): 254-74.
Pleasures of Fear: Antifascist Myth, Holocaust,
and Soft Dissidence in Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster, German Quarterly, 76.1 (Winter 2003): 25-37
Postcolonial Legacies: the Rhetoric of Race
in the East/West German National Identity Debate of the Late
1990s, M/MLA 35.2 (2002), (Special Issue on “Translating
Within and Across Cultures”): 13-33
Excessive Conversions: Antifascism, Holocaust,
and State Dissidence in Franz Fühmann’s “Das
Judenauto,” Seminar: a Journal of Germanic Studies
38.2 (May 2002): 142-53
Book Reviews in German Studies Review, Modern Fiction Studies, JEGP, Modern
Philology, GDR Bulletin
