Ursula Wertheim

Ursula Wertheim (8 October 1919 – 26 July 2006) was a German literary scholar and university teacher at Jena in East Germany. The primary focus of her writing and teaching was on Germany's eighteenth and nineteenth century classical literature.

Life

Ursula Wertheim was born in Nowawes, a township a short distance to the east of Potsdam in central Germany. Her student studies took her to Berlin's Humboldt University between 1948 and 1953 where her subjects were German studies, History and Art History. The eastern part of Berlin had ended the war in the Soviet occupation zone, and she was a member of the first generation of scholars in what later became East Germany to undertake her studies through the Marxist prism, which accompany her through her academic career. which hints at an increasing overlap between Sociology and more traditionally academic fields of study such as History and Literature: this was a general trend in officially approved academic scholarship in East Germany during the 1950s and 60s.

In 1963/64 she set on course and briefly headed up the Theatre History department at Jena. She continued to promote study of theatre history at the university, conducting pertinent seminars on it. In 1965 she was appointed university professor for the history of modern and contemporary literature. The focus of her work continued to concern traditionally Marxist oriented study of classical German literature. By the time she retired in 1979, her approach to the literary classics through a single rather rigid Socio-political prism was seen by some to have been superseded by newer methodologies.