Time to give something back
A fresh start with the Friends' Association
Not as expected
Study in Jena—and then what?
Portrait of Prof. Dr Roberto Simanowski. The literary and media scholar now calls two continents home.
Roberto Simanowski (born in 1963) studied German literature and history at the University of Jena. Today, the literary and media scholar lives as a journalist in Berlin and Rio de Janeiro. After numerous relocations and career changes, what did he take away from his time in Jena in the 1980s and 90s?
At the time I thought I would lead a quiet life, behind walls. As a literary critic who occasionally debated the interpretation of clever texts with the authorities and, in the summer, encountered new horizons that expanded his worldview in southern Bulgaria. With the fall of the Berlin Wall came scholarships for East German students. I learnt Portuguese in Lisbon, English in San Francisco, went to Harvard as a postdoc and stayed in the US for ten years.
This was followed by professorships at the University of Basel and the City University of Hong Kong. By that point, my research interests had shifted from German studies, the field in which I wrote my doctoral thesis (on Goethe’s brother-in-law), to media studies, where I completed my postdoctoral thesis (on art on the internet). Back then, I believed it would be good for my career to be internationally based and adopt an interdisciplinary focus.
Now I know that you can’t really get a foothold anywhere that way. That’s a problem, at least in Germany, where you’re unlikely to get a professorship unless you have a strong network. Or was it my East German background? That, at least, is what my university friend Dirk Oschmann says in his book »Der Osten. Eine westdeutsche Erfindung« (The East: A West German Invention), advising that it is best to keep one’s East German background quiet in a job application.
By the time I read the book, however, I had already given up on the idea of a professorship in Germany. I wanted to lie on the beach in Rio, where my wife is from, and write the books I really wanted to write. Incidentally, I met my wife—who also worked at the university in Hong Kong—in Germany, at a conference in Siegen. And I certainly wouldn’t have imagined either of those things possible when I first began my studies: Siegen and Rio.
