Charlotte Krick
Charlotte Krick is a PhD candidate in German Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, affiliated with the Collaborative Research Centre 1369 “Cultures of Vigilance” (Project A09). Her dissertation, “Aber alle denken daran.” Jewish Authorship and Cultures of Vigilance in Pre-March Prussian Censorship Practice, treats Prussian censorship as a collection of officials with their own prejudices, rivalries, and personal stakes, still working out what loyalty to the state was even supposed to mean. Within this fluid, pre-national setting, she argues that Jewish authorship functioned as a stable interpretive category precisely when almost nothing else about political danger was stable. A way for censors to locate suspicion in a period when the old confessional order had collapsed but no new one had yet taken its place. Her case studies, centered on the reception of Johann Jacoby, trace a form of anti-Jewish thinking that precedes racial antisemitism: more diffuse, rarely named outright, and for that reason still routinely dismissed by later readers as mere ambivalence rather than as a historical finding in its own right.
She is also currently developing a project on memory politics at Buchenwald since 2026, examining how the camp’s liberation myth, above all the GDR-era narrative of self-liberation was built, institutionalized, and contested across the Cold War divide, and how it continues to shape present-day conflicts over commemoration, including recent controversies such as the disinvitation of speaker Omri Boehm. The project asks how antisemitism itself was understood differently under different political systems, and how those older, system-specific habits of interpretation still echo in current debates around Holocaust memory, Israel, and the so-called second Historikerstreit.
Her broader research interests include the history of censorship, the materiality of archives, Austrofascism, and the politics of memory and nation-building.
Her earlier academic work followed related questions in different contexts. Her bachelor’s theses at the University of Vienna examined forbidden literature in the counter-public sphere of Austrofascism, and the visual self-fashioning of Austrian national identity through the photographer August Makart. Her master’s thesis in Austrian Studies turned to early literary Expressionism through the autobiography of Hans Flesch-Brunningen, read as a kind of forensic account of the movement’s beginnings.
She previously worked at the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and her work has taken her to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem and to the University of Cambridge as a Visiting Fellow.
