Expertise

Writers’ responses to social crises, exile, and migration in German and German-Jewish literature of the 1930s and 1940s; Critical Theory; Walter Benjamin; Anna Seghers; Antonio Gramsci; Maurice Halbwachs

Biography

Frank Voigt is an intellectual and social historian of literature interested in the role of literature in struggles for democratization and social justice. He was a doctoral fellow at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies and received his PhD from the University of Potsdam. After working at Osnabrück University and as a DAAD Lecturer in the Department of German Studies at Emory University, he joined Temple’s Intellectual Heritage Program in 2026.

He is interested in topics ranging from eighteenth-century debates about Jewish emancipation in Europe to the economic and political crises of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on questions of history and memory, migration and exile, and the relationship between literature, politics, and social transformation. His dissertation, currently in final preparation for publication as a book, reconsiders Walter Benjamin’s ideas of critique and history in their social contexts by drawing on two newly examined sources: the rediscovered manuscript of his 1937 essay Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker and a collection of some 300 excerpts from the Social Democratic theory journal Die Neue Zeit (1883–1923). He is editing these excerpts for the ongoing critical edition of Benjamin’s works and papers, Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Werke und Nachlaß.

Selected Publications

• “Menschen der Krisenzeit – Sozialistischer Humanismus und Feminismus. Anna Seghers’ Roman‚ Die Rettung‘ und seine Rezeption zu Beginn der 1970er-Jahre in der DDR.” Das Argonautenschiff. Jahrbuch der Anna-Seghers-Gesellschaft 31 (2023/24): 114–128.
• “Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci and the Problem of Elitist Traditions.” International Gramsci Journal 3.4 (2020): 59–82.
• “Die Aktualität von Halbwachs’ Kritik an Bergson und Durkheim. Zu einigen Problemen in den Halbwachs-Lektüren bei Aleida und Jan Assmann.” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geiste geschichte66.3/4 (2014): 243–269.

Courses Taught

Fall 2026

• Intellectual Heritage II: The Common Good