The 1960 Poet-in-Residence and honorary doctorate recipient of Goethe University Frankfurt is the featured author of Frankfurt liest ein Buch [Frankfurt Reads a Book] 2026.
The founding consortium behind the university’s newly established endowed Poetics Lectureship showed remarkable foresight in 1959/60. Led by Rector Helmut Viebrock together with Gottfried Bermann Fischer and Theodor W. Adorno, they selected for the first two editions of the program first Ingeborg Bachmann, then one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary German-language literature, and subsequently Marie Luise Kaschnitz, the grande dame who had become the first post-war woman writer to receive the Georg Büchner Prize in 1955. Her lectures in the 1960 summer semester, Gestalten europäischer Dichtung von Shakespeare bis Beckett [Figures of European Poetry from Shakespeare to Beckett], made Kaschnitz – who had been living in Frankfurt since 1941 with her husband, classical archaeologist Guido Freiherr Kaschnitz von Weinberg – into a Frankfurt author in the fullest sense of the term.
One particularly enthusiastic listener was Siegfried Unseld. After the death of Peter Suhrkamp in March 1959, Unseld became sole publisher of the house and soon the host of influential literary gatherings in Frankfurt. He invited Kaschnitz to one such evening at which Adorno would play the piano – a fitting beginning to the relationship between the author and her future publisher. Kaschnitz and Adorno were close friends; in her diaries, his name appears with striking frequency, ranking just behind immediate family members, Jesus Christ and Goethe. Unseld’s courtship was discreet. Kaschnitz had already published with distinguished houses such as Bruno Cassirer, Claassen & Goverts and later Claassen. But the publishing landscape of the 1960s was changing rapidly. Before an involuntary transfer became necessary, she chose her own path. In 1966 – the same year she received the Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt – the jacket text of her new prose collection Ferngespräche [Distant Conversations] announced with unusual pathos: “With this book, Marie Luise Kaschnitz enters Insel Verlag.” It was a perfect constellation. After the commercial and literary rise of Unseld and the financial strength of Swiss co-owners, Suhrkamp had acquired Insel Verlag in 1963. There Kaschnitz would find the publishing home of her late and collected works.
The upheavals of 1968 also shaped the university’s role. The first historic phase of the Poetics Lectureship came to an end in the 1967/68 winter semester with Hans Erich Nossack’s lecture Ist Poesie lehrbar? [Can Poetry Be Taught?] For many, this reflected a broader shift: intellectual debate was moving from the lecture hall into the political arena. Rector Viebrock responded by initiating the award of an honorary doctorate to Kaschnitz. His reasoning read like a plea for reconciliation across a divided society. He praised her as a mediator between tradition and the present, and between older and younger generations – grounded in humane conviction and artistic authority.
Kaschnitz herself remained aligned with the best of Germany’s humanistic tradition while never retreating into nostalgia. As critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki observed, she was “conservative and progressive at once, and both in the best sense of the words.” In practice, that meant continuing to publish new prose, new poetry, and collected works in which individuality, perception, and language appeared not as relics of the past, but as forms of freedom. The final chapter was to have been another honor: Unseld invited her to deliver the keynote address at the 75th anniversary of Insel Verlag at the Städel Museum in autumn 1974 under the title Rettung durch Phantasie [Salvation Through Imagination]. She died only days before the event.
Founded by Klaus Schöffling, Frankfurt liest ein Buch began in 2010 as a citywide festival dedicated to rediscovering literary works connected to Frankfurt. Since 2017, the association has been chaired on a voluntary basis by Sabine Baumann, a graduate of Goethe University. The Literature Archive of Goethe University has accompanied the festival with exhibitions, public readings, archive tours, and publications. This year’s campaign centers on Gott und die Welt. Aufzeichnungen aus der Wiesenau [God and the World: Notes from Wiesenau] by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (Edition W, 2026). It opens at the German National Library on April 20, 2026, at 7:30 p.m. and continues through May 3, with 99 further events dedicated to her work. Further information: www.frankfurt-liest-ein-buch.de
Author: Wolfgang Schopf, Goethe University Literature Archive
Recommended Event:
“Marie Luise Kaschnitz. Hier.”
Goethe University House Reading
Thursday, April 30, 2026, 7:30 p.m., University Archive Frankfurt, Dantestraße 9, in cooperation with Horst Bingel-Stiftung für Literatur e. V.
Reservation required via w.schopf@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de
