German Studies Lecture Series: Nicola Gess - The Impostor. A Social Archetype of the 1920s

Please join the German Studies Lecture Series talk entitled, The Impostor. A Social Archetype of the 1920s by Nicola Gess (University of Basel/Columbia University)

Abstract

This lecture explores literature as a laboratory of the social imaginary, taking the impostor as its central case study. Across novels, self-help manuals, daily newspapers, psychology, sociology, and criminology, the figure of the con artist emerges as a pervasive presence in the Weimar Republic Tracing the conditions that enabled this proliferation, the lecture examines the role literature played in shaping and disseminating the impostor figure and explores its broader significance for the interwar period - an emblematic figure through which a crises-ridden society came to recognize itself.

RSVP for talk by Nicola Gess

Nicola Gess is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Basel and currently the 2026 Visiting Max Kade Professor at Columbia University. Her recent books include "Primitive Thinking: Figuring Alterity in German Modernity" (2022), "Halbwahrheiten: Zur Manipulation von Wirklichkeit" (2021), and "Staunen: Eine Poetik" (2019).