On May 31, 2015, after a career spanning more than 40 years, Helen Fehervary, professor of German, will retire from The Ohio State University. This, however, does not mean that her work will be ending. She has published extensively on 20th-century German literature and intellectual history and is the General Editor of the Anna Seghers Werkausgabe, 25 volumes (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2000), of which 13 volumes have been published to date.

In 1993, she received the Helen Hooven Santmyer Prize in Women's Studies for Salvador’s Children: A Song for Survival. The prize, established by the Ohio State University Press, is awarded annually for the “best book-length manuscript on the contributions of women, their lives and experiences, and their role in society.”

Mit den Toten reden: Fragen an Heiner Müller (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1999) with Jost Hermand followed, and in 2001,her extensively researched and enlightening monograph Anna Seghers: The Mythic Dimension (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press) was released. Fehervary then published Anna Seghers, Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2002), vol. I/1 in Anna Seghers, Werkausgabe, ed. H. Fehervary and B. Spies and Kulturpolitik und Politik der Kultur / Cultural Politics and the Politics of Culture: Essays to Honor Alexander Stephan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007) with Bernd Fischer.

Professor Fehervary has chaired over thirty MA and PhD Examinations and has directed more than a dozen dissertations at Ohio State. She is an established Seghers, Brecht, Müller, and Wolf scholar and her research and teaching specializations include twentieth-century German literature, intellectual history, culture; Weimar Republic, exile 1930s and 1940s, Germany East and West 1945-1990; Central European modernism; critical theory; comparative literature, women's literature, German-Jewish literature; narrative prose; drama, theatre, and film; literature and art history.

Professor Fehervary’s students will miss her involvement in bringing drama to the Department. For example, in spring 2010, she organized a GLL theater workshop for undergraduate and graduate students that culminated in a public performance on 16 May, directed by Alexander Stillmark of Berlin, of Heiner Müller’s Die Hamletmaschine.

We all wish her well as she continues to enrich the field of German Studies for many years to come.