Katharina Friege

Research Interests

My research focuses on German history in the twentieth century, where my main interests centre on subjectivity, cultural discourse, and identity. My doctoral dissertation explores the lives of a small cast of heterogenous female writers, journalists, and photographers who were originally from Germany but spent significant periods of time abroad between the early 1920s and late 1940s. I analyse the points of tension that arose as these women sought to navigate collective notions of belonging while also remaining committed to their sense of individuality and independence. Their lives and experiences showcase the sometimes precarious and often contradictory balance between culture as overarching structure and subjective adoption – collective identities may be established and internalized through shared frameworks of belonging, but they are simultaneously interpreted and renegotiated at the level of the individual. This research is informed by a transnational perspective on gender relations, by the study of transforming media landscapes in the first half of the twentieth century, and by an understanding of mobility as both a geographic and symbolic phenomenon.

I am also interested in the cultural imagination and lived experience of place and space, in the history of emotions and subjectivity, and in the relationship between literary and historical narratives.