1 August 2023

Noah Willumsen is new Head of the Bertolt Brecht Archive of the Akademie der Künste

Noah Willumsen,36-year-old literary and media scholar, has taken over as Head of the Bertolt Brecht Archive as of 1 August 2024. One of his most important tasks will be to transition the archive into the digital age.

Willumsen studied German language and culture, art history and philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and the Humboldt University in Berlin, where he is doing his doctorate on the history of the interview in the research training group “The Literary and Epistemic History of Small Forms”. His edition of Bertolt Brecht’s interview Unsere Hoffnung heute ist die Krise was published in 2023 by Suhrkamp. Based on extensive archival studies, this work explores internationally scattered and in part wholly unknown texts by Brecht, providing insight into his contentious approach to the news media of his era. Willumsen’s essays on Brecht, Heiner Müller and the media history of the GDR have most recently appeared in Brecht in Context, Heiner Müller’s KüstenLANDSCHAFTEN, E-CIBS as well as in the Brecht-Jahrbuch, of which he is a member of the editorial board.

Noah Willumsen succeeds Erdmut Wizisla, who held the position of Head of the Bertolt Brecht Archive since 1993 and is now giving it up due to retirement; he will now concentrate on managing the Walter Benjamin Archive at the Akademie. Wizisla took the work of the Bertolt Brecht Archive into a unified Germany and developed the archive into an internationally recognised centre of Brecht research. The notable additions to the collection in recent decades are largely thanks to his networking efforts in the “Brecht community” as well as his academic reputation. Wizisla made an impression with his authoritative studies, including Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship (2004), which formed the basis for the highly acclaimed Akademie exhibition “Benjamin and Brecht – Thinking in Extremes” (2017/18).

The Archive of the Akademie der Künste (Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv) contains the extensive literary estate of the author and director Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), comprising well over one million documents. It includes work manuscripts, diaries and notebooks, correspondence and an extensive special library on Brecht. The same location also houses additional holdings such as the estates of Helene Weigel, Elisabeth Hauptman, Peter Voigt (Peter Voigt) and Gerhard Seidel (Peter Voigt and Gerhard Seidel), the photographic archives of Percy Paukschta, Hainer Hill and Vera Tenschert, as well as the Archive of the Berliner Ensemble (Archiv des Berliner Ensembles). The collections are complemented by extensive documentation of the history of Brecht’s work and reception, film and audio documents as well as other materials.