Privatdozent Dr. Patrick Eiden-Offe
Senior Fellow, October 2026 to September 2027
Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin
- Since 2017: Research Associate at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. Since 2025, Co-coordinator of the program area "History of Theory" .
- 2017: Habilitation at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Contemporary German Literary Studies and Cultural Studies. Habilitation thesis: “The Poetry of Class: Romantic Anti-Capitalism and the Invention of the Proletariat” (Matthes und Seitz, Berlin, 2017; Spanish translation 2021; English translation 2023).
- 2008: Ph.D. from the University of Konstanz with the dissertation “Das Reich der Demokratie. Hermann Broch’s ‘Der Tod des Vergil’” (Fink 2011).
Fellow project: „Georg Lukács (1885–1971): An Intellectual Biography in the Age of Extremes“
The Hungarian philosopher, literary theorist, and revolutionary Georg Lukács is one of the great political intellectuals of the 20th century. Throughout his life, he experienced all the ups and downs of what Eric Hobsbawm called the “Age of Extremes”: His life journey took him from an upper-class family in fin-de-siècle Budapest, through the communist world movement of the 1920s and exile in Stalin‘s Moscow, to the “actually existing socialism” of the postwar decades. In the intellectual biography of Lukács that I am writing, his theoretical development is linked to his political engagement. This includes the fact that Lukács’s theory has repeatedly experienced revivals, for example within the New Left of the 1960s or in the political-theoretical response to the global economic crisis since 2008. Lukács’s continued relevance is evident not least in the fact that both he and his work again become the target of attacks in recent years: for example, Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary has repeatedly launched campaigns against Lukács. In light of the global rise of a new authoritarianism, this exemplary intellectual of the 20th century seems to be gaining new relevance today.