History of the Adalbert Stifter Association
- Baroness von Herzogenberg and Erich Mende at the opening ceremony of the exhibition Flucht und Grenze (‘Escape and Border’), Bonn, 1964
The Adalbert Stifter Association was founded in Munich in 1947 by scholars, artists and writers from Prague and the Sudeten regions. The association originally provided cultural support for exiled compatriots. In the 1950s, the association’s office became a cultural institute in the narrower sense, devoted to preparing exhibitions on cultural history, conducting research into literary history and promoting artists. The association has enjoyed institutional support from the German Government since 1952.
In the decades that followed, the association developed sizeable exhibitions on topics including St. John of Nepomuk, Emperor Charles IV, Emil Orlik, Johann Amos Comenius and Prague as a hub of anti-Nazi emigration. It also published a representative series of art books on Bohemia’s cultural history. The first volume (on Baroque in Bohemia) was published in 1964, and the last one (Bohemia in the 19th century) in 1995.
The association began to seek contact with Czech artists and academics back in the 1960s. After the Prague Spring was crushed in the summer of 1968, the association teamed up with InterNationes to set up a “Czechoslovak Office” to help Czech emigrants. Since 1989, in addition to its activities in the field of literary and cultural history, the association has also helped promote cultural exchange between Germany and the Czech Republic.
The association’s recent history
- Exhibition on Stifter-Kontexte (‘Stifter contexts’), 2005
Since 1997, the Adalbert Stifter Association has stepped up cooperation with scholars of German philology and cultural studies from Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. This has given rise to two long-term projects: research into the cultural history of the Nazi years in Bohemia and Moravia, and the creation of a lexical reference book on the 19th- and 20th century literature of Bohemia written in German.
The association’s larger events have included the series 10 Jahre Sanfte Revolution (‘10 Years Velvet Revolution’), which it held in the autumn of 1999 in collaboration with other institutions from Munich and Regensburg. The highlight of the series was a jazz and poetry evening with the authors Peter Kurzeck (Uzès) and Jiří Stránský (Prague) and the musicians Jiří Stivín (Prague) and Wolfgang Lackerschmid (Augsburg).
In 2005, the association took part in events to mark Adalbert Stifter’s 200th birthday. It organised panel discussions, readings and talks. The Adalbert Stifter Prize for Central European writers and translators was awarded by the association for the first time on a boat on the River Danube near Passau. It organised the exhibition Stifter-Kontexte. Zum Gebrauchswert eines Klassikers (‘Stifter contexts. The practical value of a classic’) together with the Munich-based German philologist Ulrich Dittmann (idea and design).
The association celebrated its 60th anniversary in May 2007. The official speech was held by Professor Hans Lemberg, with addresses by the Czech Ambassador to Germany, Rudolf Jindrák, the Bavarian Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, Family and Women, Christa Stewens, and Undersecretary Wolfgang Käppler for the Federal German Government’s Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
