Prof. Dr. Stefan Willer

Photo: Lidia Tirri

Curriculum

Stefan Willer is Professor of Modern German Literature at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. After studying German and Romance languages and literatures, and musicology, he earned his doctorate in 2001 from the University of Münster with a dissertation on Romantic linguistic theory. Between 2001 and 2018, he worked at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, serving as deputy director since 2010. Also in 2010, he completed his habilitation at the Technical University of Berlin with a dissertation on the functions of inheritance and heritage in modern literary culture. Between 2014 and 2018, he held a special professorship at the Institute of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität and moved to a chair at the Institute of German Literature in 2018. He has served as a visiting scholar and visiting professor at LMU Munich, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Stanford University, UC Santa Barbara, and Columbia University in New York City. His research focuses on the literary and intellectual history of generation, inheritance, and future, the interrelationships between literature and music, and theories of language and translation.

Publications (selection)

Figurationen des Erbes in der Frühen Neuzeit (Co-ed., to be published in 2026).
Selbstübersetzung als Wissenstransfer (Co-ed., 2020).
Erbfälle. Theorie und Praxis kultureller Übertragung in der Moderne (2014).
Das Konzept der Generation. Eine Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Co-auth., 2008).
Poetik der Etymologie. Texturen sprachlichen Wissens in der Romantik (2003).

Research project: Wishing. An Essy on a Poetic Force.

The aim of the project is to examine wishing as a poetic faculty that simultaneously constitutes a poetic act. This duality of faculty and act, of potentiality and practice, can be understood as force in the sense of the centre for advanced studies. The working hypothesis of the project is that there is a specific force precisely in the supposed powerlessness of the mere ability to wish. In the development of the project, the speculative character of this hypothesis is to be emphasized and, at the same time, elaborated through historical examples. Thus, in early modern literature, with its strong pragmatic ties, wishing manifests itself in distinct textual genres, such as Baroque casual poems, in which the performativity of wishing is realized in specifically addressed speech acts. In contrast, a de-pragmatization can be observed in the 18th century, as evidenced both by the concept of heart’s desire and by the irrealization of wishful ideas, which is found primarily in idyllic poetry. Further historical stages concern the epistemological and technological significance of wishing: its critique in the course of the 19th century, particularly in the theorem of wish fulfillment (for example, in Feuerbach’s disavowal of Christianity or in Freud’s characterization of the dream), its multifaceted trajectory in 20th-century theoretical frameworks (in concepts such as ‚mimetic desire‘ or ‚desiring-machines‘) and its current technological implementations in algorithms that seem to pre-format wishes along with their fulfillments. However, the project is less concerned with reconstructing a history of form, genre, or theory than with attempting a poetics of wishing that is historically informed yet systematically oriented.