Michael Beer (1800-1833), famous for a few years early in life, is one of the many forgotten poets of the 19th century. This lecture will show why it can be rewarding to dig deeper into the work of an author whose dramas are generally neglected because of their „Epigonalität.“ Beer, a German cosmopolitan, stood in close contact with the European world of theater and opera; as an author of tragedies, he was fully aware of the necessity to react in form and contents to the enormous success of opera as personified in his brother, Giacomo Meyerbeer. Michael Beer, as a German Jew, had to achieve everything he intended as a poet against the anti-Semitic resentment which in the correspondence with his family is named „Risches“. Of special interest is Beer’s drama ‚Der Paria‘ (1823) and its performance in Weimar under the direction of Goethe.

Ernst Osterkamp is professor of German literature at Humboldt University Berlin, and has held guest professorships at New York University and Washington University/St. Louis; he was a 1999-2000 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,  and in 2010 was the Aby Warburg Professor at the Aby Warburg Foundation in Hamburg, Germany. he is a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz and of Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Since 2017 Professor Osterkamp has been President of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (German academy of language and literature). He has published books on the Lucifer theme in European literature, on Goethe, Stefan George, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Felix Dahn, among others.

 foto: fotostudio-charlottenburg