Alexander Stephan

Alexander Stephan (August 16, 1946 – May 29, 2009) was a specialist in German literature and area studies. He was a professor, Ohio Eminent Scholar, and Senior Fellow of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University (OSU).

Stephan studied American and German literature at the Freie Universität in Berlin and at the University of Michigan. He obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University, where students in his elementary German courses remember him as one of the best teachers they had in that very distinguished institution. Subsequently, he taught at Princeton, the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) and University of Florida. At Ohio State University, he held a research professorship in German literature and area studies.

As professor of German literature, Stephan focused on the modern period. His publications covered the history of German exile literature, the Weimar Republic, and the literature of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). He was the author of books, among others, on Anna Seghers, Christa Wolf, Max Frisch, and Peter Weiss. Stephan was also the first researcher who obtained access to the documents which the FBI kept on German exile writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann and Anna Seghers.

At the OSU Mershon Center, Stephan concentrated on international security and US-European cultural relations. He wrote about the impact of American culture on the GDR and published five collections of essays analyzing Americanization and anti-Americanism in Germany and in Europe after 1945.

Stephan was a founder of the book series Exilstudien/Exile Studies, a member of the German PEN, and a recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Humboldt Foundation, and numerous other institutions. His publications were discussed on German television, by CNN, and in papers such as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and The Guardian.

In 2007 appeared a Festschrift honoring Stephan, Kulturpolitik und Politik der Kultur/Cultural Politics and the Politics of Culture (Oxford), which was edited by Helen Fehervary and Bernd Fischer.

His widow, Halina Stephan, is a professor for Slavic Literature at Ohio State University. She specializes in Russian avant-garde literature and Polish theatre, and is director of the OSU Center for Slavic and East European Studies.