Sophie-Charlott Hartisch: Kosmische Ordnungen. Gemeinschaftsentwürfe in der Lyrik nach 1900

In the context of World War I, German-language poetry reflects a wide range of ideas about society. Expressionism envisions utopian visions of fraternal unity; Else Lasker-Schüler and Rainer Maria Rilke reflect on the possibility of a rapprochement between “you” and “I”; and Stefan George’s poetry aims at a hierarchical model of community. Her lecture upon receiving the Carlo Barck Prize highlights the common thread linking these diverse concepts: their connection to astronomical concepts of order.

Welcome address and laudation: Eva Geulen

Sophie-Charlott Hartisch studied German literature, political science, and social sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In 2024, she completed her dissertation, “Astrale Konstellationen in der Lyrik um 1900. Stern und Kosmos als Zeitsignatur der Moderne” [Astral Constellations in Poetry around 1900: Stars and the Cosmos as Signatures of Modernity] at the University of Cologne. For this work, she received the Carlo Barck Prize in 2025. Hartisch is a research associate at the Department of German Studies at the University of Bonn. Since April 1, 2026, she has been working at the ZfL as a Carlo Barck Prize fellow on her new project Coherence. The Poetics of Connectedness.

The Carlo Barck Prize

Awarded by the ZfL for the first time in 2017, the Carlo Barck Prize honors dissertations in the field of literary and cultural studies that pose innovative questions and display an original conception. The prize money of 12,000 euros is allocated as a six-month scholarship for a fellowship at the ZfL.

The scholar of Romance literature Karlheinz “Carlo” Barck (1934–2012) investigated the history of aesthetics and imagination since the 18th century, focussing on the French and Spanish avant-gardes of the early 20th century. He was the driving force in the development and publication of the Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, a historical dictionary of basic aesthetic concepts. With his multifaceted intellectual interests, he had a lasting impact on the ZfL’s research program.