Aus dem Schatten - Kuratorinnenführung durch die Jubiläumsausstellung

Curator-led tour with Dr. Francesca Fabbri through the special exhibition “Out of the Shadows: Katharina Kippenberg and Women of Goethe’s Time.”

To mark the 70th anniversary of the Goethe Museum and the 150th birthday of Katharina Kippenberg, the exhibition highlights women of Goethe’s time and the Romantic era who have long been overshadowed by traditional narratives.

Women writers, artists, translators, journalists, and entrepreneurs come to the fore through poetic works, visionary imagery, emancipatory texts, and political debates. Manuscripts, letters, portraits, and books—including numerous previously unknown and never-before-exhibited objects—are systematically cataloged and recontextualized. In this way, the exhibition opens up new perspectives on the Kippenberg Collection, one of the world’s most significant private literary collections.

A central figure is Katharina Kippenberg (1876–1947), whose 150th birthday in 2026 serves as the occasion for the exhibition. As an editor, writer, and co-founder of Insel-Verlag, she had a profound influence on the literary life of her time. Through her extensive network, she promoted the visibility of women writers and opened the publishing house to new literary movements. As early as 1914, she curated the section “Women in the Book Trade” at the International Exhibition for the Book Trade and Graphic Arts in Leipzig—an early testament to her commitment to women in publishing and book culture. Her work remained underestimated for a long time and only received public recognition much later. With this exhibition, the Goethe-Museum is, for the first time, linking the history of Katharina Kippenberg to a broader perspective on female authorship, cultural networks, and forms of female participation around 1800 and beyond.