Katharina Scheerer Research Project

Avant-garde and science fiction: at first glance, the two don't have much in common. On the one hand, there are exclusive artists who want to break the rules of art and find new forms of expression, and on the other, there is schematic literature that is sold en masse. But in German literature around 1900, the avant-garde and science fiction formed a striking symbiosis. Suddenly, motifs appear in the texts of avant-garde artists that we are familiar with from popular authors such as Jules Verne. Are the boundaries between high art and pulp ultimately not as rigid as literary scholars have long assumed? My work examines the complex relationships between ‘high’ and ‘low’ and shows that the science fiction genre has an unjustly bad reputation.