What is AFM?
In 2008, the AFM was founded by a group of American germanists with the goal of intensifying the exchange between students and scholars from the USA on the one hand, and the German Literature Archive (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, DLA) on the other. Membership fees and donations are intended to fund travel grants for American students to do research in Marbach.
What is the DLA?
DLA is the abbreviation for the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (www.dla-marbach.de). The DLA is a literature archive, library and museum all situated atop the Schillerhöhe in Marbach, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The literature archive is the most important research center for the history of German literature from 1750 to the present, accordingly it is located in Marbach, the birthplace of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). Its holdings include the papers of more than 1,300 writers, scholars, philosophers and historians – among them Paul Celan, W.G. Sebald, Norbert Elias, Martin Heidegger and Reinhard Koselleck. Living authors like Martin Walser, Peter Handke and Bernhard Schlink have already entrusted some of their manuscripts to the archive’s care. Furthermore, the history of Germanistik is well documented and includes a special section on scholars of German literature in exile with papers by Bernhard Blume, Heinz Politzer, Egon Schwarz, Werner Vordtriede and many others. With nearly 800,000 volumes and over 1.000 journals, the DLA’s library is easily accessible and an invaluable source for research on 20th and 21st-century German literature.
Two museums – the Schiller-Nationalmuseum (SNM, built in 1903) and the Literaturmuseum der Moderne (LiMo, built in 2006) – present permanent and temporary exhibitions on German literature.