An authority on Marx: the career of Margaret A. Rose FAHA FRHistS

Eminent German Studies scholar, Dr Margaret Anne Rose FAHA FRHistS was elected to the Academy of the Humanities in 1985 following the award of the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize for her Marx’s Lost Aesthetic, published by Cambridge University Press in 1984.

For Margaret, her election to the Academy was the result of years of dedicated research in German Studies, an interest which she can trace back to her Australian school days.

‘I had a very good teacher of German at my school in Melbourne in the early 1960s,’ she begins. ‘We were taught how to read Gothic script as well as Gothic print (something no longer taught in most German schools, let alone in Australian ones, but important for any archival work in 19th Century German studies). That teacher (a German emigré named Rita Streich) also inspired an interest in German writers that included both Goethe and the prose and poetry of the Romantic satirist Heinrich Heine (1797-1856).’

Margaret’s interest in Heine was deepened when the Foundation Professor of German at Monash University and Heine expert, Professor Leslie Bodi, provided lectures for school leavers in her Matriculation year of 1964.

‘I decided to continue my German studies at Monash University,’ she says, and recalls studying and working alongside Leslie Bodi, David Roberts, Rodney Livingstone, Walther Veit, Ernst Keller, Philip Thomson and Silke Beinssen-Hesse, amongst others.

‘After a year abroad on Commonwealth and DAAD scholarships in Germany (in Munich, Tübingen, and Düsseldorf) in 1970, I finally completed my all-too long (600 page plus!) doctoral dissertation on Heine and biblical parody in 1973, the year I was appointed a Lecturer in German at UNSW, and later translated some of the thesis into German for publication as a book while on leave in Düsseldorf in 1976.’

‘The German Department at UNSW also had several very interesting and intelligent emigrant scholars, including Gero von Wilpert, Gerhard Fischer and Konrad Kwiet, when I was there.’

During my time at UNSW I was awarded a Visiting Fellowship to the ANU’s History of Ideas Unit, which was headed by Eugene Kamenka FAHA, where numerous interesting speakers from overseas gave seminars and chatted in the Research School’s famous tea room, or over meals at University House. I also attended, when in Canberra, seminars and conferences in Ian Donaldson’s Humanities Research Centre and discussed with Alan Serle AO FAHA FASSA of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) and Ken Inglis AO FASSA of the Research School of Social Sciences the possibility of working on biographies of the Victorian sculptors Margaret Baskerville (a great-aunt whose London diaries I had transcribed) and her husband C. Douglas Richardson.’

When asked about the influence of the political context of the 1970s on Margaret’s PhD, she agrees that it ‘may have made the study of satire more academically acceptable as well as the historical study of the political works of both Heine and his contemporary Karl Marx; although it also produced much ideological interpretation of the latter’s writings.’

Reading the young Marx

While a Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences’ History of Ideas Unit at the ANU in 1977, Margaret also began writing a second book, Reading the Young Marx and Engels. Poetry, Parody and the Censor, which she completed after a year as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Germany, in Constance and Düsseldorf, in 1978.

‘I was able again to visit archives in Germany as well as the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, where many of Marx’s early papers were held. But I’d had to resign from UNSW to take up my Humboldt Fellowship, and next moved to Deakin University where I was appointed to a lectureship and then a senior lectureship in the History of Ideas in the School of Humanities, from 1978 to 1985.’

‘While I was there, I helped to prepare teaching units for Deakin and completed my Parody/Meta-Fiction of 1979. It begun as a “spin-off” from both my 1973 thesis on Heine and my 1978 book on Marx and Engels, as well as (in 1982) the manuscript of my Marx’s Lost Aesthetic. Karl Marx & the visual arts. That book was a critique, amongst other things, of the anachronistic appropriation of Marx to 20^th-Century theories of socialist realist art and was first published by Cambridge University Press in 1984.’

The cover of ‘Marx’s lost aesthetic’ by Margaret A. Rose.

The book would go on to win the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1984, recognising books published in English ‘which exemplified the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.’ The award has been ongoing since 1969.

Election to the Fellowship

The following year (1985), Margaret was elected to the Fellowship at the age of 38.

‘At that time, only about ten percent of the Academy’s Fellows (i.e. 16 out of c. 161) were women,’ she says. ‘Being a Fellow of the Academy meant above all that one was in the company of scholars, who valued both national and international research, when that was not always valued by others.’

In 1988 Margaret published her research on Margaret Baskerville (1861-1930), one of Victoria’s first woman sculptors, and her husband C.D. Richardson (1853-1932). In the following years, Margaret would continue to publish regularly. The Post-modern and the post-industrial: A critical analysis would be released in 1991 by Cambridge University Press and reprinted and translated several times, offering analyses both of the term post-modern and the concept of the post-industrial society, to which the concept of the post-modern has often been related.

In 1993, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern was also published by CUP, and expanded on both her 1973 thesis and her 1979 book, Parody//Meta-fiction, which began as an influential text in broadening awareness of parody as a ‘double-coded’ device which could be used for more than mere ridicule.

Margaret Rose at the 2003 London Centenary medal ceremony for service to Australian society and the humanities in the study of history.

Margaret had also continued her academic career following her years at Deakin with a Visiting Associateship at Clare Hall Cambridge in 1985 and with her appointment as the first T.R. Ashworth Reader in Social Theory at the University of Melbourne between 1986 and 1990, when she gave seminars on topics such as Marx, the Frankfurt School, the post-industrial and the post-modern, as well as organising seminars and lectures by a variety of national and internationally known academic writers.

In 1989 Margaret was also awarded an ARC grant for study of the post-industrial society and an Overseas Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge.

Margaret remains a Life Member of Clare Hall College in Cambridge and has assisted with the supervision of both Masters and Doctoral theses there.

Concerning her own research, she writes that she has ‘maintained and developed an interest in 19^th and 20^th Century European thought and culture, but has also returned to archival research, as well as to the 19^th Century German art discussed in Marx’s Lost Aesthetic, with the discovery in 1997 of letters and an album of sketches by the Düsseldorf artist Theodor Mintrop (1814-1870), which have also provided the key to analysing another already well known album of his works.’

In 2003, she published the first of her books on Mintrop thanks to the award of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grant for the publication in colour of Theodor Mintrop. Das Album für Minna (1855-1857) by the Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld.

In that same year, Margaret was elected a member of the committee of the UK Alexander von Humboldt Association, which amongst other things encourages post-doctoral research in Germany, and was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal for service to Australian society and the humanities in the study of history at the Australian High Commission, London.

Margaret Rose and her husband Francis West returned to Cambridge upon his retirement in 1990, where they continue to engage with the Fellowship and the Australian academic community from afar. Despite ‘the tyranny of distance’ (to use Geoffrey Blainey’s classic phrase) technology allows Margaret and Francis to keep up to date on Academy matters, although they also note that ‘what might be called the tyranny of time differences’ makes it hard to join in all on-line events from the Southern hemisphere!’.

 

This is a dual interview with Foundation Fellow Emeritus Professor Francis James West FAHA, whose article, Reflections of a Foundation Fellow: Francis West can be read here.

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