Simone Barck

Simone Barck (July 1944 - 16 July 2007) was a German contemporary historian and literary scholar. A principal focus of her research was on Literature and the Publishing Sector in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany 1949-1990).

Simone Barck was born in Stolpe (Pomerania) towards the end of July 1944 during the final year of the Second World War. Following the ethnic cleansing that defined the mid-1940s in the region she ended up in what became from 1949 the German Democratic Republic. She attended school in before moving on to study Germanistics and Slavic studies at and Greifswald. After this she moved to Berlin and became a Cultural Official (Kulturreferentin) at the Humboldt University.

In 1970 she joined the newly created Central Institute for Literary History (Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte / ZIL) in order to work in its Germanistics department. Her qualifications in Germanistics were fairly mainstream in the East German academic world, but the depth of her knowledge of Slavic studies was unusual. At around this time she brought both expertise sets to her doctoral dissertation entitled "Johannes R. Bechers Publizistik in der Sowjetunion 1933-1945" ("Johannes R. Becher's journalism in the Soviet Union 1933-1945"), which provided new insights on literary aspects of the Brecht-Lukács debates on at the time.

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