No. 112/2021

31 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 112/2021 arship Foundation) to secure their examination success. If you wanted to take a doctorate, you had to apply to a professor as a candidate. Some of my friends failed at that point. Put off by this, I did not even give it a try. Instead, I organised my own year abroad in England which took me to the University of East Anglia where a German-born German scholar by the name of W.G. Sebald was teaching. His outstanding essays on Austrian litera- ture ultimately convinced me to go to Norwich. After a year there, nothing could have enticed me back to Munich; I took my PhD with Sebald, who, with publication of the English translations of his collection of stories, “The Emi- grants”, and his prose work, “The Rings of Saturn”, was just shooting to fame as arguably the most important Ger- man writer of the late 20th century. After graduating, I soon found a lectureship at Aston University in Birming- ham where I have been teaching ever since. So, the fact that my “emigration” to England, whilst not getting me, the working-class boy, a professorship, but clearly enabling me to realise my ambition of a university career, is my version of an upward mobility story. I there- fore have a lot to be grateful to England for. Not just the opportunity to do a doctorate with the most unusual, impressive supervisor in every way imaginable who him- self had seen just as few prospects of a university career in Germany at the beginning of the sixties. As opposed to the German university system, I could also spend time pro- ductively working on research without the existential worry of whether an underpaid, fixed-term, project-­ financed position would be extended, or uncertainty as to whether unpaid teaching duty as a Privatdozent (private lecturer) would ever earn me one of the rare professorships in German studies. Therefore, I have the Humboldt Foundation to thank for repeatedly sponsoring me since 2008. I consider its meritocratic principle of basing funding decisions on aca- demic excellence without regard to social background or gender to be eminently fair. Only an egalitarian approach of this kind can produce diversity in academia. Increased diversity is a moral necessity in response to the unequal social distribution of opportunity. Particularly in view of the challenges currently facing society, the issue of social justice is of the utmost importance. Photo: Franziska K. Huhn DR UWE SCHÜTTE , born in West Ger- many in 1967, is a reader in German in the School of History, Languages and Translation at Aston University, United Kingdom. He studied modern German literature, English and history at LMU Munich and moved to the UK in 1992. He took his PhD at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, in 1997, super- vised by the writer and literary scholar, W.G. Sebald. Uwe Schütte has been a Humboldt Research Fellow at Hum­ boldt-Universität zu Berlin (2008/ 2009) and the University of Paderborn (2011). In 2017, he completed an exter- nal Habilitation at the University of Göttingen. His research focusses on contemporary German literature (espe- cially W.G. Sebald) and popular culture/ pop music (especially the band Kraft- werk). He regularly publishes literary criticism and essays on culture in Ger- man daily newspapers and magazines.