first survey on contemporary literature in German Die Stimme der Medusa) contributed significantly to the establishment of gender studies in German universities during the 1980s. The comprehensive monography on Ingeborg Bachmann (1999), which for the first time used the archive of the author's correspondents (such as Adorno, Scholem, Hildesheimer, the editor of Merkur et al.,) radically changed the image of Bachmann as author and intellectual. Other authors of Weigel's publications include William Shakespeare, Heinrich Kleist, Heinrich Heine, Sigmund Freud, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Jakob Taubes, Susan Taubes, Alfred Andersch, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf, Unica Zürn, Yoko Tawada (who did her PhD with her). Memory and restitution post-1945 The aftermath of WWII and holocaust form a continuous commitment of her work, with contributions to memory, trauma, trans-generationality, testimony, restitution and the problematic conversion of guilt into debts (Schuld/Schulden). First cultural science (Kulturwissenschaft) The name 'first cultural science' (Kulturwissenschaft) coined by Weigel, refers to a constellation of intellectual history around 1900, when predominantly Jewish German-speaking authors such as Sigmund Freud, Aby Warburg, Georg Simmel, Ernst Cassirer, Helmuth Plessner, Walter Benjamin et al. transgressed disciplines to study boundary cases and the afterlife (Nachleben) of religion, myth, and ritual in modern culture. Their ideas, emerging from the reverse side of Europe's nationalist and colonial past, anticipate several components of critical theory, e.g. a non-teleologic theory of history and correspondences between European and non-European cultures. Whereas violently disrupted by Nazi-Germany, the intellectual legacy of Kulturwissenschaft found successors in authors such as Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Stéphane Mosès and Susan Taubes. Weigel engaged herself to the archive of this intellectual history by means of editions, including Warburg's Writings in One Volume and the first comprehensive edition of Scholem's Poetica. The topics of her cultural science- publications include: the history of the generation concept, genealogy, the topographical turn, figures of martyrdom in religious-cultural history, testimony, compassion, selftranslation, the voice, and opera. Walter Benjamin For Weigel, Benjamin's thinking is "neither theological nor secular", but shaped by a subtle interplay between the biblical and profane language register. Her work is dedicated to his characteristic thought-figures (such as legibility, historical index, topography/ site, body and image space, awakening), to his epistemological threshold knowledge (Schwellenkunde), his image-based epistemology, and his music theory. In contrast to Giorgio Agamben, she emphasizes the differences between Benjamin and Carl Schmitt by discussing their theories of ‘sovereignty’ from the perspective of the