Helmuth Feilke Elected President of Germany's Academy for Language and Literature

The linguist Helmuth Feilke has been elected president of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, the German Academy for Language and Literature. The academy announced the vote on October 23, after its members' meeting that day. Feilke will serve a three-year term.

He succeeds the novelist Ingo Schulze, who did not stand again after three years in the post, the academy said. The Darmstadt-based academy brings together writers and scholars from Germany and abroad, publishes editions, and gives literary prizes, including the Georg Büchner Prize, the best-known award for German-language literature.

A warning about AI text

In a statement released by the academy, Feilke said that free culture and scholarship, and the ability to read and write, are "doubly under pressure" right now. (The quotes here are PT's translation from German.)

The first pressure he named was artificial intelligence. The "digital illusion of perfect, AI-generated texts" widens what he called the literate comfort zone, he said, but it can also, quite literally, take away from people the work of writing and reading, and with it the chance to develop a voice of their own in language and literature. He called that a challenge for schools as much as for the academy.

The second pressure, he said, is political: around the world, a new nationalism wants to wrap language, literature and cultural memory in flags, and to make both history and the stories people tell fit national pathos. In that situation, Feilke said, the academy can speak up as an attentive observer and as a critical participant in public debate about language and literature, and he wants to contribute to that as president.

Who he is

Feilke, born in 1959 in Wissen an der Sieg, taught at Justus Liebig University Giessen until 2025, according to the academy. His research on language theory and the teaching of German has won several awards, among them the Konrad Duden Prize in 2023. He co-edits the journal Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik and the teaching journal Praxis Deutsch. He has been a member of the academy since 2019 and shared responsibility for its third language report, on language in schools, published in 2021.

The rest of the new leadership

Members also elected a new presidium. The writer Oswald Egger, the literary scholar Daniel Göske and the Germanist and critic Daniela Strigl are the new vice presidents. The six other presidium members are the linguists Christa Dürscheid and Rita Franceschini, the Germanist Gisela Holfter, the writers Joachim Kalka and Ulf Stolterfoht, and the translator Susanne Lange.

Why it matters

The Büchner Prize academy now has a president whose work is about how people learn to read and write. He used his first statement to name AI-generated text as one of the main threats to that, which puts one of Europe's main literary institutions alongside the writers' groups already pushing back on machine-written books.

Sources

• Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, October 23, 2026: Helmuth Feilke ist neuer Präsident der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung