Doctoral research fellow  Henrike Scharff

Henrike Scharff holds a B.A. in History and Philosophy from Heidelberg University as well as a German-French M.A. in History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) Paris and Heidelberg University. Her Master's thesis examined media and criminological discourses on female impostors in the Weimar Republic, laying the groundwork for her current doctoral project, which extends this inquiry beyond Germany's borders and into the heart of interwar Europe. Female impostors - women who appropriated socially elevated identities to obtain material and social advantages - were among the most fascinating and unsettling figures of interwar Europe. The press, the judiciary, and criminological science responded to them with a characteristic ambivalence: admiration for their audacity and outrage at their deception rarely lay far apart. The dissertation examines how female impostors in Germany, France, Austria, and Switzerland (1918–1933) came to be constructed as ambivalent enemy figures and what this process reveals about contemporary norms of gender, class, and social mobility. Within the Research Training Group "Ambivalent Enmity", the project extends the concept of ambivalent enmity to an intra-societal dimension: enemy figures do not only emerge between societies, but within them, along the fault lines of class and gender.