Margaret E. Menninger is Professor of History at Texas State University, USA. She is a scholar of German culture during the long nineteenth century and Executive Director of the German Studies Association. She is the author of A Serious Matter and True Joy: Philanthropy, the Arts, and the State in Leipzig, 1750-1918 (2022) and co-editor of The Total Work of Art: Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations (2016).