Ursula Wertheim (8 October 1919 – 26 July 2006) was a German literary scholar and university teacher at Jena in East Germany.
The eastern part of Berlin had ended the war in the Soviet occupation zone, and she was a member of the first generation of scholars in what later became East Germany to undertake her studies through the Marxist prism, which accompany her through her academic career.
She received her doctorate in 1957 for work on Friedrich Schiller, focusing on his plays "Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua" and "Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien".
The theme identified in the title of her dissertation was that of "Problems with the historical material in the drama of the young Schiller",[3] which hints at an increasing overlap between Sociology and more traditionally academic fields of study such as History and Literature: this was a general trend in officially approved academic scholarship in East Germany during the 1950s and 60s.
By the time she retired in 1979, her approach to the literary classics through a single rather rigid Socio-political prism was seen by some to have been superseded by newer methodologies.