Her books include:

• Walter Benjamins "Deutsche Menschen", together with Erdmut Wizisla  (Wallstein 2008)
• Im Nachvollzug des Geschriebenseins. Theorie der Literatur nach 1945  (Königshausen und Neumann 2007)
• Hannah Arendt: Von den Dichtern erwarten wir Wahrheit (with Marie Luise Knott; Matthes & Seitz, 2007).
• Hannah Arendt: Leidenschaften, Menschen und Bücher (Berlin Verlag 2005).
• Die Jüdin Pallas Athene. Auch eine Theorie der Moderne (Berlin Verlag 2002), and its English translation: The Jewess Pallas Athena. This Too a Theory of Modernity. Translated by James McFarland (Princeton University Press, 2005).
• Unter falschem Namen. Von der schwierigen Autorschaft der Frauen (Suhrkamp, 1991).
• “Antworten Sie mir”. Rahel Levin Varnhagens Briefwechsel (Stroemfeld, 1990).
• Im Schlaf bin ich wacher. Die Träume der Rahel Levin Varnhagen (Luchterhand 1990)

She is currently working on a book in which she reconstructs the constellations of theoretical writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, entitled To Write a Book?… Walking, and a second one, entitled Poetry is Closest to Thought. Hannah Arendt’s Literature.

Since she discovered the unpublished papers of Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Germany’s most interesting intellectual Jewish woman in the nineteenth century, she has, in cooperation with a German-Italian group of scholars, published her correspondences and diaries, of which two volumes have already appeared: the correspondences with Pauline Wiesel (C.H.Beck, 1997) and the correspondences with Ludwig Robert (C.H.Beck, 2002). In 1998 Pauline Wiesels Liebesgeschichten was published, a collection of love letters written around 1800 (C.H.Beck).

She has also edited Frauen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Von Lou Andreas-Salomé bis Hannah Arendt (Beck, 1994) and Von einer Welt in die andere. Jüdinnen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (with Jutta Dick; Wien: Brandstätter Verlag, 1993).

In addition, she has authored many essays on among others Ricarda Huch, Ernst Jünger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, Charlotte von Stein, Margarete Susman, the Book of Job, Heiner Müller, and Franz Kafka.