News & Events
Lecture
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Helke Sander's dffb Cinema, 1968 and West Germany's Feminist Movement
Time: - 1:00 PMDate: Location: 201 Moses Hall
Helke Sander was a key figure of the early dffb, where she studied between 1966 and 1969. Returning her political organizing and her films of the era revises three crucial narratives: 1. it expands narratives about 1968 to include the establishment of feminism as part of it (The Tomatenwurf), which is often read as a 1970s phenomenon; 2. it expands narratives of cinemas of the late sixties to include feminist filmmaking; and 3. it shows how the seeds for her much better known filmmaking of the seventies were already visible thematically and formally in her little known earlier work. Christina…
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Celebrating Poland: 100 Years of Independence
Time: - 7:00 PMDate: Location: Dinner Board Room Graduate Theological Union
Speaker: John Connelly
This talk will consider the meanings and consequences of the reemergence of a Polish state in 1918 in new boundaries, after 125 years of rule by foreign powers. The event is celebrated as liberation, but what did it mean for ethnic minorities like Jews and Ukrainians? What did it mean for women? That Poland lasted barely twenty years before being overwhelmed by its totalitarian neighbors. Could its leaders have done more to protect their state and European peace? These questions are considered in the shadow of today’s Poland and a right wing government that rejects critical approaches to the past.…
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Poland at 100: The Continuing Challenges of Nationhood
Time: - 7:00 PMDate: Location: Dinner Board Room Graduate Theological Union
Speaker: John Connelly
This talk will consider the meanings and consequences of the reemergence of a Polish state in 1918 in new boundaries, after 125 years of rule by foreign powers. The event is celebrated as liberation, but what did it mean for ethnic minorities like Jews and Ukrainians? What did it mean for women? That Poland lasted barely twenty years before being overwhelmed by its totalitarian neighbors. Could its leaders have done more to protect their state and European peace? These questions are considered in the shadow of today’s Poland and a right wing government that rejects critical approaches to the past.…
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Twentieth-Century Anti-Utopianism and its West German Antidote
Time: - 12:00 AMDate: Location: 201 Moses Hall
This talk picks up a melancholic thread in assessments of the end of the Cold War, when the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism over really existing socialism led academics and public intellectuals to pronounce the end of utopian ambitions. Margaret Thatcher captured this idea in her claim that there is no alternative. Some West Germans, however, resisted this logic. Facing the ostensible dissipation of radical social and political alternatives, they refused to abandon hope for a superlative existence. But they also recognized that old paradigms of utopian thought had lost their currency. They jettisoned the conviction that society marched…
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Historiography and Migration: Explaining the Present through the Lens of History
Time: - 1:00 PMDate: Location: 201 Moses Hall
Discussions about migration have dominated the public discourse in Germany since the refugee crisis of 2015. There is a growing acceptance of empiric data on migration, collected by research institutions like the IMIS at Osnabrück University. On the other hand, the public discourse including from the government is getting more emotional and often denies proven facts and figures. After a short introduction of recent German history, Paul Voerkel will analyze several statements made by German Government´s representatives about migration and refugees. He will show to what extend those statements contain arbitrary affirmations, and he will contrasted those with…
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Rock and Rule: Popular Music in Cold War Poland and East Germany
Time: - 5:30 PMDate: Location: 270 Stephens Hall
Speaker: Kyrill Kunakhovich
We often hear that rock and roll helped bring down communist regimes, but they themselves believed that it could help their cause. For much of the Cold War, communist states taught rock in schools, organized popular music festivals, and held singing competitions on TV. However, things did not always go as planned. This talk considers what rock looked like on the other side of the Iron Curtain, with a focus on Poland and East Germany in the 1960s.
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Work between National Socialism and the Economic Miracle: A Forgotten Crisis in the Early Federal Republic
Time: - 6:30 PMDate: Location: 201 Moses Hall
Joerg Neuheisers current research focuses on post-war Germany and the history of work in 20th century Europe. He is working on a book on the West German work ethic after 1945 in which he analyzes the legacy of Weimar and Nazi work experiences after 1945, the migration of so-called guest workers from the 1960s onwards and the German experience of economic, technological and cultural change in the 1970s and 1980s. A key aspect of the book is a critical reevaluation of contemporary sociological research on values after 1970 and the role that public debates on value change and a declining…
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Paving the Way: Refugees in German Higher Education
Time: - 1:00 PMDate: Location: 201 Moses Hall
Many refugees coming to Germany are highly educated. In late 2015, at the beginning of the so-called European refugee crisis, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research launched a 100 Million Euro four-year initiative to pave the way for refugees into the German higher education system. 200 universities are taking part in the programs rolled out by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), assessing the refugees university entrance qualification, offering preparatory language and propaedeutic courses as well as providing guidance and support by hundreds of volunteering student initiatives. Bernd Fischer, will give an evidence-based presentation on the programs and…
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Townsend Center's Berkeley Book Chat: Bryan Wagner: The Tar Baby: A Global History
Time: - 1:00 PMDate: Location: Geballe Room Stephens Hall
In The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton, 2017), Bryan Wagner (English) explores how the tar baby tale, thought to have originated in Africa, came to exist in hundreds of forms on five continents. Examining the fables variation, reception, and dispersal over time, he argues that this story of a fox, a rabbit, and a doll made of tar and turpentine is best understood not merely as a folktale but as a collective work in political philosophy. Circulating at the same time and in the same places as new ideas about property and politics developed in colonial law and political…
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What is in a Category? Telling Political Refugees and Economic Migrants Apart
Time: - 2:00 PMDate: Location: Toll Room Alumni House
Please join us for our Annual Bucerius Lecture with David Miliband, President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, followed by a conversation with Jutta Allmendinger, President of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Unlike Europe, where there are two separate migration issues that are coming together in a complicated way, the US conversation on migration has until recently been more neatly divided between economic immigrants coming from Latin America and East/South Asia on the one hand and refugees being resettled in the country largely from the Middle East and Africa. But the unaccompanied minors crisis a few years ago,…