Please join us for our Third Annual Bucerius Lecture with Kiev-born German writer Katja Petrowskaja, followed by a conversation with Sven Spieker (UC Santa Barbara).   Katja Petrowskaja deals with the conundrums of making history. In her acclaimed novel Maybe Esther, a modern person undertakes a road trip through European landscapes of memory, languages, and family stories. The “maybe” introduces remembering as an act of defiance, as personal resistance against the firmly established, inevitable pace of history.   An old woman is killed on a sunny day in September 1941, in the very center of Kiev. We are certain where…

Humor, whether dark or satirical, can be a trenchant analytical device. It is a tool for exposing facades, revealing contradictions between envisioned and actual reality. Satires of Nazism have been especially resonant, and controversial — from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” to Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem”. They upend familiar narratives, pointing to human folly at the heart of monstrous power. This talk asks what we gain from applying a comic lens to Nazism, exploring the curious case of Liechtenstein. In this real-life Lilliputian land, just over half the size of Nantucket, 10,000 residents enacted the furies of the wider…

  This lecture is part of a larger research project to reexamine literary and theoretical configurations of reading as labor and work, including their medial, gender-related, and institutional framings. It is the goal to inquire how historical and contemporary concepts of labor and work can be challenged by a closer look at the actuality of reading. It is the assumption that reading and working are intrinsically connected and function as incommensurable practices, e.g. in terms of a never quite assurable ‘doing’, as bodily and transformative dynamics, or as elective affinities between ‘load’ and ‘lust’, profession and confession.   The laborious…

A central concept in Foucault’s later work is Askesis: an exercise of oneself, related to self-mastery and self-transformation. The concept of “ascetic schooling” in the foreword to Benjamin’s Origin of German Trauerspiel has a similarly significant role, much neglected by scholarship. Both Foucault’s askesis  and Benjamin’s “ascetic schooling” relate to the transformation of the subject through arduous work as fundamental for philosophy.   At the same time, their considerations of askesis/asceticism illuminates the different models of critique in each case – the reactivation of an attitude alien to tradition and doctrine (Foucault), versus a change of attitude as propaedeutic for the presentation of doctrine or tradition (Benjamin).  Ori…

The notion of practice has played an increasingly important role in the study of literature, in cultural studies, in anthropology, and in philosophy during the last decades. This increasing interest in practices also entailed a specific interest in forms of writing from a perspective that foregrounds not the production of meaning and the hermeneutic reading of texts, but a specific attention to the ways in which texts shape forms of perception, stiles of thought, and modes of behavior. Thus, we have to distinguish between a focus on and a tension between semiotic and hermeneutic approaches to texts and approaches that…

A German Cabaret WAS ES ALLES GIBT!

Bio: W. Daniel Wilson was professor of German at Berkeley from 1983 to 2005 and departmental chair for four years; he is now professor of German at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely in eighteenth-century literature, culture, and politics, particularly on political, gender and sexuality in Goethe. His most recent books are Goethe Männer Knaben: Ansichten zur ‘Homosexualität’ (Insel, 2012), Goethes Erotica und die Weimarer ‘Zensoren’ (Wehrhahn, 2015) and Der Faustische Pakt: Goethe und die Goethe-Gesellschaft im Dritten Reich (dtv, 2018). In 2016 he was awarded the Raimar Lüst Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. https://literaturkritik.de/wilson-der-faustische-pakt-goethe-als-mitlaeufer,25123.html