News & Events
Events
The Department of German hosts and co-sponsors a range of events throughout the year, including conferences, lecture series, and weekly/biweekly colloquia and social activities.
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“As on the First Day”: The Struggle of Firsts in Heidegger’s “First Elaboration” of his “Origin of the Work of Art”
Time: Date: Location: Dwinelle 370
Speaker: Peter Fenves
The primary thesis of this paper is that Heidegger’s “First Elaboration” of the thoughts that would emerge as his essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art” provides a tantalizing brief index of an insight into the work of art from which the later elaborations of the “Artwork” essay would progressively retreat. The secondary thesis of this paper is that, even if its primary thesis appears as though it were only a parody of the primary thesis Heidegger advances in Kant and the Problem of the Metaphysics, the index in question is itself parodic. Specifically—and this is the tertiary…
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Digital Semiotics: German Idealism, Cybernetics, and the Sign
Time: Date: Location: Wheeler Hall, Maude Fife Room
Speaker: Leif Weatherby
Digital machines are sign-making machines. This basic fact was known – and crucial – to the first generation of computer architects, who often tied their work to a philosophical trajectory from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Charles Sanders Peirce. This talk traces the semiotic origins of digital technologies and its consequences for what Max Bense, the most important semiotician of the digital, called “information aesthetics,” aiming to lay the groundwork for a theory of the digital. Leif Weatherby is Associate Professor of German at NYU and the author of Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx (Fordham 2016).…
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Conceptualizing an Era: A Preface to Early Twentieth-century German History
Time: Date: Location: 201 Moses Hall
Speaker: Helmut Walser Smith
Drawn from the author’s “Germany. A Nation in its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000” (forthcoming, W.W. Norton, March 2020), this lecture attempts to lay out elementary historical structures of “the nationalist age.” Shadowing Kant’s famous distinction between an age of enlightenment and an enlightened age, it is argued that in the nationalist age, war shaped the era fundamentally, even during years of peace, and that killing and dying took on entirely new contours. It is further argued that notions of national sacrifice—for the nation and of groups within the nation—were at the heart of novel discourses about the…
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Workshop with Katja Petrowskaja
Time: Date: Location: Dwinelle 3335
The German Department is thrilled to announce a special guest: the acclaimed Ukrainian-German author Katja Petrowskaja will give a workshop October 22, 5 PM, in our department (Dwinelle 3335). We will have the chance to encounter Katja Petrowskaja in this informal setting and engage in a conversation with her about her writing. The workshop will be based on a few chapters from Petrowskaja’s book Vielleicht Esther (2014). The format of the workshop is open; reading in advance is much appreciated. For a copy of the discussion text please email mkrueger@berkeley.edu. Please note that the workshop is in addition to the…
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“Maybe Esther”: Storytelling and the Unpredictability of the Past
Time: Date: Location: Alumni House
Speaker: Katja Petrowskaja
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…
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Nazism: A Dark Comedy in Liechtenstein
Time: Date: Location: 201 Moses Hall
Speaker: Edith Sheffer
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…
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The Labor of Reading: Kafka’s America
Time: Date: Location: 1229 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Dr. Nils Plath, Department of Literature, University of Erfurt
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…
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Lecture:”Fremde Heimkehr: Zu einem Literaturprogramm der Moderne”
Time: - 8:00 PMDate: Location: 282 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Dr. Eva Esslinger (LMU-Munich)
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Lecture: “Der Zorn der Moralisten und die Theorie des Ressentiments: Gegenwartsdiagnose mit/gegen Nietzsche”
Time: - 7:00 PMDate: Location: 282 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Professor Albrecht Koschorke (Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor)
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Askesis, Critique and Tradition: Foucault and Benjamin
Time: - 7:00 PMDate: Location: 282 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Dr. Ori Rotlevy (Tel Aviv University)
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…