The talk focuses on Christoph Schlingensief’s 2000 performance Bitte liebt Österreich/Ausländer raus! (Please Love Austria/Foreigners Out!) – a six-day event with complex mediatic structure designed as a political critique against the Freedom Party of Austria’s inclusion into the Austrian government (marking the first time since World War II that a far-right anti-immigration party had been incorporated into a European governing coalition). Schlingensief’s artistic intervention consisted of erecting a container camp in Vienna’s Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz for six days, housing twelve asylum seekers. Ausländer raus! was staged as a game show based on the Big Brother television format, inviting the Austrian public to…

Sponsors:  Institute of European Studies, Center for German and European Studies, German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley Zoom Link Available The concept of ‘Stunde Null/Zero Hour’ has often been used to characterize the physical and cultural state of Germany at the end the WWII. In this talk five deeply personal and (simultaneously) social narratives mark the flow of time with reference to space in German villages since 1945 to the present. Prof. Naithani argues that micro level narratives are central to understanding stasis, continuity and change in culture. They provide deep insights into the post WWII Germany. Villages constituted a very…

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The relationship between text and image has been a longstanding concern of aesthetic theory. On the one hand, it has invited strong formalist calls for their separation as entirely distinct media whose aesthetic integrity requires that they be kept separate; on the other hand, such dreams of purity have been rebuked as misguided because “there are no visual media” (W.J.T. Mitchell). This talk proposes that state-of-the-art instances of “multimodal AI” both complicate the relationship between text and image and help us to rethink it. Multimodal AI – particularly text-to-image machine learning systems like Dall-E 2 or Stable Diffusion – collapses…

  For graduate students presenting their research (their proposed dissertation, conference papers, or current research project) For visitors (profs., postdocs, doctoral students) presenting their research For guests speakers   In the Doctoral Colloquium of the Department of German at UC Berkeley, visitors, guest speakers, faculty, and doctoral students present the progress of their proposed dissertations, conference papers, or current research projects. Regular colloquia help to ensure that a collegial exchange is possible and that ideas, critical suggestions, and outstanding matters can be discussed. This is an opportunity for faculty, visitors, and doctoral students from various departments to share their ideas,…

A leading graphic novelist, Barbara Yelin has engaged with German history, in particular the Holocaust, and issues of migration. Born in Munich, she studied illustration at the Hamburg Institute of Applied Sciences and started publishing in France (le visiteur; le retard). Her graphic narrative Gift (2010, with Peer Meter) portrays the story of Gesche Gottfried, a female serial killer in nineteenth-century Bremen. Her graphic narrative Irmina deals with female complicity in the Third Reich. Unsichtbar addresses the travails of Kidane, an Eritrean refugee. Yelin has also drawn comic strips for German newspapers, including the Frankfurter Rundschau and Tagesspiegel, and worked…

Sponsors:  Institute of European Studies, Flanders in the USA, BENELUX Studies Program, Dutch Studies Between 1914 and 1918, Belgium was the de facto testing ground for large-scale industrial armed conflict. From the brutal German invasion in August 1914 to the armistice in November 1918, the neutral, small state was the scene of some of the bloodiest innovations in technological warfare such as the introduction of aerial attacks on civilians, chemical weapons, rapid innovation in artillery systems and tanks. With the country split between active frontline and occupied territory, it saw four years of close civil-military interactions, propaganda wars and civilian coping strategies under occupation.…

For graduate students presenting their research (their proposed dissertation, conference papers, or current research project) For visitors (profs., postdocs, doctoral students) presenting their research For guests speakers   In the Doctoral Colloquium of the Department of German at UC Berkeley, visitors, guest speakers, faculty, and doctoral students present the progress of their proposed dissertations, conference papers, or current research projects. Regular colloquia help to ensure that a collegial exchange is possible and that ideas, critical suggestions, and outstanding matters can be discussed. This is an opportunity for faculty, visitors, and doctoral students from various departments to share their ideas, listen…

Our next Noon Colloquium is this Friday!   For graduate students presenting their research (their proposed dissertation, conference papers, or current research project) For visitors (profs., postdocs, doctoral students) presenting their research For guests speakers   In the Doctoral Colloquium of the Department of German at UC Berkeley, visitors, guest speakers, faculty, and doctoral students present the progress of their proposed dissertation, conference papers, or current research projects. Regular colloquia help to ensure that a collegial exchange is possible and that ideas, critical suggestions, and outstanding matters can be discussed. This is an opportunity for faculty, visitors, and doctoral students…

Moderator: John Efron, Koret Professor of Jewish History, UC Berkeley Sponsors: Institute of European Studies, Center for Jewish Studies, Department of German, Department of History, German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley Friendship is a key category for understanding what Jewishness meant to many German Jews in the late nineteenth century and up to the eve of the Holocaust. While Judaism in Germany had been transformed into a mere “community of faith,” that is, one shorn of any ethnic conception of Jewishness, this denominational concept of what it means to be Jewish faced a crisis in the age of secularization. For many Jews, Jewishness was…