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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Noon Colloquium
Time: - 1:00 PMDate: Location: 282 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Lorenzo Capitanio
“Die vierfache Wurzel des romantischen Symbols. Versuch einer begriffsgeschichtlichen Genealogie”
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Seminar: “What are Theory Films? On the Visual Afterlife of Textual Procedures”
Time: - 6:00 PMDate: Location: 3335 Dwinelle Hall (History Room)
Speaker: Florian Fuchs Freie Universität
In my current media-theoretical project I study the continuation of literary formats and theoretical problematizations with visual means in the film and text works of Harun Farocki, Laura Mulvey/Peter Wollen, Trinh Minh-ha, Hito Steyerl, Philipp Scheffner, and others. Up to now, these filmmakers have primarily been perceived as artists, which ignores their extensive textual work with and on literary and theoretical texts. The project attempts to identify systematically the text-based practices of reading and writing in their visual works, and their transposition into media specific procedures of inquiry, which have remained largely implicit in their globally received films. Through this…
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Theology of Disability: Germany, 1900-1945
Time: - 6:30 PMDate: Location: 223 Moses Hall & Zoom
Speaker: Dagmar Herzog, Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center
Moderator: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Associate Professor of History, UC Berkeley Sponsors: Institute of European Studies, German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley, Department of History, Department of German, Center for German and European Studies A slim book published in 1920, entitled “Permission to Annihilate Life Unworthy of Life,” is often invoked when scholars try to explain the prehistory of the Nazi “euthanasia” murder program which is estimated to have claimed nearly 300,000 victims. Far less well studied are the various counter-positions proposed by Christian authors – theologians, pastors, charity institution directors – who, during the years of the Weimar Republic, strove to argue that the killing…
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Seminar: “The Rubble Women: War, Gender, and the Novel in Austria, 1945–49”
Time: - 6:00 PMDate: Location: 3401 Dwinelle Hall (History Seminar Room)
Speaker: Alys George Stanford University
How are the years 1938–45 represented in fiction from the immediate postwar era? Was it even possible to tell a “true” war story in German, when catastrophic nationalism had tainted the very fundamentals of the language? This presentation looks to Austrian writers who retooled the Zeitroman, a socially and politically engaged genre, by destabilizing the boundaries between historical documentary, fiction, and autobiography. At a time when literary representation was little match for lived experience, largely neglected female authors—including Ilse Aichinger, Marie Frischauf-Pappenheim, and Mela Hartwig—refused silence and escapism, instead bearing witness to the ruinous bequest of World War II. In…
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Seminar: “Utopia & Revolution: Lu Märten’s Queer and Classless Forms”
Time: - 6:00 PMDate: Location: 3335 Dwinelle Hall (History Room)
Speaker: Mari F. Jarris University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
For as long as the concept of utopia has existed, it has been a site of contradiction: both a good place and a non-place, a call to action and an escapist fantasy, the promise of liberation and the threat of totalitarianism. Within the history of socialism, the utopian concern with gender and sexuality is typically construed as a premature phase surpassed by the science of Marxism. This talk draws out the utopian currents that persisted alongside scientific socialism, arguing that utopianism has provided the means for thinking queerness and revolution together since the nineteenth century. Building on the renewed interest…
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Seminar: “The Ends of Perfection: On a Limit Concept in German Film and Media Theory”
Time: - 6:00 PMDate: Location: 3335 Dwinelle Hall (History Room)
Speaker: Nicholas Baer Utrecht University
This talk examines the concept of perfection against the backdrop of today’s digital mediascape, where the latest screen technologies promise sharp, pristine images with lossless compression. While, in Hito Steyerl’s account, the circulation of “poor” or “imperfect” images can disrupt hegemonic media logics, I demonstrate that the very ideal of perfection is an engine of semantic instability in German modernity. Intervening in contemporary debates about “rich” and “poor” images, and “high” and “low” definition, my lecture offers a differentiated and historically dynamic understanding of perfection as a limit concept in German film and media theory. I argue that moving images…
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Seminar: “The Theatre of Migration, or: Affect, Biopolitics, and Spectacle in Christoph Schlingensief’s Ausländer Raus!”
Time: - 6:00 PMDate: Location: 3335 Dwinelle Hall (History Room)
Speaker: Irina Simova Editor, Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch
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…
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Decolonizing German Cultural Anthropology: Narratives of Time and Space in contemporary German Villages
Time: - 1:00 PMDate: Location: 201 Moses Hall (Zoom link available)
Speaker: Sadhana Naithani, Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University
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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“Music of War and Victory: How Beethoven helped to save and rebuild the Habsburg Empire”
Time: - 12:30 PMDate: Location: 223 Moses Hall
Speaker: Prof. Philipp Ther (Univ. Vienna)
More details can be found here
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Seminar: “Operative Ekphrasis: Multimodal AI and the Text-Image Distinction”
Time: - 6:00 PMDate: Location: 3335 Dwinelle Hall (History Room)
Speaker: Hannes Bajohr Collegium Helveticum, Zurich
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…