Reading – Literary | March 5 | 12-1:30 p.m. |   Featured Performer:  Sharon Dodua Otoo Panelist/Discussants:  Jon Cho-Polizzi; Deniz Göktürk Attended by more than a hundred participants across the globe, this Zoom event was the first in a series of workshop conversations with authors, “Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of Fake News” organized by Deniz Göktürk (UC Berkeley, Department of German, Multicultural Germany Project and Transit Journal) and Elisabeth Krimmer (UC Davis, German Department, Migration and Aesthetics Project). The series engages in conversation with contemporary writers who bring diverse perspectives to questions of societal polarization and the power of poetic imagination. Their…

Travel Forms-Global German Studies Program As a pandemic and international solidarity for Black Lives Matter demand reckoning with crises of a global scale, we propose to rethink German Studies in its constitutive contradiction: formed around a national canon, yet also situated in global networks, the discipline calls for conceptual, aesthetic, and historical reevaluations of cultural-medial forms in motion. Around 1800, Immanuel Kant conceptualized cosmopolitanism without leaving Königsberg, and the decreasingly mobile Goethe projected the idea of world literature from his study in Weimar, suggesting that visions of global circulation often arise in tension with local limitations on mobility. In this…

Machine learning has not only changed how computers “read”, but also how they process the visual world. In this talk, I will investigate some of the implications of the machine learning revolution for the digital humanities. I will present an analysis of popular distant viewing practices that leverage machine learning to analyze large corpora of images and show how these practices fail by failing to take into account the radical differences between human and machine intelligence. Specifically, I will argue that it is exactly a “close reading” of machine learning that is required to uncover such epistemological limitations, and that…

Machine learning has not only changed how computers “read”, but also how they process the visual world. In this talk, I will investigate some of the implications of the machine learning revolution for the digital humanities. I will present an analysis of popular distant viewing practices that leverage machine learning to analyze large corpora of images and show how these practices fail by failing to take into account the radical differences between human and machine intelligence. Specifically, I will argue that it is exactly a “close reading” of machine learning that is required to uncover such epistemological limitations, and that…

The German department is proud to present: “The Madhouse: Ecological Anxiety and Viral Reality in Kafka and Coetzee”   Prof. Ian Fleishman German and Cinema & Media Studies University of Pennsylvania

UC Berkeley’s German Cabaret 2020 Zoomeist heiter bis wolkig UC Berkeley’s students of German once again present a mixture of poetry, skits, and music in their annual cabaret program  – a humorous, poetic, and playful celebration of the German language featuring the suspenseful story of an exquisite overcoat, a poem lamenting the abuse of flowers and blossoms, a Berkeley take on a commercial by the Berlin Public Transit Authority, some really, really bad jokes, and much more – all of this conveniently coming to your house via Zoom and in German, “live” on April 30, 4 pm, and on demand thereafter. If you are joining us ‘live’, please…

In 2011, a right-wing terrorist cell named “NSU” was discovered in Germany. The NSU –”National Socialist Underground” – killed ten people and committed several other crimes. For more than 13 years, three neo-Nazi terrorists had been able to live undetected acting under false identity. All these years the police and intelligence forces did not stop them. Germany’s Chief Federal Prosecutor has called this “Germany’s 9/11”. This may be seen as an exaggeration, nevertheless this judgement shows the importance of the NSU case. Tanjev Schultz puts it into a broader context of developments of the far right, including German Ku Klux…

The Global Urban Humanities Initiative presents Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin, which focuses on the urban wilds of marginal spaces in Berlin as they are transformed into parks and public spaces–or allowed to remain vacant. The film is by Matthew Gandy, the noted geographer from the University of Cambridge and author of The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity and the Urban Imagination among many other books. Co-author and executive producer of the film Sandra Jasper (now at Humboldt University in Berlin) will talk about the film.   Natura Urbana tells the post-war history of Berlin through its plants. The…

Laocoon & Sons: The Story of the Transformation of Esmeralda del Rio (Laokoon & Söhne: Die Verwandlungsgeschichte der Esmeralda del Rio)   Ulrike Ottinger   FEATURING: Tabea Blumenschein,   Ottinger’s debut film already contains many of the elements that would appear in her later works: an extraordinary woman, an unusual country, and a chain of magic transformations that give rise to eccentric characterizations by an ensemble cast, here featuring Tabea Blumenschein in multiple roles. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Ottinger’s allegorical work explores themes of death, destruction, and resurrection. With striking camerawork reminiscent of the antics of avant-garde psychodramas, Laocoon & Sons is…