A man-eating tiger, an entrancing temple dancer, a menacing maharajah: such are the thrills and perils encountered by a German architect in India in Fritz Lang’s two-part epic The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb. After decades of exile in Hollywood, Lang returned to Germany in 1958 to direct the films, working from a script that he and Thea von Harbou had originally developed in 1920. The result is part pulp serial, part formal experiment, a fantasia of flamboyant set pieces and exotic colors shown off to full effect in this recent restoration. In The Tiger of Eschnapur, architect…

Christina Isabel Zuber presents the main arguments and empirical findings of her book project on ideational legacies and the politics of migration in European minority regions. The empirical analysis focuses on Catalonia and South Tyrol, two minority regions that respond very differently to immigration. South Tyrolean elites frame immigration as a threat and restrict immigrants’ access to social benefits. Catalan elites emphasize the opportunities of immigration and grant social rights to “new Catalans” on equal terms. Tracing the development of the political discourse on and the administrative management of migration and integration in both regions over time, I show that…

This talk examines the transnational circulation of proposals for a Working Women’s Charter in 1970s Europe, a decade that saw both the expansion of gender equality legislation in the expanding European Economic Community, and a renewed attempt by communist regimes in the Soviet bloc to internationalize a socialist vision of women’s rights through international communist organisations such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation, or international forums such as the United Nations. While most research on global socialist feminism in the 1970s has focused on the UN Decade for Women, this article instead takes Europe as its frame. Drawing on archives…

The talk considers photographs that were taken by non-professional Jewish photographers under the National Socialist regime. By the early 1930s, most German-Jewish families had avidly used pocket-sized cameras to document their experiences, from domestic routines and family vacations to participation in political gatherings, youth movement ceremonies, sports and religious events. I argue that, gazing at a rapidly changing environment after January 1933, amateur Jewish photographers utilized their cameras to reflect on the new reality, to make sense of it, and to reclaim agency in it. My analysis of the photographs underscores their dialog with the visual imagery of the time,…

Kira Thurman explores the rise in popularity of African American classical musicians in interwar Germany and Austria. Singing Lieder by Schubert, Brahms, and others, they challenged audiences’ expectations of what a black performer looked and sounded like in the transatlantic “jazz age.” Audiences labeled singers such as Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes “negroes with white souls,” and marveled at their musical mastery. If the listener closed his or her eyes and listened, these African American musicians, many remarked, “sounded like Germans.” How had they managed to accomplish this feat? By exploring Austrian and German reception of black singers, this presentation…

This captivating play within a play tells the corresponding stories of a post-war land dispute in the Caucasus Mountains and a young servant who risks her life to raise an abandoned child. Bertolt Brecht masterfully employs historification and distancing to reveal the hidden (and not so hidden) oppression of the powerless by the powerful. We are challenged not only to see the inequality inherent in power structures, but also to find ways to change our relationship to those structures—to find our way to justice, fairness, and compassion in the face of overwhelming odds. Marking 75 years since Brecht completed the…

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…

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).…

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…