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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Still Lives: Jewish Photography under Nazism (co-sponsored by The Center for Jewish Studies)
Time: Date: Location: 3205 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Ofer Ashkenazi
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,…
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Singing Schubert, Hearing Race: Black Concert Singers and the German Lied in Interwar Central Europe
Time: Date: Location: 201 Moses Hall
Speaker: Kira Thurman
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…
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TDPS presents The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht
Time: Date: Location: Zellerbach Playhouse
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…
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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…