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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Lecture:”Fremde Heimkehr: Zu einem Literaturprogramm der Moderne”
Time: - 8:00 PMDate: Location: 282 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Dr. Eva Esslinger (LMU-Munich)
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Lecture: “Der Zorn der Moralisten und die Theorie des Ressentiments: Gegenwartsdiagnose mit/gegen Nietzsche”
Time: - 7:00 PMDate: Location: 282 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Professor Albrecht Koschorke (Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor)
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Askesis, Critique and Tradition: Foucault and Benjamin
Time: - 7:00 PMDate: Location: 282 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Dr. Ori Rotlevy (Tel Aviv University)
A central concept in Foucault’s later work is Askesis: an exercise of oneself, related to self-mastery and self-transformation. The concept of “ascetic schooling” in the foreword to Benjamin’s Origin of German Trauerspiel has a similarly significant role, much neglected by scholarship. Both Foucault’s askesis and Benjamin’s “ascetic schooling” relate to the transformation of the subject through arduous work as fundamental for philosophy. At the same time, their considerations of askesis/asceticism illuminates the different models of critique in each case – the reactivation of an attitude alien to tradition and doctrine (Foucault), versus a change of attitude as propaedeutic for the presentation of doctrine or tradition (Benjamin). Ori…
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“Poetic Thinking, or Why Germany’s Best Writers Today are Poets”
Time: - 7:00 PMDate: Location: 3335 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Dr. Christian Metz (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich)
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Berkeley Cologne Summer School: “Practice, Exercise, Formation”
Time: - 5:00 PMDate: - 08/23/2019 Location: 370 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Coordinator: Niklaus Largier
The notion of practice has played an increasingly important role in the study of literature, in cultural studies, in anthropology, and in philosophy during the last decades. This increasing interest in practices also entailed a specific interest in forms of writing from a perspective that foregrounds not the production of meaning and the hermeneutic reading of texts, but a specific attention to the ways in which texts shape forms of perception, stiles of thought, and modes of behavior. Thus, we have to distinguish between a focus on and a tension between semiotic and hermeneutic approaches to texts and approaches that…
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A German Cabaret-04/23 & 4/24 at 7pm
Time: Date: - 04/24/2019 Location: B-4 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Niko Euba
A German Cabaret WAS ES ALLES GIBT!
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Bonwit-Heine Lecture “ ‘Global Mission’: Nazi Foreign Cultural Policy and the Goethe Society in Weimar”
Time: - 7:00 PMDate: Location: 3335 Dwinelle Hall
Bio: W. Daniel Wilson was professor of German at Berkeley from 1983 to 2005 and departmental chair for four years; he is now professor of German at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely in eighteenth-century literature, culture, and politics, particularly on political, gender and sexuality in Goethe. His most recent books are Goethe Männer Knaben: Ansichten zur Homosexualität (Insel, 2012), Goethes Erotica und die Weimarer Zensoren (Wehrhahn, 2015) and Der Faustische Pakt: Goethe und die Goethe-Gesellschaft im Dritten Reich (dtv, 2018). In 2016 he was awarded the Raimar Lüst Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. https://literaturkritik.de/wilson-der-faustische-pakt-goethe-als-mitlaeufer,25123.html
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Helke Sander's dffb Cinema, 1968 and West Germany's Feminist Movement
Time: - 3:00 PMDate: Location: 201 Moses Hall
Helke Sander was a key figure of the early dffb (Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin), where she studied between 1966 and 1969. Returning to her political organizing and her films of the era revises three crucial narratives: 1. it expands narratives about 1968 to include the establishment of feminism as part of it (The Tomatenwurf), which is often read as a 1970s phenomenon; 2. it expands narratives of cinemas of the late sixties to include feminist filmmaking; and 3. it shows how the seeds for her much better known filmmaking of the seventies were already visible thematically and formally in…
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Between the Money-Image and the Museum: Ulrich Peltzer’s Theory of the (Contemporary) Work of (Installation) Art
Time: - 7:00 PMDate:
Speaker: Richard Langston
Abstract: If money’s status as dominant medium guiding what Jochen Hörisch once called the ontosemiological framework of modern culture has really yielded to the empire of audio-visual media, then why is so much contemporary German literature still so obsessed with money? This presentation considers how one such example—Ulrich Peltzer’s 2015 novel Das bessere Leben, a work whose very title signals its investment in correlating being and meaning—has tracked the convergence of money and image in our contemporary moment but in so doing has also called literature’s powers of critical observation into question. By indexing the museum as a privileged space of aesthetic…
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Mosse Lecture: Ulrike Ottinger
Time: - 8:30 PMDate: Location: 2155 Center Street, Berkeley
Speaker: Ulrike Ottinger
Filmmaker in residence Ulrike Ottinger presents an illustrated lecture discussing her approach to the visual design of her films, as well as her research methods for a nonfiction film project like Chamisso’s Shadow. https://bampfa.org/event/mosse-lecture-ulrike-ottinger See schedule on PFA website: https://bampfa.org/program/afterimage-ulrike-ottinger