Past Events Archive

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…

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…

Monday, April 27, 2020 12:00pm to 1:30pm via Zoom  RSVP here   Author Max Czollek’s essay collection Desintegriert Euch! transformed the debate about the integration of minorities in Germany when it appeared in 2018. His perspective on the roles of contemporary Jews in German society and its remembrance culture—its “theater of memory”—struck a nerve not just among Jews, but other minority groups as well. The threat from the right has created a new kind of solidarity, Czollek recently told the New York Times, speaking about his efforts to forge alliances among various minority groups in Germany. This joint event co-organized by the Stanford Taube Center…

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…

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 Eurozone, Ukraine, refugees and Brexit – the European Union has had to confront and manage several major crises during the last decade. However, the outcomes of these crises in respect of political integration have been divergent. The Eurozone has become politically more closely integrated. The Ukraine crisis has not produced any significant effect one way or the other. In contrast, the refugee crisis has provoked some, albeit limited, political disintegration and, with Brexit, the EU is losing one of its three largest and most powerful member states. This divergent pattern of crisis outcomes is not easily explicable in terms…

A series of recent controversies has raised many questions about Europe’s treatment of its religious minorities. Why do societies that claim to respect religious freedom and tolerance so routinely discriminate against Muslims, Jews, and others? Udi Greenberg will explore the origins of Europe’s contemporary thinking about religious pluralism to the recent peace between Catholics and Protestants and will show how this development, which unfolded between the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and the era of decolonization in the 1960s, helped shape both the scope and rigid limits of the continent’s religious landscape   Udi Greenberg is an associate professor…

Policymakers across the world have embraced higher education to generate the human capital believed to be essential for sustaining economic development and social welfare in the 21st century’s “global knowledge economy.” Attempts to disrupt universities and redesign inherited modes of education delivery have accompanied commitments to expanding access. This talk explores the regulatory strategies deployed by state authorities in Germany and the US, home to world-leading university systems, to sponsor the reorganization of higher education amidst growth during the past three decades. Its analysis shows how policymakers across borders have leveraged structurally equivalent competition-sustaining provisions to steer universities’ expansion. Beyond…