Past Events Archive

This comprehensively revised, updated and significantly extended edition introduces German film history from its beginnings to the present day, covering key periods and movements including early and silent cinema, Weimar cinema, Nazi cinema, the New German Cinema, the Berlin School, the cinema of migration, and moving images in the digital era. Contributions by leading international scholars are grouped into sections that focus on genre; stars; authorship; film production, distribution and exhibition; theory and politics, including women’s and queer cinema; and transnational connections. Spotlight articles within each section offer key case studies, including of individual films that illuminate larger histories (Heimat, Downfall, The…

Hear from fellow students and representatives of UCEAP, the Institute of European Studies, Fulbright, and DAAD about opportunities to study, intern, research, and teach in German-speaking lands! Summer, semester, year-long, and post-graduation opportunities exist for all undergraduates at all language levels. It’s never too early to plan ahead! Kaffee und Kuchen will be served!

The Eurocrisis after 2010 and the migration crisis of 2015 posed important policy challenges for the European Union and its member states. Both crisis events impacted on EU countries in an asymmetrical manner. The process of taming these problems through policies resulted in political conflicts between voters and governments supporting solidarity with negatively affected countries on the one hand, and those opposing it on the other. Philipp Trein will analyze the political process of making anti-crisis policies in the EU and compare it with the process in federal states and will conclude with a discussion of the implications of EU…

This is a multi-day conference (February 21-22, 10 am-4:30 pm)   Speakers include: Banu Bargu, Eleanor Kaufman, A. Kiarina Kordela, Warren Montag, Vittorio Morfino, Ted Stolze, and Massimiliano Tomba.   This two-day conference seeks to generate and examine the conceptual problems, questions and returns of the relationships (and non-relationships) of Marx and philosophy. What philosophical debts does Marx inherit or incur? How does Marx think and intervene in philosophy? What transformations occur in philosophy as a result of Marx’s interventions and how do these transformations, in turn, inflect the current philosophical conjuncture? We aim to determine the positions animating their…

This is a multi-day conference (February 21-22, 10 am-4:30 pm)   Speakers include: Banu Bargu, Eleanor Kaufman, A. Kiarina Kordela, Warren Montag, Vittorio Morfino, Ted Stolze, and Massimiliano Tomba.   This two-day conference seeks to generate and examine the conceptual problems, questions and returns of the relationships (and non-relationships) of Marx and philosophy. What philosophical debts does Marx inherit or incur? How does Marx think and intervene in philosophy? What transformations occur in philosophy as a result of Marx’s interventions and how do these transformations, in turn, inflect the current philosophical conjuncture? We aim to determine the positions animating their…

Heated debate surrounds the question of the role Christianity and Christian churches played in the Nazi and Italian Fascist demonization of the Jews. This talk brings to light similarities and differences in the Nazi and Italian Fascist uses of Christianity in their efforts to turn their populations against the Jews through examination of two of their most influential popular anti-Semitic propaganda vehicles: La difesa della razza in Italy and Der Stürmer in Germany. Both would mix pseudo-scientific racial theories with arguments based on Christian religious authority, and both would present themselves as defenders of Christianity against the Jewish threat. Yet there were also differences,…

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, SF, Present a Seminar/Discussion with Howard Eiland on his recently published book: Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019).   Howard Eiland’s Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) is a highly erudite and courageous inquiry into the arts. Weaving through a host of “classic” texts—literary, cinematic, and musical—these notes of a virtouso close reader set up echoes and reflections across signature moments. These “notes” address a dissident force in art while discussing an impressively diverse range of works and ideas in literature, film, and jazz. For instance: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and…

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, San Francisco, present a panel-and-audience discussion with Howard Eiland: “On Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel.”   A panel of UC Berkeley faculty from the Humanities and Social sciences will speak with Eiland about Benjamin’s book, including issues involving Eiland’s new translation of and introduction to the text, as well as those raised by Eiland’s Monday, February 10 talk, “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?” (see further below for description of the February 10 talk).  The panel will then open things up by inviting questions and discussion from the audience.   For those wishing to attend the…