Past Events Archive

In her signature work, Körper (Bodies), Berlin choreographer Sasha Waltz explores the visceral tangle of humanity from the perspectives of history, science, and architecture. Waltz premiered Körper in her first season as artistic director of the Schaubühne Theater in 2000 and now revives the work as she is poised to take on the co-directorship of the Staatsballett Berlin next year. Set on 13 male and female dancers, the movement evokes a staggering range of embodied experience through a series of living tableaux, both epic and intimate; the dancers morph and converge, meld and squirm, join and are torn apart, creating…

Please join us for our Annual Bucerius Lecture with David Miliband, President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, followed by a conversation with Jutta Allmendinger, President of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Unlike Europe, where there are two separate migration issues that are coming together in a complicated way, the US conversation on migration has until recently been more neatly divided between economic immigrants coming from Latin America and East/South Asia on the one hand and refugees being resettled in the country largely from the Middle East and Africa. But the unaccompanied minors crisis a few years ago,…

Environmental Change and Migration in Historical Perspective Sponsors: Institute of European Studies, GHI West – Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington DC, Gerda Henkel Foundation, Center for German and European Studies   Current debates about “climate refugees” have triggered interest in the larger connections between environmental change and migration. But what can history contribute to this new field of research? Focusing on historical case studies of environmental migration in general and displacement after natural disasters in particular, Uwe Lübken’s talk will highlight the potential of historical research for this debate. This lecture is part of the Gerda Henkel Lecture Series, organized…

Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen Directed by Thomas Ostermeier In a version by Florian Borchmeyer October 12–13, 2018 Zellerbach Hall Price: Tickets start at $30 Berlin’s esteemed Schaubühne theater presents a radically revised adaptation of An Enemy of the People, Ibsen’s potent 1882 drama about individual and social responsibility. The story of a whistleblower in a small town whose efforts to speak truth to power are shut down by his self-interested neighbors, the play both implicates and exhilarates its audience in a conversation about the perils of democratic capitalism. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier, for decades a leading creative…

Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf wrote in 1997 that “a century of authoritarianism is by no means the least likely prognosis for the 21st century”. Due to economic globalization and digitalization, changes in the realms of life and work are vast and far-reaching, with profound consequences for democracy. This development, however, is not new—a look at globalization from the end of World War I to post-1945 Europe reveals comparable crises. Bridging literary, historical, economic and technological perspectives, this two-day conference examines the successes, and failures, of democracies, and analyzes a possible return of anti-democratic trends, both in present-day Europe and internationally. 10am-12pm…

Professor Ella Shohat, 2018 CMES Distinguished Visitor, will deliver a lecture on “The Question of Judeo-Arabic: Nation, Partition, and the Linguistic Imaginary.” This lecture examines linguistic belonging as invented within national and colonial itineraries. More specifically, it explores the genealogy of the concept of “Judeo-Arabic language” and its axiomatic definition as a cohesive (specifically Jewish) unit separate from Arabic, and classifiable under the historically novel rubric of isolatable “Jewish languages” severed from their neighboring dialect/languages. Does the notion of “Judeo-Arabic” correspond to the designation by the speakers of that language themselves or rather to a paradigm influenced by post-Enlightenment Judaic…

The voices and spaces of immigrants come together to form collective memories. This, in turn, constitutes an important basis of community knowledge. Evelyn Hu-DeHart reflects on this process with the example ofBarcelona, where she currently teaches about new Chinese immigrants. Her research examines the distant history of Chinese in the Spanish Empire, first in Manila in the 16th century, then in Cuba in the 19th century. Keynote Address for the Conference Migrant Knowledges: Concepts, Voices, Spaces on April 20 & 21, 2018 at GHI West, the Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington DC.

Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf wrote in 1997 that “a century of authoritarianism is by no means the least likely prognosis for the 21st century”. Due to economic globalization and digitalization, changes in the realms of life and work are vast and far-reaching, with profound consequences for democracy. This development, however, is not new—a look at globalization from the end of World War I to post-1945 Europe reveals comparable crises. Bridging literary, historical, economic and technological perspectives, this two-day conference examines the successes, and failures, of democracies, and analyzes a possible return of anti-democratic trends, both in present-day Europe and internationally. 9:00…

Drawing on the author’s recent book, Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany (2017), this talk will challenge older explanations of postwar German liberal democratic reconstruction and offer a new interpretation rooted in under-explored sources from the Hitler era. Noah B. Strote is an Associate Professor of European History at North Carolina State University. He earned his PhD from the Department of History at UC Berkeley in 2011.

The exile after the coup in 1948 and the fate of Czechs abroad, who sought the return of freedom and democracy to their homeland, enslaved by the Communists, are an integral part of our modern history. However, this phenomenon is still neglected and the general public has only fragmentary information about it. Researchers are still unable to agree on the intensities of individual waves of emigration between 1948-1989. The most likely figure would be probably 250,000 people in total. The estimate of Czechoslovak State Security at the end of 1948 states 8614 refugees. Their first steps in the free world…