Kaffee and Kuchen – Study/Work abroad in German speaking countries

The members of German house would like to share their study/work experiences in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and give you helpful tips about available program options and lifestyle abroad.

Elena Georgieva will talk about science programs in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland during and after graduation, as well as some work possibilities for science majors.

Nathan Shane will talk about studying music and German (and learning to cook!) while living in Leipzig, and how participating in such a different educational system gave him more perspective on his experience at Wesleyan.

Lana will talk about  the Wesleyan-Vanderbilt-Wheaton program in Regensburg which she did, and also about how one can take music and psychology classes that were counted towards her majors. Steffi, our exchange student from Regensburg also be there to answer any questions.

Our guest, Sara Lynch, who went to Berlin as part of the Duke in Berlin program will talk about her experience.

Frau Bork will also be there and answer any questions about Regensburg, the Duke in Berlin and the Columbia in Berlin programs.

The rest of the house members will be there to share our excitement with German culture and assist you with any other questions related to campus German life. Bring your questions, maybe laptops, and stomachs ready for cake!

Ulrich Plass on “Metaphysics and the Body”

 

 

On April 13, Ulrich Plass presented a talk titled “Metaphysics and the Body: Adorno and Nietzsche on Living Rightly” at the Philosophy Department of the University of South Florida. His lecture compared Nietzsche’s philosophy of the body with Adorno’s attempts to ground an ethics of the good in somatic experience, i.e., in the spontaneous articulation of impulses.

Leo Lensing on Schnitzler’s Dreams

Träume. Das Traumtagebuch 1875-1931, Leo Lensing’s edition of the dream journal of the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), the author of  La Ronde, Fräulein Else and other classics of early twentieth-century German literature, was published by Wallstein Verlag (Göttingen) on March 6. Prepared together with Peter Michael Braunwarth to celebrate Schnitzler’s 150th birthday, the revised and expanded version of the dream texts originally included in his diaries can be read as an implicit challenge to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.  Schnitzler’s Träume is both an “unconscious” autobiography of its author, whom Freud called his doppelgänger, and a dark, surreal reflection of the era between the final phase of the Habsburg Empire and the rise of fascism in the 1920s. His dreams are peopled not only by his family and famous Viennese contemporaries, including Freud, Mahler, Klimt, Karl Kraus and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, but also by Goethe, Mozart, Wagner, Emperor Franz Joseph, Kaiser Wilhelm, and even Marlene Dietrich.  An early review in the Viennese music journal Der neue Merker marveled over the “profound richness” of the dream texts and praised commentary and afterword as a “compendium of knowledge” about Schnitzler’s world. Träume was also featured on April 15 in “Ex libris,” a weekly program discussing new publications on ORF, Austrian National Radio.

GERMAN FILM FESTIVAL – (Re)imagining Post-Industrial Urbanity: Films of the Ruhr Area, Germany

 

 

The German film festival will be held in Downey House 113 on April 13 and April 14, 2012. We will be showing three films from this large post-industrial area in western Germany. The first film, Bang Boom Bang by Peter Thorwart, will be shown on Friday at 7:00 p.m. The other two-Losers and Winners, a documentary by Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken, and Solino by Fatih Akin-will be screened on Saturday at 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m., followed by a discussion. The introductory session by Sina Nitzsche, Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Oglethorpe University, and Kate Thorpe, Teagle Writing Fellow at Wesleyan will place these films in the context of the transformation through art and image-making that the region is experiencing.

The event is sponsored by the German Studies Department, Writing at Wesleyan, and the Goethe Institute Boston.

 

Wesleyan Students in Germany

All five students have been studying with our Regensburg Program at Regensburg University, Germany since January 2012. Here you see them during a visit to Berlin in front of the German Reichstag in Berlin.

From left to right: Oscar Takabvirwa’14, Taylor Steele’14, Shu Zhang’13, Julius Bjornson’14, Afi Tettey-Fio’13

Newer and Newest German Cinema

Film Studies & German Studies will continue their annual film series with Maren Ade’s comedy drama, Everyone Else (2009).

 “…watching the film is to watch the emergence of a very particular and potentially galvanic cinematic talent.”   – Glenn Kenney, The Los Angeles Times

Powell Family Cinema, CFS, Tuesday, March 27, 2012, 7 p.m.,

with an introduction by Katja Straub

Leo Lensing on Karl Kraus

 

Leo Lensing contributed the article on Karl Kraus (1874-1936) to the Handbuch der Kunstzitate, a lexicon documenting allusions to painting, sculpture and photography in the work of more than two hundred German-language writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The “handbook,” edited by Konstanze Fliedl et al., is published in two volumes by De Gruyter.

Newer and Newest German Cinema

 

 

 

 

Film Studies & German Studies will kick off their annual film series with Christian Petzold’s enigmatic thriller, Yella (2007). It  “offers a surreal X-ray vision of cutthroat capitalism in 21st-century Germany.”  – Stephen Holden, The New York Times

Powell Family Cinema, CFS, Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 7 p.m., with an introduction by Leo Lensing

We will continue our series in March with Maren Ade’s comedy drama, Everyone Else (2009).   “…watching the film is to watch the emergence of a very particular and potentially galvanic cinematic talent.” – Glenn Kenney, The Los Angeles Times

Powell Family Cinema, CFS, Tuesday, March 27, 2012, 7 p.m., with an introduction by Katja Straub