“The Wallpeckers” Professor Krishna Winston introduces Günter Grass’s novel “Too Far Afield”

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Please join us for our  fourth and last lecture in the German Department’s fall series on commemorating the 25th year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this Thursday, November 6, in the Downey House Lounge at 4:15 PM. In her talk, “The Wallpeckers,”  Krishna Winston introduces and reads from Günter Grass’s novel, Too Far Afield.

Refreshments will be served.

NPR -Journalist Bellamy Pailthorp ’89 will speak about “The Fall of the Wall — An Eyewitness Perspective.”

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Bellamy Pailthorp ’89 is a news reporter in Seattle with KPLU Public Radio, one of the leading NPR stations in the Pacific Northwest. She graduated from Wesleyan with High Honors in German Language and Literature in the spring of 1989. She went to Berlin on a Fulbright scholarship that September, to pursue a project on dramaturgy and Bertolt Brecht. Little did she know she would end up working as an interpreter for journalists during the fall of the wall – an unforgettable experience that led to her career as a broadcaster. She lived in Berlin from 1989-1998, eventually working as a TV producer at Deutsche Welle TV and freelancing for other outlets. She now covers the environment beat at KPLU. In this talk, she will share anecdotes about her experience in Berlin before, during and after the fall of the wall.

“25 Years: Fall of the Berlin Wall” is co-sponsored by the German Embassy in Washington D.C. All events are free of charge and open to the public. For more information call 860-685-3359.

Sarah Wiliarty will speak on The Fall of the Wall – A Political Perspective

Please join us for the  first lecture in the German Department’s fall series on commemorating the 25th Year of the Fall of the Berlin
Wall.

This Wednesday, October 15 in FISK 210 at noon, Prof. Sarah Wiliarty will speak on “ The Fall of the Berlin Wall – A Political Perspective.”

Refreshments will be served.

“25 Years: Fall of the Berlin Wall” is co-sponsored by the German Studies Department and the German Embassy in Washington D.C. All events are free of charge and open to the public. For more information call 860-685-3359.

Hannah Arendt, directed bu Margarethe von Trotta

Hannah

Please join us for the screening of Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta.

September 27, 8:00 p.m. at the Goldsmith Family Cinema

Introduction by Leo Lensing (Professor of German and Film Studies), followed by a Q&A with Pam Katz P ’16, the film’s co-screenwriter

 

A second screening will take place on September 28, at 10:00 a.m. at the Powell Family Cinema.

Exercising Judgment in Ethics, Politics, and the Law

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Wesleyan University is hosting a conference on Hannah Arendt on September 26-28, 2013. The conference is made possible by the generous support of David Rhodes, COL ’68. It is hosted by the Center for the Humanities and co-sponsored by the College of Letters; Jewish and Israel Studies; German Studies; Government; Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory; and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).

Uli Plass is moderating the session on Judging Evil on September 27, 4:00-6:00 p.m. in Bechkam Hall.

Leo Lensing is introducing the the film Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta on September 27, 8:00 p.m.

Conference Program 

More Information about the conference

Peter Handke in America

Friday, December 7th, 6:30 p.m. Deutsches Haus at New York University, 42 Washington Mews New York, NY 10003

Please join the German House in New York City for a discussion with Fatima Naqvi (Rutgers University), Christoph Bartmann (Goethe Institut NYC), Klaus Kastberger (University of Vienna), Heike Polster (University of Memphis), Krishna Winston (Wesleyan University), and Thorsten Carstensen (The Indiana University School of Liberal Arts).

Peter Handke in America is an important theme for understanding the writer’s work. Because of his life-long fascination with America, Handke was among the first German-speaking writers of his generation to present a positive image of the United States against the anti-imperialist aversions of the European 1968-movement. Particularly in his early work, scholars have traced his fascination with writers such as John Ford, Walker Percy (whom he also translated), as well as the blues, New York City, the image of the “Native American” and with the beauty of the American landscape. His 1971 novel Short Letter, Long Farewell makes his fascination with the United States the central motif. Handke also lived in New York (after lengthy travels through Alaska), where in 1979 he wrote his important novel The Long Way Round. In his film Three American LPs, he co-produced with Wim Wenders, many of these themes can also be clearly identified. More information

You can watch some of the discussion on Youtube.

The Social Individual

Several German authors, works and themes will be presented at this year’s annual conference of the Northeastern American Society for 18th Century at Wesleyan University on October 12 and 13.

Friday, 12 —  9:00 – 10:30 a.m. 

The Imagination and Sociability in German Literature ……………………………………………………………  Wyllys 115

Chair:  David Pugh (Queen’s University)

Andrea Speltz (University of Guelph):“Imaginative Compassion in Christoph Martin Wieland’s Die Geschichte des Agathon 

Paola Mayer (University of Guelph): “Einbildungskraft as Creator of Einbildung: E.T.A. Hoffman’s Die Räuber

Dennis Mahoney  (University of Vermont): “Joseph von Eichendorff and the Domestication of the Romantic  Imagination”

Edward Larkin (University of  New Hampshire): “Imagining the Social Individual: C.W. Frölich’s Über den Menschen und seine Verhältnisse

 

Friday, 12 — 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Open Panel on Enlightenment Philosophy  …………………………………………………………… Usdan 108

Chair:  Lucy Guenova    (Wesleyan University)

James J. Caudle  (Yale University): “‘Sociability and other Cruel Sports’: James Boswell Among The Soaping Club and The Criticks”

Charlotte M. Craig (Rutgers  University): “Ambivalent Traits in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Image: Enlightener, National Author, Patriot,  Cosmopolitan, Freemason”

Michael Printy (Wesleyan University): “‘Revolutions of the Spirit’: The Protestant Enlightenment and the Rise of German Philosophy

Catherine Keohane (Montclair State University): “Seeing Oneself  in(stead of) the Poor: Charity and Imaginative Substitution”

Satuday, 13  —  10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

Sense and Sociability in France and Germany ……………………………………………………………  Wyllys 110

Chair:  Edward Larkin (University of New Hampshire)

Masano Yamashita  (University of Colorado): “Enlightenment Conceptions of Commonality: French Questionings of the Public Nature of  Aesthetics”

David Pugh  (Queen’s University):  “Social Anxieties in German Asthetics”

Mark Ilsemann  (University of Virginia): “‘Everyone has  […]  Their Own Way of Seeing’: The Science of  Optics  (and its Metaphors) in Georg   Forster’s  Anthropology”

 

Satuday, 13  — 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Genius ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Wyllys 112

Chair:  Ulrich Plass (Wesleyan    University)

Sarah Eron  (University of Rhode Island): “Fielding’s Muse: Inspiration, Genius, and the Dialogic Novel”

Amelia Bitely  (University at Buffalo): “‘His name consenting crowds repeat’: The Exhortations and Praise of Genii Loci

Lorraine Piroux  (Rutgers University): “Imagining the Social Genius: Possession and Self-­‐Possession in Diderot’s  Paradoxe sur le comedien

Joseph Drury  (Villanova University): “The Machine in the Ghost: Ann Radcliffe’s Music”

 

Modernist Memories: Architecture and Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany

Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche

Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty (University College Dublin), an expert on 20th century German architecture and author of numerous publications will lecture on architecture and identity in Germany at Wesleyan University on Tuesday,  Sept. 25, at 4:30pm, in 41 Wyllys, room 112.

Although the most prominent buildings  in Berlin since the fall of the wall in 1989, such as Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, Norman Foster’s renovation of the Reichstag, and David Chipperfield’s reconstruction of the Neues Museum, are often understood as examples of a postmodernist strategy, their juxtaposition of historic architecture, often damaged in the Second World War, and modern forms that recall the architecture of the Weimar Republic, are in fact only relatively recent examples of an architectural strategy that can be traced back to the founding of the Federal Republic.  Now associated with coming to terms with the atrocities of the Third Reich, in its original entirely modernist context this pairing originally encompassed conservative nostalgia for a pre-democratic past even as it helped define a specifically non-Communist present.  Following reunification it served as alternative to the postmodernism with which it is too often confused in part because the degree of modernism’s rupture with the past is often exaggerated.

This talk is made possible through the Department of Art and Art History, Samuel Silipo ’85 Distinguished Visitor Fund, and the German Studies Department.

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.