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.