The fifth episode of the WesGerman podcast. Click here!
Segments:
1:12 – Musik mit Anna Tjeltveit: “Es kamen Menschen an” by Cem Karaca.
9:00 – Gespräch mit Jenna Lacey (Dept. Chair Frau Bork-Goldfield, student Julian White)
Frau Bork and Julian White’s favorite German words:
das Denkmal – monument
die Glockenblumen – bellflowers
die Schokoladenmousse – chocolate mousse
die Nachträglichkeit – afterwardness (I misspoke – Freudian slip!)
It’s a good time to get involved in German Studies at Wesleyan! For more info: https://www.wesleyan.edu/german/
Miranda Haymon ’16, GRST and THEA double major discussed her career after graduation and her artistic process with Sam Morreale ’19 on March 17th. Her study abroad semester in Berlin during her sophomore played an important role in her life. She emphasized how important and helpful it was for her theatre career to be a GRST major and getting a liberal arts education. You can watch their conversation on YouTube.
Haymon’s upcoming radio play version of Pedro Pietri’s “The Masses Are Asses” (1974) will be aired on WESU Middletown 88.1FM this spring.
This picture was taken from Miranda’s bb_Brecht performance. Here is a video clip from it–> https://www.instagram.com/tv/CKMIonfjoq_/
You can follow Miranda on Instagram.
Miranda Haymon (she/they) is a Princess Grace Award/Honoraria-winning director, writer and curator. Recent projects include A Cakewalk (Garage Magazine & Gucci), Really, Really Gorgeous (The Tank), Everybody (Sarah Lawrence College), In the Penal Colony (Next Door @ New York Theatre Workshop, The Tank) and Mondo Tragic (National Black Theater). Haymon is a Resident Director at Roundabout Theatre Company and The Tank, a New Georges Affiliate Artist, a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop, a Space on Ryder Farm Creative Resident, member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, and the Wingspace Mentorship Program. Haymon has held directing fellowships at WP Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout Theatre Company, and Arena Stage. Haymon graduated from Wesleyan in 2016. For more information, please visit www.mirandahaymon.com.
Sam Morreale (they/them) is an advocate and facilitator for QTBIPOC+ storytellers and makers. Most of their work takes form through producing, directing, and consulting, particularly with a practice rooted in anti-racism and anti-oppression, transformative justice, healing and harm reduction. They have a unique view of the theatrical landscape, having worked in various capacities throughout the American Theater Industry quite early in their career. Recent Work: Facilitator/Curator for Rattlestick Playwright’s Theater, Community Conversations. Consultant: ART/NY, Center Theatre Group, Boston Court Pasadena.
By Iris Bork-Goldfield, Adj. Professor of German Studies
In March 2020, students were told to return from their study abroad programs, and we faculty were asked not to leave the U.S. Four of our students had just arrived at our Smith program in Hamburg, Germany, when they received that unwelcome message to pack again and return home. In the summer, I learned that our exchange student from Freiburg would not be coming to Wesleyan because of COVID. This meant that I would be without a teaching assistant from Germany in 2020/21. I contacted Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, my Alma Mater. I had graduated from LMU in German as a Foreign Language (Deutsch als Fremdsprache= DaF) and knew that students were required to do a teaching internship as part of their studies. I had done mine in China, but why not offer an online internship in the U.S., and why not at Wesleyan? I contacted the internship coordinator at the DaF Institut in Munich and sent her a description of our teaching internship, asking if she would announce it to their students.
Already a week later, I had the first response, followed quickly by several others. I interviewed several candidates via Zoom, explaining that they would be responsible for individual Oral Practice sessions (OPS) of 10-15 minutes each, with my Beginning German students. I kept the sessions short as no funding was available. The TAs were only to speak German and reinforce what my students had learned in my classes the week before. The three German tutors and I met once per week, usually on Fridays, to discuss what I had taught and share ideas about how to best practice the material, mainly vocabulary, grammar, and German culture. Later we also discussed what worked and what didn’t. One Wesleyan student, a native German speaker, who is currently attending classes from her hometown, Vienna, also joined us as a TA. She enrolled in a tutorial with me and will receive .5 credit for her work this semester. The students from Munich received an evaluation and an internship certificate from me which Munich University accepts as part of their studies. In early September 2020, my students had to sign up for an OPS and met with their German TA once a week, always at the same time.
My students’ evaluations showed how much they enjoyed these meetings with a student from Germany/Austria. Their only regret was that the sessions were so short. All four TAs agreed to continue working with my students and me this semester, and we agreed that they would meet with two students at a time and extend their sessions to 20-30 minutes each.
Another project bridging the “ocean” is the Tandem project, initiated by the Baden-Württemberg (BW) exchange program, which is administered by the University of Connecticut. They invite students from participating U.S. universities to sign up for a tandem partner from one of the universities in Baden-Württemberg. German students who study English at Heidelberg, Tübingen, Freiburg, Stuttgart, and Konstanz now meet with American students who study German at the intermediate or advanced level in Connecticut. They are meeting 11 times this semester for about 60-90 minutes per session via WebEx, Zoom or Microsoft Teams. Topics that should be covered are, for example:
The goal is to practice the language of the host country and divide the meeting time between German and English. Depending on the student’s level of fluency and familiarity with the other language, they may not need to correct each other’s vocabulary or pronunciation very much but should still pay attention to these details.
Students are expected to keep a journal and use the following questions as guidelines for their entries after each meeting with their Tandem partner:
Three of our Wesleyan students signed up and now have a Tandem partner. Just as UConn awards credits to their students, we offer a half-credit group tutorial for our Wesleyan students.
Needless to say, these online meetings do not substitute for in-person meetings and study abroad, but they are a bridge to a world, and to people, that we currently cannot visit in person.
Published in Wes and the World Newsletter (03-04-21)
Segments:
1:54 – Musik mit Anna Tjeltveit (Wolf Biermann)
9:14 – Politik mit Jenna Lacey (German Parliament)
15:56 – Kunst mit Yasemin Schmitt
20:46 – Gespräch mit Hannah Landel (Eric Goldscheider)
Herr Goldscheider’s translation project: https://bertalandre.org/
Also, if you haven’t yet, subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify – that way you’ll be the first to know when another episode comes out!
Get in touch at germanpodcast@wesleyan.edu!
In the past fall semester, Wesleyan students in the First Year Seminar “Holocaust Remembrance in Germany: The Third Generation” participated in a pilot exchange with the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Made possible by the Departments of German Studies and Jewish Studies and the initiative “Meet a Jew”, these virtual meetings constituted the first of a series of transatlantic connections.
Working on theories of trauma and memory, this FYS focused especially on Jewish life in Germany today. Literary representations and academic texts made visible themes of identity, memory culture, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and xenophobia. A personal note was sounded in the meetings with young members of the Jewish community in Germany. Not only did these visits allow for contextualization of course material, they also covered more in-depth and personal accounts. Dima, one of the German participants reflected that “I have rarely met such an open group. All questions were deep and touched everything from impacts of migration, to denominational distinctions, through to LGBTQI acceptance. This shows how much farther the US is in respect of the normality of Jewish Life than we are in Germany.”
FYS courses at Wesleyan are specifically designed to introduce students to academic writing, reasoning, and arguing, as well as the tools to successfully work at the university level. This initiative added unreserved questions, open discussion, and personal connection to the rigorous academic schedule of the course. Students could reenvisage their paper topics and discuss real-world aspects of their textual analyses. The FYS “Holocaust Remembrance and Jewish Identity in Germany,” part of the FYS Summer 2021 program, will bring these exchanges to a new level. Students will have the chance to not only engage in class discussions but also in regular small group discussions.
Written by Thorsten Wilhelm, published in Wes and the World Newsletter (03-04-21)
Check out the Summer Course program for further information or contact Prof. Thorsten Wilhelm.
Segments:
2:30 – Musik mit Anna Tjeltveit
12:05 – Politik mit Anna Tjeltveit
18:00 – Kunstgespräch mit Yasemin Schmitt (Malerin Bettina Blohm)
40:25 – Gespräch mit Hannah Landel (Eric Goldscheider)
Music throughout is Octopus Ensemble’s June 2012 production of Haydn’s “The Seasons: Winter”
Many thanks to AATG for featuring us in their magazine, Aktuelles!
The German Studies department would like to congratulate Erik Grimmer-Solem, (Professor of History and affiliated with German Studies) on his latest publication, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). His book–as he tells his readers–“seeks to reshape our understanding of Imperial Germany’s history by reconstructing the complex overseas entanglements of Germans in North and South America, Japan, China, Southeast Asia, Russia, and Ottoman Turkey” https://egrimmer.faculty.wesleyan.edu/current-projects/research/.
Learning Empire has been widely reviewed in the US, Great Britain, Australia, and Germany. Dirk Bonker (Duke University) calls it an “impressive book” in which “Erik Grimmer-Solem offers a new narrative of the German Empire’s expansionist discourse and pursuit of global power from the 1870s through the 1910s” [German Studies Review, Volume 43, Number 2, May 2020, pp. 405-407]. Edward Ross Dickinson (University of California, Davis) calls Erik’s work “a remarkable undertaking, a hybrid work that is at once an ambitious and sustained synthesis of the massive scholarly literature on German imperial policy (Weltpolitik) and a study, founded on extensive archival research, of the role in shaping that policy of a small network of academic economists interested in the emerging capitalist world economy (Weltwirtschaft) [Journal of World History, December 2020, pp. 820-822]. Matthew P. Fitzpatrick (Flinders University, South Australia) calls the book a “landmark work of scholarship.” Erik “persuasively demonstrates that imperialism in the German Kaiserreich was not the product of the dominance of atavistic feudal remnants, but rather was an expression of the social, geopolitical and economic understanding of the globalizing middle classes of Germany. Beyond this, however, he also demonstrates that Germany’s liberal Weltpolitik was matched and eventually eclipsed by the expression of similar globalizing impulses in other nations, including the United States and Britain” [German History, Oxford University press, pre-publication book review]. And Gerhard Wegner (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) ends his positive review with: “Learning Empire bietet dem Leser eine höchst anregende Darstellung des Imperalismus aus der Perspektive zeitgenössischer Nationalökonomen” (January 18, 2021).
And available at Olin Libray
This is the inaugural episode of the WesGerman podcast.
Many, many thanks to Pablo Puente for the original music throughout.
To subscribe to this podcast, copy and paste the URL into the podcast app of your choice. If you have comments or suggestions please contact the podcast producers at germanpodcast@wesleyan.edu.
https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/94819852066?pwd=OG90TEFHYXlxbHppZG9vSm9WVW41QT09
Meeting ID: 948 1985 2066
Passcode: 921831
More information about the film and its filmmakers http://germansandjews.com/
On Wednesday, October 7, 2020 Elisabeth Lauffer ’07 participated in a Zoom discussion, 
sponsored by East End Books Ptown, with Lea Singer, the author of Der Klavierschüler – The Piano Student, which Elisabeth recently translated for New Vessel Press. Singer’s novel draws its inspiration from love letters written by the piano virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz to his first pupil, Nico Kaufmann. which Singer discovered in a Swiss archive. In 2014 Elisabeth received the Gutekunst Prize for young translators from the Goethe-Institut. Her senior honors thesis at Wesleyan was a translation of Wladimir Kaminer’s Die Reise nach Trulala. Descriptions of her other translations can be found at www.elisabethlauffer.com.
