Department News & Events

GSS 2007-2008 Lecture Series

Conversation with Antje Strubel and Zaia Alexander
Friday, October 10, 4:00 pm in Phelps 1508
Antje Strubel is an author of six acclaimed novels as well as short stories,
essays and articles. She will read from her latest book, Snowed Under (2008), translated from the German by Zaia Alexander.
Zaia Alexander is a an accomplished translator residing in Los Angeles and Berlin, and has also held the prestigious position of Director of Programs at the Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades,
one of the most important institutions in Southern California for hosting international authors in residence.

George J. Wittenstein Lecture Series

This series of lectures is created to honor Dr. George J. Wittenstein, one of the surviving members of the White Rose Resistance Movement. Under the auspices of the series, we will invite one to three scholars every year.

Preview of 2008-09 Lectures and Events:

March 3, 2009: Staged Reading of Ida Fink's "The Table", directed by William Smithers
April 28, 2009: Lecture by Sara R. Horowitz, Vanier College

Past Lectures:

Spring 08 Lecture:

"History as a Gift: Postwar German Literature and the Quest for the Past "
Amir Eshel, Stanford University

Tuesday, May 20, 2008
5:00 p.m.
HSSB McCune Conference Room

The lecture explored prevalent approaches to the literary and cultural engagement with National Socialism in Germany from the 1950s to the present while arguing for the need to develop new paradigms. Referring to the work of such eminent writers as Günter Grass and Alexander Kluge, the lecture also introduced the innovative prose of younger writers such as Hans Ulrich Treichel, Norbert Gstrein and Katharina Hacker.

Winter 08 Lectures:

"Hitler's Assault on the Golden Rule"
Claudia Koonz, Duke University

Tuesday, February 26, 2008
5:00 p.m.
HSSB McCune Conference Room

“To resist,” from the Latin resistere, means to stand fast, to uphold principles against pressure to abandon them. In her lecture, Claudia Koonz discussed the appeal of the Nazis’ mandate to “Love only they neighbor who is like thyself.” Using examples from visual and print media from the 1930s, Koonz explored the moral culture that normalized state-sanctioned persecution, theft, and murder. When we appreciate the force of this culture of impunity, we appreciate afresh the moral courage of the very few who resisted it.

"'Weak Messianism': Recovery and Prefiguration in Benjamin's Arcades Project"
Alexander Gelley, University of California Irvine

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
5:00 p.m.
UCen Harbor Room

Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish thinker of the Weimar period, left his Arcades Project unfinished when he died in 1940. This work was to be a contribution to the philosophy of history rather than a work of documentation. Its aim was to awaken a collective subject, heir of the Marxist proletariat, a collective not yet actual and still under the spell of the "phantasmagoria" of the nineteenth-century. Benjamin's "weak messianism" is best conceived as a form of writing designed to incite a readership by means of image, example, anecdote, citation. He hoped, in this way, to recover a past, not for the sake of a transcendent eschatology but rather as a practice of disinterment and extraction guided by a present need.

Lectures are free and open to the public.

For more information about this lecture and a list of events, please visit: www.gss.ucsb.edu/wittenstein

GSS 2007-2008 Lecture Series

"Enemies of Mankind "
Dr. Bernhard Siegert, Kade Visiting Professor in Winter 08
Tuesday, February 12, 5:00 pm in HSSB McCune Conference Room
The lecture traces the history of the legal formula "hostis humani generis," which has lately gained new topicality. Originally applied to mimes and pirates on the High Seas the concept has been since the 18th century related more and more to the invisible enemy within society. Enemies of Mankind switched from the side of the mimic to the side of mimicry and amorphousness. Therefore the connection between the transformation of the concept of "hostis humani generis" and military and/or partisan strategies of becoming invisible are of special interest.

Bernhard Siegert is currently Visiting Kade Professor at the Department of Germanic, Slavic & Semitic Languages at UC Santa Barbara. He is Professor of History and Theory of Cultural Techniques at the Media Faculty of the Bauhaus University at Weimar, Germany, and co-director of the newly founded International Center for Research in the Humanities at Weimar.

"Adorno's American Experience: What's Metaphysics Got to Do With It? "
Ulrich Plass, Wesleyan University
Tuesday, December 4, 5:00 pm in Phelps 6320
Adorno's philosophy can be understood as an expression of and response to the existential experience of emigration and survival, of guilt and fear. In this lecture Ulrich Plass argues that Adorno's American writings, especially his Minima Moralia, offer a philosophy of "damaged life" that must be viewed in relation to his later idea of "metaphysical experience," a concept with which Adorno hopes to reclaim for philosophical thought the possibility of happiness.

2007-2008 Kaffeestunde and German Film Series

Join us each night before the film for Kaffeestunde at Nicoletti's (in the
UCen) from 5:30-6:30PM!

Kaffeestunden:

April 17, May 1, and May 22

Location: Nicoletti's in the UCen
Time: 5:30-6:30pm

Film Series:

Thursday, April 17, 7:00 p.m. in HSSB 1173: Rosenstrasse

Thursday, May 1, 7:00 p.m. in HSSB 1173: Sophie Scholl - Die Letzten Tage

Thursday, May 22, 7:00 p.m. in HSSB 1173: Vier Minuten

Russian Film Series

TBA

Past Events and Lectures

Visiting Artist: Clemens von Wedemeyer

Berlin-based Clemens von Wedemeyer is Europe's most acclaimed young conceptual filmmaker. His work investigates the nature of film and its relationship with language and reality. Von Wedemeyer's work has been shown at P.S.1, MoMA, the Moscow Biennale and many other venues. During his residency at UCSB, von Wedemeyer shot a film with a team made up of students from various departments and gave one public lecture. We celebrated his stay at UCSB with a roundtable and a series of artist talks under the title “Video After Video in a Post-Media Age.”

For a recent interview with Clemens von Wedemeyer about one of his recent films, please see here.

"Back in the USSR - Russian Popular Music - Past and Present "

Artemy Troitsky (Moscow State University)

Friday, February 15, 2008
2:00 p.m.
HSSB McCune Conference Room

Artemy Troitsky is a preeminent Russian music journalist, TV critic, rock historian, and authority on modern Russian culture to the US. He is the author of one of the most respected books on the history of popular music in Russia, Bank in the USSR: Back in the USSR: The True History of Rock in Russia (Omnibus Press, 1987).

"Science as Navigation: Leonhard Euler's Journeys "

Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara

November 30, 2007
9:00 am to 7:00 pm
Hummanities and Social Sciences Building, 6th floor, McCune Conference Room
Free and open to the public!

For details, visit: www.gss.ucsb.edu/Euler.html

Torture and the Future: Perspectives from the Humanities

This series of events addresses the critical issues surrounding the use of torture by the most powerful democracy in the world. The series will focus on four areas: the devastating effects of torture conducted by democratic societies on the concept and practice of democracy; the consequences of state-sanctioned torture on the principles and practices of scholarship and education; the role of mass media in the increasing acceptability of the use of torture; and the relationship between torture used in US-run prisons abroad, and human rights violations on American soil. The series features scholars whose work on torture and human rights effectively crosses the disciplinary gap between the humanities and social sciences, as well as artists, activists and lawyers whose work is committed to an ethics and politics of response and resistance.

For more information and a list of events, please visit: www.complit.ucsb.edu/projects/tortureandthefuture

Spring 2007 Lecture Series

"Tactile Texts. The Role of the Hand in Avant-garde Literature"
Susanne Straetling (Berlin, currently UC Berkeley)
Tuesday, May 8, 5:00 pm in Phelps 6309
The lecture touches on the history of the hand both as part of the human body and as a figure in avant-garde poetics. While early Futurism revitalized the medium of handwritten texts, Constructivism used the hand as
a metaphor to conceptualize literature as a performative gesture/action. The late Russian avant-garde group Oberiu used both Futurist and Constructivist elements to make experience more tactile again, but ended up, paradoxically, with an aesthetics of the untouchable.

"A Conversation with Mara and Walter Kohn - Memories of Berlin (1938-40) and of Vienna (1938 - 39)"
Walter Kohn and Mara Kohn
Tuesday, May 22, 3:30pm in UCen Flying A Studio
Mara Vishniac Kohn was born in Berlin, 1926, of Russian - Jewish parents, emigrated with her family via Portugal to New York in 1941. She is a retired educator in Special Education and of English as a Second Language.
Walter Kohn was born in Vienna, 1923, of Austrian - Jewish parents, emigrated alone to England in 1939, where he was interned in 1940 and sent to Canada; attended the University of Toronto 1942-44 and 45-46, and served in the Canadian infantry, 1944-45; currently, Professor Emeritus of Physics and Chemistry at UCSB. Walter Kohn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on October 13, 1998 for his development of the density-functional theory.

"Artificial Art or Mimesis by Abstraction"
Hans-Christian von Herrmann
Wednesday, May 23, 5:00 pm in Phelps 6320
As Roland Barthes wrote in his famous 1964 essay "The Structuralist Activity" structuralism can be described as a new form of mimesis that is not anymore based on analogy of substances but on analogy of functions. And according to Barthes this mimesis can be found both in science and art. The lecture will discuss this structuralist junction of epistemology and aesthetics by focussing on some examples of computer generated graphics and poetry of the 1960s.

"Eye Or Ear: Walter Benjamin On Optical And Acoustical Media"

Conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara

December 1, 2006
10:30 am to 6:00 pm
Hummanities and Social Sciences Building, 6th floor, McCune Conference Room
Free and open to the public!

For details, visit: www.gss.ucsb.edu/Benjamin.html

If you would like to receive information about upcoming departmental activities (e.g. visiting guests, keynote lectures, literary readings, showings of German or Russian films and plays, and other cultural events in Santa Barbara), please send an email to gd-germ@gss.ucsb.edu with the subject "Add to Events Listserve".

© 2004 UCSB Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies. gd-germ@gss.ucsb.edu