Events

Dr. Ulrich v. Bülow
(Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Leiter Archiv)
 
Olin Language Center, Room 206  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Seit seiner Gründung 1955 erwirbt das Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach Dokumente von und über Franz Kafka. Die Sammlungen umfassen das Process-Manuskript ebenso wie Kafkas Briefe an Milena Jesenská, Grete Bloch und an seine Schwester Ottla. Vor einigen Jahren tauchten in Paris Kafkas Maturitätszeugnis auf – Deutschnote: „befriedigend“. Dokumente von Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftstellern wie Max Brod, Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Martin Walser, Peter Handke oder Barbara Köhler zeigen, wie Kafka nach seinem Tod im Westen zum Klassiker wurde, während man im Osten nach dem Verdikt von Georg Lukács im Leipziger Reclam diskutierte, ob man seine Werke überhaupt veröffentlichen sollte.

Der Leiter der Archivabteilung Dr. Ulrich von Bülow, der die aktuelle Ausstellung Kafkas Echo mitkuratierte, stellt die Marbacher Sammlung vor.

A Reading and Conversation with Translators C. Francis Fisher and Kathleen Heil, moderated by Prof. Éric Trudel
Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
C. Francis Fisher is the translator of Joyce Mansour’s In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems (World Poetry, 2024); Kathleen Heil is the translator of Meret Oppenheim’s The Loveliest Vowel Empties (World Poetry, 2022). Joyce Mansour (1928-1986) and Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) were arguably two of the most important female surrealist figures of the 20th century. Fisher and Heil will be in conversation about their translations on Tuesday, October 1.

About the translators:

C. Francis Fisher is a poet and translator who received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She has been supported by scholarships from Breadloaf
Writers Conference, Brooklyn Poets, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her first book of translations, In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour, appeared with World Poetry May ’24.

Kathleen Heil is an artist whose practice encompasses dance/performance and the writing and translating of poetry and prose. She is the author of the poetry collection You Can Have It All, forthcoming with Moist Books November 2024, and the translator of The Loveliest Vowel Empties, Meret Oppenheim’s collected poems (World Poetry, 2023). Her literary translations appear in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. Originally from New Orleans, she lives and works in Berlin.

with Fatima Naqvi, Professor of German and Media Studies (Yale University)
Olin Humanities, Room 204  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
In the short span of a hundred and sixty years, hospitals became ubiquitous in Western society. But initially this institution was met with opposition from a host of critics and commentators. Today, the hospital seems nearly invisible, even though it bookends the beginning and end of most people’s lives. This talk by Dr. Fatima Naqvi focuses on Vienna in the twentieth century as the privileged site for an exemplary tale about the hospital’s rise, the suspicion it faced, and its contemporary evolution.

The Architecture of Illness investigates hospital building styles, tracing the hospital’s transformation from a dispersive site of health care to a massive digital interface. Using examples from literary works by Arthur Schnitzler, Rainer Maria Rilke, and films by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, it analyzes certain key words in discussions of hospitals to reveal the many intersections of architecture and health.

Fatima Naqvi is Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of German and Film & Media Studies at Yale University, Chair of the Film & Media Studies program and the European Studies Council. Prof. Naqvi’s work is situated at the intersection of literature, film, and architecture. It is deeply committed to curmudgeons, naysayers, and querulous types: Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke, Ulrich Seidl, Michael Haneke, and Ruth Beckermann are her privileged subjects of research.
 

Wout Cornelissen, University Lecturer in Philosophy of Law (Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL) 
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Several political theorists have pointed to a contradiction in Arendt’s The Human Condition. On the one hand, the book appears to argue that action is possible anytime, anywhere: “Wherever you go, you will be a polis.” On the other hand, action appears as conditioned–without lawmaking, no space would exist in which action could appear–and finally, due to the rise of “the social” in the modern age, action seems to have become altogether unavailable to us. Looking for ways out of this seeming contradiction, with a view to understanding “the gift of freedom,” Wout Cornelissen turns to The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s investigation into the three mental activities she regarded as “constitutive for all political action,” a book project she conceived of as “a kind of second volume” to The Human Condition. By analyzing specific passages from the newly constituted text of The Life of the Mind, which he co-edited for the Complete Works: Critical Edition and which is based on Arendt’s original typescripts, he will present a reading of her unfinished work that offers resources for answering Arendt’s critical interpreters.

Dr. Wout Cornelissen is appointed as University Lecturer in Philosophy of Law at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He co-edited the new, critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind (Wallstein, 2024), which appeared as vol. 14 of the Complete Works: Critical Edition. He published essays on Arendt’s conceptions of thinking in the Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt (2020) and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (Fordham UP, 2017). Previously, he taught at FU Berlin, Vanderbilt University, Bard College, and VU Amsterdam. He holds a PhD in Political Philosophy from Leiden University.

  In Fall 2024, we will introduce a language class in Yiddish! But what is Yiddish?
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Yiddish has no clear boundaries of either space or time. Some speak of the beginning of Yiddish at the end of the 19th Century, with the novels of Mendele Mokher Sforim. Some go back a further century to the stories of Rabbi Nakhman of Braslev. And some go back to the 13th and 15th centuries. Some people say that it’s a dead language, and some people would be quite upset by such an assertion. Some contradictory images of Yiddish are that it is the language of poor ignorant people, but that Yiddish has reached impressive cultural feats in literature and criticism, poetry, the theater, and even in the cinema. Some people think that Yiddish is a sad language, and others think that it is actually funny.

Insight to Yiddish language, history, and culture (and the forthcoming Yiddish courses in 2024–25) will be provided in an information session on Thursday, April 18, at 2 pm, in Weis Cinema.


Download: What-is-Yiddish-Information-Session.pdf

Ross Benjamin, translator

Discussant: Jana Schmidt
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
An essential new translation of the author’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.

"This new and scrupulously faithful translation of the Diaries brings us...the true inner life of the twentieth century’s most complex and enigmatic literary prophet." —Cynthia Ozick, author of Antiquities

Dating from 1909 to 1923, the handwritten diaries contain various kinds of writing: accounts of daily events, reflections, observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, accounts of dreams, as well as finished stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries and provides substantial new content, including details, names, literary works, and passages of a sexual nature that were omitted from previous publications. By faithfully reproducing the diaries’ distinctive—and often surprisingly unpolished—writing in Kafka’s notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary experimentation and private self-expression, but also their value as a work of art in themselves.

Ross Benjamin’s translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Joseph Roth’s Job, and Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left and Tyll. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov, and he received a Guggenheim fellowship for his work on Franz Kafka’s diaries.

Jana Schmidt is an assistant professor of German Studies at Bard College. She writes about German and American, transatlantic and exilic literatures.

Olin 202 & RKC 103  1:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In their 1992 open letter to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, African American writers Audre Lorde and Gloria I. Joseph protested a recent wave of deadly attacks on refugees in East Germany by connecting it to tacit violence against people of color and the “fundamental questions of racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia […] within the German psyche that have not been publicly examined and addressed in the last 50 years.” Instead of easily buying into the commemoration ritual of German Reunification, Lorde and Joseph measured the success of German memory culture by its effect on their lives, asking “Why has the dismantling of the Berlin Wall meant that we now feel less and less safe as Black Women visitors [...], lest we be insulted or attacked?”

Today, their question reverberates against the backdrop of multiple “refugee crises” and the rise of right-wing extremisms across Europe, with German’s AfD party growing in popularity. This one-day symposium builds on Lorde and Joseph’s protest letter to explore transnational connections and narratives of resistance in Germany and across the Atlantic. We seek to explore how marginalized groups have politically and historically advocated for justice by drawing parallels of remembrance against forgetting across different cultures, spaces, languages, bodies and times. By realizing parallels across multiple geopolitical histories of migrant activists, feminists, workers, Europeans of colour, Sinti and Roma populations and refugees we want to generate interdisciplinary discussions on the uses of memory as resistance.

We invite various artistic, academic and activist perspectives to provide new perspectives that broaden the clusters of Memory, Resistance and Colonial Hierarchies of Belonging. While our focus is on Germany, we welcome contributions from other contexts that comparatively address how Western colonial, imperial, transnational, and transatlantic memories are tied and translated to other regions and contexts.

This event is co-sponsored by: Rethinking Place Bard-On-Mahicantuck, A Mellon Foundation "Humanities For All Times" Initiative, Central European University, Gender Studies Department, The Hannah Arendt Center, The Literature Program, The Politics Program, The American And Indigenous Studies Program, The Philosophy Program, The History Program, The Human Rights Program, The Language Center, The Dean's Office, The Division Of Languages And Literature, and Bard Center For The Study Of Hate.Schedule:1:00-2:30 PM (Olin 202) 
Panel 1: Memory Making, Trauma, Colonialism, and Resistance
Tường Vi Nguyễn (Freie Universität Berlin) "Survival Consciousness: A Decolonial and Critical Phenomenological Approach"
Ain Ul Khair (CEU), “Memory-Making and the Question of Nostalgia”
Peter Odak (CEU), tbd
Ali Hashemian (CEU), “The Making of the Civilized Iranian Man: Masculinity, ‘Civilization’ and Race in the Interwar Nationalist Discourse in Iran”
 
2:45-4:00 PM (Olin 202) 
Panel 2: Jessica Varela (CEU), “Gendering Blackness, Migration, Coloniality: Una Marson, Claudia Jones, and Audre Lorde in the UK and Germany” and Bard respondents Gabriella Lindsay, Jana Schmidt, Vivian Hoyden

4:30-6 PM (RCK 103) Keynote: Michelle M. Wright (Emory), “Time to Re-Member: A Physics of Queer Black Belonging”

Uljana Wolf, Distinguished German Poet and Essayist
Hegeman 204A  6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
What is a mother tongue, seen by day? Or at night, awake next to a crib? Or when someone changes diapers, performing tasks that interrupt the poem, or the I? Is this then a broken, stuttering language? A muttering tongue? A language never alone with itself, always with room for others?
Since her debut collection kochanie ich habe brot gekauft (2005), which was awarded the prestigious Peter Huchel-Preis, Uljana Wolf's poems and essays have been listening to the dissolution of language in the murmur or Mutter of a shimmering multiplicity. Now finally her debut kochanie, today i bought bread has been translated into English by Greg Nissan (World Poetry Books). Simultaneously, Uljana Wolf’s new poetry collection in German, muttertask (kookbooks, 2023) attempts to blend the translingual trajectories of her latest poems with the lyrical beginnings of kochanie.

Wolf will read from the new translation of kochanie ich habe brot gekauft alongside with German poems rom her new book, muttertask, as well as discuss her essays on translation and translingualism from Etymologischer Gossip.

A Reichsbahn Worker Decides // 1933–2022
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Esther Dischereit
Eminent German Poet, Essayist, and Activist

In 2023, Esther Dischereit created an exhibition in cooperation with Deutsche Bahn to honor the railroad worker Fritz Kittel. In 1944 and 1945, he hid her mother Hella and sister Hannelore, who as Jews were persecuted by the Gestapo and threatened with death in Germany under National Socialism. They were liberated by U.S. troops in 1945. Dischereit began to search for the family of the rescuer and found them in 2019. Fritz Kittel had not told his own family about his courageous act throughout his life. Esther Dischereit's literary response in 17 text pieces includes other found objects from the lives of her mother, sister, and Fritz Kittel, and they offer a dialogue with those who are now the daughters and sons or grandchildren. False information given at a registration office, illegal names and addresses ... What do we read when we read these documents?What do we see when we look at these photos?

Esther Dischereit lives in Berlin, writes prose, poems, essays and radio works. Recent publications: Hab keine Angst! Erzähl alles. Das Attentat von Halle und die Stimmen der Überlebenden (Ed., 2020). Sometimes a Single Leaf (2020), Flowers for Otello On the Crimes that Came out of Jena (2022) – both transl. by Iain Galbraith. Wer war Fritz Kittel, Exhibition 2023: Berlin / Frankfurt am Main / Chemnitz / Nürnberg.

Maggie Hough studies Classics, German, philosophy and theater at Bard College.

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  3:30 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us on Friday, May 19 at 3:30 pm in RKC 103 for the presentation of the latest issue of Sui Generis, Bard’s student-run journal dedicated to literary translation. Please come to celebrate the hard work of the journal’s editorial board and the many translators who contributed to a robust and diverse issue of the journal. In addition to readings of work in many languages and in English translation, there will be light refreshments. All are welcome!

Aaron Dickinson, David Taylor-Demeter, and Bridget White, students of German language and literature at Bard
Olin LC 208  11:30 am – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Literature keeps the experience of the unexpected alive. The experience that things can be said in surprisingly beautiful, concise, funny, nuanced, ways, or simply put: differently. How to say things differently is the daily bread of studying and practicing another language. Just the same can be said of translation! To invite diverse practices of translation into the classroom thus offers particularly generative and joyful ways of studying both literature and languages.

At this panel, three students of German language and literature share their work on and with translation
through multilingual and multimedia presentations:

Aaron Dickinson, in a dramatic reenactment of the translation process, reflects on the conversation with yourself, here with his draconic and ironic other selves while transferring poems by Rainer Maria Rilke from German to English.

David Taylor-Demeter unfolds the captivating complexity of Barbara Honigmann’s novel "Soharas Reise" (Sohara’s Journey) through the analysis of a single sentence and its possible translations into English.

Bridget White engages with the act of translation as a multi-sensory experience in her presentation of “buchstabenkonstellationen”, or letter-constellations, inspired by and in dialog with eminent visual poet Franz Mon.

Everyone is welcome! No previous knowledge of German required.

  Inaugural De Gruyter–Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:15 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Part of “Judgment, Pluralism, & Democracy: On the Desirability of Speaking with Others” conference.Stream the Keynote Lecture on YouTube


Download: De-Gruyter-HAC-Lecture-posterFinal.pdf

Nicola Behrmann, Rutgers University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Drawing on and expanding Jacques Derrida’s notion of the archive as a site that negotiates the relationship between memory and forgetting, this lecture focuses on testimonies that resist to appear in any given site or space of commemoration. How can we imagine and secure memory and political responsibility if the testimony is unavailable, absent, or unreliable? What happens if an archive no longer follows the archontic principle that is invested in the preservation and even the constitution of an event?

Within literary renderings of imprisonment a powerful mode of testimony can unfold: Emmy Hennings’ autobiographical novel Prison (1918), written during World War I as her contribution to the Dada movement, and Werner Krauss’ novel PLN—The Passions of the Halyconian Soul (1946), written while the Romance scholar was on death row in a Gestapo prison and as a secret addendum to his official study on Baltasar Gracián, are exemplary texts that are fixated on and even obsessed with language. Caught between confession, resistance, transformation, and survival, the prisoner’s testimony brings forth an invisible archive by means of language as a mode of probability, not principality, that reconfigures the relation between history, politics, and fiction.

Nicola Behrmann is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Her research combines studies of literature, history, and gender and media studies. Within this framework, Behrmann focuses on 20th-century avant-garde movements and works on the politics of the archive and on non-representational forms of memory in literary, visual, and architectural spaces. She is author of the book Geburt der Avantgarde—Emmy Hennings (2018) and co-editor of several volumes of an annotated edition of the works of Emmy Hennings (2016-2020). Currently, Behrmann is working on a book-length study of four women writers in 1920s’ Germany, titled “The Mystical Archive”.

Dennis Johannssen, Assistant Professor of German, Lafayette College
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Lisa Marie Anderson, Hunter College, 
City University of New York
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In this talk I will juxtapose Bertolt Brecht’s early comedy Drums in the Night (1922) with Ernst Toller’s tragedy Hinkemann (1923), considering what these two popular plays tell us about demobilization after World War One, specifically about those societal anxieties that were projected onto the bodies of returning soldiers. I will then turn to an underappreciated facet of this projection, arguing that scholars have missed important discourses of racialization that are operative in these and other plays about the soldier’s return. Drawing on historical scholarship concerned with the so-called “Black Horror on the Rhine,” i.e., with the racist propaganda campaign against nonwhite colonial soldiers during the French occupation of the Rhineland, I argue that discourse analysis of this campaign should inform more literary scholarship about the period, as well.

Listen or even perform literature in different languages.
Olin Language Center, Room 203 (Tutoring Seminar)  3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
If you're interested in poetry and languages this is your event! Come and listen to your peers.

If you want to participate write to [email protected]. Please send the original text and an English translation. Any type of written art is accepted. Original works and translations are welcome too!

Food and drinks are provided.

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  8:30 pm – 10:30 pm EST/GMT-5

Jana Mader, Lecturer in the Humanities
Olin Humanities, Room 203  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
When we see, feel, and think of nature, it is never just an objective encounter with an outside world. Rather, landscapes carry meaning like a complex language, spoken and written in land, air, and water. Humans are storytellers in dialog with landscapes, influenced by their past, present and imagined future. When a group of German farmers who had fled famine and persecution settled along the Hudson, they were reminded of their river back home, the Rhine, and founded Rhinebeck. In a broad sense, then, they translated their home into their new place. This talk examines two river landscapes, the Hudson River Valley and the Rhine Valley in Germany, the contradictory narratives they were shaped by and the cultural translation of landscape, from the visual into the textual and what that entails. To what extent is our perception filtered through experience and our collective history?

A Lecture by ilija Trojanow
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
"Each day we are sold different versions of yesterday, but rarely offered a different tomorrow. The apocalypse streams into every household at a flat rate. In an era of dystopian forebodings, the future can no longer be taken for granted, and optimism is under siege. It seems high time for a reboot of utopian literature, in which a space that is not, may yet come to be in the future. We are near forgetting that history is not a foregone conclusion, and that fatalism is the last refuge of the coward. How we shape the future lies in our own hands, but with the prerequisite that we are ready to think ahead, into the unknown and uncertain, imagining alternatives to given paradigms. If the seeds of human progress are indeed planted by ideas before they can blossom into transformations, utopian narratives are of existential importance." Our guest, Ilija Trojanow, has spent the past  several years working on a utopian novel and exploring the history of Utopia. At a time when we reckon with our destruction of the natural world and of imagination, Trojanow's work encourages us to scrub clear our overclouded skies and to ask ourselves: what is literature if not unshackled fancy?

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This event brings together in person on the Bard campus in Annandale three esteemed writers—Nuruddin Farah, Ilija Trojanow, and Aleksandar Hemon—to read from and discuss their work. As suggested by the titles North of Dawn (Farah) and Nowhere Man (Hemon), all three writers are concerned in their work with questions of place and displacement, of cultural difference and shared humanity, and of what Trojanow in his recent work calls “utopian narratives.” Each also has deep personal and professional connections to more than one language, and together they comprise a knowledge of literatures that is truly stunning in its diversity, including works composed in Arabic, Bulgarian, German, Serbo-Croation, and Somali, among other languages. All three authors are also active in a plurality of genres and media, which taken together includes novels, short stories, criticism, plays, film and television scripts, and music. On this evening, they will read and discuss their work and explore common concerns and points of difference, and will invite the audience to join in the conversation

Jana Schmidt, Visiting Fellow at the German Historical Institute, Washington
Olin Humanities, Room 202  5:30 pm – 6:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
The lecture takes the German Jewish writer Charlotte Beradt’s radio reportages on black politics from the 1960s as an example of the exile’s double vision - forever seeing the place you left “behind” the one you inhabit - and as a model for transforming memories into spaces of encounter, potential, and political relation. In rewriting the history of “Black Power” for German radio listeners, Beradt thereby also challenges us to perk up our ears to the resonances of seemingly distant historical experiences.

Uljana Wolf on Translation, Ilse Aichinger, and
a Poetics of Resistance

Reading and Conversation
Moderator: Thomas Wild
Olin Humanities, Room 204  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the renowned Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger. After surviving the Nazi regime in Vienna with her mother, she published the first literary texts to address the Shoah in Austrian literature. Her uncompromising, multi-genre body of work has influenced many writers, among them German poet, essayist and translator Uljana Wolf. Together with American poet Christian Hawkey she translated Aichinger’s Bad Words. Selected Short Prose (Seagull 2018). At this first presentation of the book in the U.S., Wolf will speak about how one translates texts that resist “the better words”, and how such poetics of resistance informs the translingual imagination of her own writings, among them her praised book of poems, False Friends.

Uljana Wolf is a distinguished German poet and translator based in Berlin and Brooklyn. She has been awarded the prestigious Adalbert-von-Chamisso-Prize 2016, the Villa Massimo Rome Prize 2017, and, as translator, the Münster Prize for International Poetry. A book length translingual edition of her work, Subsisters: Selected Poems, translated by Sophie Seita, appeared with Belladonna* in 2017. In 2021, Wolf published her celebrated essay collection Etymologischer Gossip and a catalog of her co-curated exhibition Die Hochsee der Ilse Aichinger.

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Peace is the goal for every country, community, and, hey, family. (See, we're funny here at BGIA.) In general, peace is the absence of war and violence. Through its work on the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Framework, the Institute for Economics and Peace takes peace and peace building further. It focuses on strengths not deficits and individual action on creating and sustaining positive societies.

Join us on Thursday, November 18 at 12pm for an hour long Positive Peace Workshop. In this workshop, participants will learn how to better think about actions and approaches to creating peaceful societies. It will focus on policy, strategy, and implementation. If you're interested in conflict resolution, policymaking, and peace building, don't miss this virtual event. RSVP required. 

Prof. Ulrich Baer in Conversation
Online Event  10:30 am – 11:30 am EDT/GMT-4
Prof. Ulrich Baer of NYU will discuss via Zoom the works of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926) with Prof. Peter Filkins and the students of LIT 2248 - Rilke in English. Following the threads of Loss, Grief, and Transformation that run throughout Rilke's poetry, fiction, and correspondence, Ulrich Baer will take up Rilke's thoughts on the role of "death in life" and how Rilke struggled to resolve its force and nemesis. Those attending from the broader Bard community will also be encouraged to participate in the conversation and pose questions of their own about Rilke's work, life, and thinking on grief and loss.

Zoom Link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/87845248204

Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography. His books include Remnants of Song: The Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan; Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma; The Rilke Alphabet; What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Equality and Truth in the University, and, as editor and translator, The Dark Interval: Rilke’s Letters on Loss, Grief and Transformation; Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters on Life, the German edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Prose. He hosts the ideas podcast, Think About It, and has published editions of numerous classic books with Warbler Press.

Moderated by Alys Moody and Stephen Ross
Online Event  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
To receive the Zoom invitation for this event, please email [email protected]. Invitations will be sent out on the morning of the event.

Global modernism exists only in translation. Its condition of possibility is the circulation of texts through time and space, across languages and in languages that are not the texts’ own. Historically speaking, the texts we think of as modernist are, almost without exception, the products of lively eras of translation in an expanded sense that reaches beyond the strict remit of textual translation between languages. In order to have global modernism, then, there must be translation and, necessarily, its distortions. Global modernism, by foregrounding this established problematic of translation in the context of an awareness of the unevenness of global exchange, highlights the centrality of language politics to modernist literary creation. 

The study of global modernism, too, relies on active and continuous translation efforts. Contemporary translators, many of them themselves practicing poets or writers, are increasingly making available modernisms from around the world. In doing so, they underscore the extent to which modernists so often regarded translation as a primary creative act rather than secondary or derivative one. 

This roundtable and reading features the work of four scholars and translators of modernist poetry who contributed original translations to the anthology Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020) and whose efforts shine illuminating cross-lights on the modernist labour of translation. As several of our participants are also practicing multilingual poets, the event will offer an occasion to listen to and reflect on the contemporary legacies of modernist poetics.

This conversation, held under the shared auspices of the Literature Program at Bard College and Concordia University’s Centre for Expanded Poetics, is the second in a three-part series exploring global modernism, in celebration of the anthology. It was preceded by a roundtable on “Editing Global Modernism,” held on October 23, and will be followed by a workshop on pedagogy and global modernism on Friday, December 4, 1:30–4:30pm EST.

Speakers
Emily Drumsta is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown University, where she works on modern Arabic and Francophone literatures. Her translation, Revolt Against the Sun: A Bilingual Reader of Nazik al-Mala'ika's Poetry was awarded a PEN/Heim Grant in 2018 and is forthcoming with Saqi Books in January 2021. She is a cofounder of Tahrir Documents, an online archive of newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, and other ephemera collected in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 Egyptian uprisings. Her translations have been published in McSweeney's, Asymptote, Jadaliyya, Circumference, and the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation. Emily contributed translations of Nazik al-Mala’ika’s critical writing to the anthology’s section on Modernism in the Arab World.

Klara Du Plessis is a second-year, FRQSC-funded PhD student in English literature at Concordia University, focusing on contemporary, Canadian poetry and the curation of literary events. As part of her dissertation preparation, she is pursuing a practical, experimental research creation component called Deep Curation, which approaches the organization of literary events as directed by the curator and places poets’ work in deliberate dialogue with each another, heightening the curator’s agency toward the poetic product; to date, she has curated eight such poetry readings, most recently with Sawako Nakayasu, Lee Ann Brown, and Fanny Howe at Boston University, in January 2020. Klara is also deeply involved with SpokenWeb, acting both as a researcher and as the student representative of its governing board; SpokenWeb is a SSHRC-funded, multi-institutional research project, founded at Concordia, that digitizes and archives poetry readings from the past seventy years in North America. Parallel to her scholarly activities, Klara is a poet and critic, active in both the Canadian and South African literary scenes. Her writing is informed by a multilingual poetics grounded in a fluently bilingual identity in English and Afrikaans, and a curiosity about languages generally. Her debut multilingual collection of essay-like long poems, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award for a book of poetry published by a woman in Canada, and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for a debut collection. Her second English collection, Hell Light Flesh, was published by Palimpsest Press in September 2020, and her first Afrikaans book, ver taal, is currently under consideration for publication in South Africa. Her chapbook, Wax Lyrical, was shortlisted for the 2016 bpNichol Chapbook Award, and she has appeared at festivals, readings, residencies, and conferences in Canada, South Africa, the United States, and elsewhere.
 
Ariel Resnikoff is the author of Unnatural Bird Migrator (Operating System, 2020) and the chapbooks Ten-Four: Poems, Translations, Variations (Operating System, 2015), with Jerome Rothenberg, and Between Shades (Materialist Press, 2014). His writing has been translated into Russian, French, Spanish, German, and Hebrew, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Golden Handcuffs Review, Full Stop Quarterly, Protocols, The Wolf Magazine for Poetry, Schreibheft, Zeitschrift für Literatur and Boundary2. With Stephen Ross, he is at work on the first critical bilingual edition of Mikhl Likht’s modernist Yiddish long poem, Processions, and with Lilach Lachman and Gabriel Levin, he is translating into English the collected writings of the translingual Hebrew poet Avot Yeshurun. Ariel is a reviews editor at Jacket2 and a founding editor of the journal and print-archive Supplement, copublished by the Materialist Press, Kelly Writers House, and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught courses on multilingual diasporic literatures at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (UPenn) and at BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change. In 2019, he completed his PhD in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania, and and he is currently a Fulbright Postdoctoral US Scholar. Ariel lives on Alameda Island in the San Francisco Bay Area with his partner, the artist and designer Riv Weinstock, and their baby, Zamir Shalom.

Sho Sugita writes and translates poetry in Matsumoto, Japan. His translation of Hirato Renkichi’s Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) is the first book of Japanese Futurist poetry to appear in English. He is currently working on translating Japanese Dada/anarchist poetry by Hagiwara Kyojiro.

Moderators
Alys Moody is assistant professor of literature at Bard College. She is the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (OUP, 2018) and is currently working on a second book, provisionally entitled The Literature of World Hunger: Poverty, Global Modernism, and the Emergence of a World Literary System. She is one of the general editors of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), and section editor or coeditor of the sections on modernism in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, the Arab world, Japan, and the South Pacific.

Stephen J. Ross is assistant professor of English at Concordia University. He is the author of Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetics of Nature (OUP, 2017). He is one of the general editors of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), and was section editor or coeditor of the sections on modernism in the Caribbean, the Arab world, and greater China.
 

Presentation and Discussion by Sophie Seita, Boston University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
“To translate is to surpass the source”— these are words Sophie Seita puts into the mouth of a character in her performance My Little Enlightenment Plays, a project in which she rewrites, translates, responds to, and, one could say, corresponds with Enlightenment thinkers and writers and other historical source materials.

In her talk, Seita will propose an expansive understanding of translation: translation as an inventive, generative, and often collaborative practice; translation as a form of writing-as-reading; and translational reading as a pedagogical tool.

She writes: “Like a manifesto, I see translation as a deeply pedagogical form. In my teaching, I promote what I would call ‘translational reading,’ which tries to understand a text by doing something with it. Following Sara Ahmed’s terminology in her manifesto‘Living a Feminist Life,’ translation would have to be in my ‘feminist survival kit.’ Translation, for me, then encompasses the moving of matter from one place to another. This might mean transforming a word, sentence, image, idea, or material (like paper, Tippex, or clay) into another form, genre, medium, or context.”

Seita will discuss these theoretical ideas with a view to how they might work in practice in the context of her own translational projects, from text- and performance-based work to pedagogical experiments.

  Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Anna Rosmus, an author and researcher whose high school essay exposed the Nazi past of her home town, will speak about her research and experiences, the importance of historical truth, and the challenges of being labeled a traitor, following the showing of The Nasty Girl, a film based on Anna’s life. Cosponsored by Center for Civic Engagement, German Studies, Hannah Arendt Center, Historical Studies, Political Studies.

Bard Hall  7:45 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
We are delighted to invite you to a concert of poetry with Nathaniel Savage and Mercer Greenwald, the works of Hugo Ball and Franz Mon, Ursprüngliche Gedichte, and more!

There will be poetry, philosophy, drama, music, pictures, drinks, and snacks. Everyone who is ready to free themselves from the fetters of language and reason is invited! 

Olin Humanities, Room 204  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Rumor has it that dictatorship and censorship were stimulating for poetry. This event will present the poetic writings by two authors, Wolfgang Hilbig (1941–2007) and Uwe Kolbe (b. 1957), whose work began under the conditions of a closed society, whose writings contributed to this society’s opening and continued to unfold and provoke after its collapse, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall. This public reading of both writers’ imaginative work understands itself as an invitation for a discussion on literature and politics.

Uwe Kolbe is an eminent poet, essayist, writer of prose, and translator. His first volume of poetry, Hineingeboren (“Born Into”), appeared in East Berlin in 1980. The increasingly critical nature of his writing led to a ban on publication in the GDR soon after. During the early 1980s, he edited the underground journal Mikado. Eventually, he was permitted to travel abroad and lived between Hamburg and East Berlin. Kolbe is the author of 13 books of poetry and the recipient of many prestigious prizes. He also was a writer in residence at the University of Texas at Austin and at Oberlin College. His collection of essays, Vineta’s Archives (2012), received the distinguished Heinrich-Mann-Award from the Academy of Arts Berlin.

Presented with generous support of the S. Fischer Foundation.

A Lecture by Benedetta Zavatta 
and a conversation with 
Daniel Berthold 
and
Ann Lauterbach
Olin Humanities, Room 201  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Benedetta Zavatta will be presenting Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson, her groundbreaking study of the influence of the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson on the German Friedrich Nietzsche, recently published by Oxford University Press. Nietzsche read Emerson intensely from a young age and through to the end of his writing career. Referring to Emerson’s Essays, Nietzsche wrote that he had never “felt so at home in a book; felt so much, indeed, as if the home were my own.” In her study, Zavatta surveys all the evidence in Nietzsche’s published writing and in his archive—including correspondence, notes, and Nietzsche’s heavily annotated copies of Emerson—to develop a rich portrait of Nietzsche’s complex relationship to the American writer he once called his “twin soul.” Zavatta's book explores the profound influence that Emerson had on Nietzsche’s thinking about a wide range of topics, including individualism, perfectionism, morality, and freedom. It also provides a fresh reading of Emerson, who, seen from a Nietzschean perspective, comes to light as an incisive cultural critic and a decisive figure in the history of philosophy. 

After the talk, poet Ann Lauterbach and philosopher Daniel Berthold will begin the discussion, responding to Benedetta Zavatta’s presentation and drawing on their own long-term engagements with Emerson and Nietzsche, respectively. 

Benedetta Zavatta is Marie Curie Researcher at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (CNRS/ENS) in Paris. Daniel Berthold is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College. Ann Lauterbach is the David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Jürgen Böttcher 
Die Mauer / The Wall & short films
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Discussion with German Studies students and eminent essayist Uwe Kolbe

Jürgen Böttcher’s striking documentary Die Mauer (The Wall, 1990) is praised as the unparalleled masterpiece on the fall of the Berlin Wall. The acclaimed filmmaker and painter explores the meaning of the Wall in the historical moment of its disappearance as the dividing line between East and West. The film portrays the Berlin Wall as a monument and canvas on which German histories are being projected. Böttcher’s film Die Mauer received the Golden Camera at the Berlin Film Festival and has been shown all over the world, including at MoMA, New York. The screening will also include a selection of rarely seen short films by Jürgen Böttcher.

Uwe Kolbe is an eminent poet, essayist, writer of prose, and translator. His first volume of poetry, Hineingeboren (Born Into), appeared in East Berlin in 1980. The increasingly critical nature of his writing led to a ban on publication in the GDR soon after. During the early 1980s, he edited the underground journal Mikado. Eventually, he was permitted to travel abroad and lived between Hamburg and East Berlin. Uwe Kolbe is author of 13 books of poetry and recipient of many prestigious prizes. He also was a writer in residence at the University of Texas Austin and at Oberlin College. His collection of essays, Vineta’s Archives (2012), received the distinguished Heinrich-Mann-Award by the Academy of Arts Berlin.

Actors for Human Rights Germany
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Between 2000 and 2007, a far-right terrorist group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU) murdered 10 people in Germany, nine of them of immigrant backgrounds. The group’s racist and neofascist ideology echoed the belief systems of other right-wing organizations, including the white supremacist Blood and Honour. In 2011, after a failed bank robbery, two members of the NSU committed suicide while the third member, Beate Zschäpe, turned herself in. In the ensuing trial, which ended in July, it became clear that German intelligence agencies had known of and even colluded with the NSU. The failures of the security authorities to stop the group’s crimes highlights the persistence of structural racism in Germany.
 
Written and performed as documentary theater, The NSU Monologues features the words of three relatives of the NSU’s victims: Elif Kubaşık, Adile Şimşek, and İsmail Yozgat. The stories of Elif, Adile, and İsmail testify to the survivors’ courage and determination. Whether they marched at the head of a funeral procession, organized demonstrations, or demanded that a street be renamed in the victims’ memory, their small acts defied the narrow “official” accounts of German authorities. With their testimonies, they reclaim a space for a historically accountable and antiracist mode of remembrance.
 
This performance will feature the work of Bard German Studies students, who have translated the original German-language script into English.

For more on AHRG, go to youtube.com/watch?v=Avkn8XGcIw0&t=55s. A trailer of the play (with English subtitles) is available at youtube.com/watch?v=5wANSSDgAJs.

A talk by Professor Greg Moynahan on “The Political Culture of Schubert's Vienna: Metternich and Domestic Life,” followed by a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, D 956, “Two Cellos”
Bitó Conservatory Building  4:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Due to popular demand, the lecture and concert program that was presented in March at Montgomery Place will be repeated at the Conservatory Performance Space. The program features an expanded, illustrated talk by Professor Greg Moynahan on “The Political Culture of Schubert's Vienna: Metternich and Domestic Life,” to be followed by a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, D 956, “Two Cellos,” performed by Conservatory students and director Robert Martin.
 No reservations required. Free and open to the public.

A conference on the theory and practice of translation, organised by Bard's Translation and Translatability Initiative.
Bard College Campus  9:00 am – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us for a book presentation with Jerome Kohn, editor of Thinking Without a Banister, in conversation with Thomas Wild.

The title refers to Hannah Arendt’s description of her experience of thinking, an activity in which she indulged without any of the traditional religious, moral, political, or philosophic pillars of support. The book’s contents are varied: the essays, lectures, reviews, interviews, speeches, and editorials, taken together, manifest the relentless activity of her mind as well as her character, acquainting the reader with the person Arendt was, and who has hardly yet been appreciated or understood. 

“This second volume of some 40 essays, interviews, conference presentations, acceptance speeches, letters and reviews, edited and introduced by Arendt scholar Kohn, reveals a wide focus, including the relationship of theory to practice, American elections, the Cold War, freedom, civic responsibility, and happiness…. [Arendt] emerges as startlingly prescient: in an interview in 1973, for example, she emphasized that a free press is crucial in a democracy…. A challenging, densely argued, provocative collection.” —Kirkus Reviews

Date: Thursday, April 12
Time: 6 pm
Location: Olin Hall, Room 102
Free and open to the public
MAP

Co-sponsored by the German Studies Program at Bard College

  Kayo Iwama, pianist and associate director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program, with visiting artist mezzo-soprano MaryAnn McCormick
Bitó Conservatory Building  7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Metropolitan opera singer MaryAnn McCormick will join pianist Kayo Iwama, associate director of the Bard Conservatory's Graduate Vocal Arts Program, for a special performance of Schubert lieder. This is a preview of a concert that will take place in Boston at Jordan Hall in April.

Free admission.

  Performance of a Schubert quintet and a talk on "The Political Culture of Schubert's Vienna: Metternich and Domestic Life"
Montgomery Place, Mansion  3:00 pm EST/GMT-5
A Montgomery Place Salon presented by the Bard College Conservatory of Music and Historical Studies Program with a talk on "The Political Culture of Schubert's Vienna: Metternich and Domestic Life" by Professor Gregory Moynahan, followed by a performance of the String Quintet in C Major, D 956, "Two cellos" by Franz Schubert by Conservatory students and faculty. Admission by reservation only. SOLD OUT--Suggested donation $20. No additional waiting list reservations will be taken. 

Olin Humanities, Room 203  6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk has been canceled. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Searching for the "origins“ of the political, as Hannah Arendt did, reflects a genealogical approach to the history of political ideas. It is a common place to say that she found it in ancient political thought. But which aspects of it? Looking into her unpublished book, "Introduction into Politics,“ we find her considering three different layers of antiquity: Homer, the Greeks, and the Romans. In the end, she opted for the Romans and consequently changed her idea of the "oasis“ of politics which has to be defended against the "desert“ of modernity.

BIO
Marcus Llanque is Professor for Political Theory at University of Augsburg/ Germany. He’s published several books on the theory of democracy, republicanism, and the history of political ideas. He is the editor of Hannah Arendt’s “What is Politics?” within the upcoming critical edition of Arendt’s complete works.

Date: March 8th, 2018
Time: 6:30 pm
Location: Olin, Room 203

Free & Open to the Public

Christine Ivanovic
Max Kade Distinguished Professor of German
(Brown University & University of Vienna)
 
Olin Humanities, Room 201  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
One of the most persistent topics in translation studies is the differentiation between “Domestication” and “Foreignization” – two alternative modes of literary translation first conceptualized by Friedrich Schleiermacher and (in English) coined by Lawrence Venuti. What happens when literary texts demand a crossing of borders? How do we perceive, conceptualize, and argue about the translation of literature, and, ultimately, about the translation of people? What do “Domestication” and “Foreignization” reflect when it is not texts but rather people who are crossing borders? How do these questions define the task of the translator today?
 
Professor Ivanovic will discuss these questions in response to eminent thinkers such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and Elfriede Jelinek.
 
For further information, please contact Thomas Wild: [email protected]
 

  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  9:00 am – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
A symposium commemorating the centennial of the Russian Revolution which will examine a wide range of topics related to the history, politics, and culture of this seminal event in modern Russian history. Bard President Leon Botstein will deliver the keynote address, and speakers include scholars from Bard, U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University (Smolny College). The scholars will discuss, among other topics, the history and politics of the Revolution, literature in early Soviet Russia, visual culture of the two 1917 revolutions and the Russian Civil War, music of the Revolution, and the Russian Revolution and Eastern European ethnic cultures. The symposium is free and open to the public.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Hosted by: The Hannah Arendt Center
Olin Humanities, Room 201  4:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
Edited by Roger Berkowitz and Ian Storey, Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Arendt's "Denktagebuch" offers a path through Hannah Arendt's recently published Denktagebuch, or "Book of Thoughts." In this book a number of innovative Arendt scholars come together to ask how we should think about these remarkable writings in the context of Arendt's published writing and broader political thinking. Other contributors include: Jeffrey Champlin, Wout Cornelissen, Ursula Ludz, Anne O'Byrne, Tracy Strong, Tatjana Noemi Tömmel, and Thomas Wild. Unique in its form, the Denktagebuch offers brilliant insights into Arendt's practice of thinking and writing. Artifacts of Thinking provides an introduction to the Denktagebuch as well as a glimpse of these fascinating but untranslated fragments that reveal not only Arendt's understanding of "the life of the mind" but her true lived experience of it.Panelist Include: Roger Berkowitz has been teaching political theory, legal thought, and human rights at Bard College since 2005. He is the academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. Professor Berkowitz is an interdisciplinary scholar, teacher, and writer. His interests stretch from Greek and German philosophy to legal history and from the history of science to images of justice in film and literature. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition; coeditor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics; editor of Revenge and Justice, a special issue of Law, Culture, and the Humanities; and a contributing editor to Rechtsgeschichte. His essays have appeared in numerous academic journals. Roger Berkowitz received his B.A. from Amherst College; J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley; and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.

Wout Cornelissen studied philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen and received his doctorate in philosophy from Leiden University. He was a visiting scholar at the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago. He taught political philosophy in Leiden and philosophy of law in Amsterdam. He was a Hannah Arendt Center Postdoctoral Fellow and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities at Bard College, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Utrecht University. His research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and literature. His first book project focuses on the relation between thought and action in the writing of Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. At Vanderbilt University, he will work on a critical edition of Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, as part of a Kritische Gesamtausgabe.


Anne O'Byrne's field of research is 20th century and contemporary European philosophy. From her dissertation, "Who are we?": Plurality and the Questioning of Philosophy, to her present project of natality (the existential condition of having been born) and finitude, her work has been at the intersection of ontology and politics. In her articles she investigates the political and ontological questions that arise around embodiment ("The Politics of Intrusion" in The New Centennial Review), gender ("The Excess if Justice" in International Studies in Philosophy), labor ("Symbol, Exchange and Birth" in Philosophy and Social Criticism) and pedagogy ("Pedagogy without a Project" in Studies in Philosophy and Education) using the work of authors such as Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva. O'Byrne also maintains an interest in Irish Studies and has written philosophical work concerning the functioning of sovereignty in Northern Ireland and the inheritance of the Irish language. At Stony Brook and while on faculty at Hofstra University (1999-2007) she has taught courses in feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of art, philosophy and the Holocaust, modernity and post-modernity, existentialism, phenomenology, and Nietzsche.

Ian Storey is co-editor with Roger Berkowitz of Archives of Thinking, and author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States.  He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards.  Having received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory.

Dr. Thomas Wild studied German literature and culture as well as political science in Berlin, and Munich, where he received his Ph.D. He has taught at institutions of higher learning in Germany, at Vanderbilt University, and at Oberlin College.  Dr. Wild’s research and teaching focus on twentieth-century German literature and film, the political dimensions of culture, art and thought, as well as contemporary developments in German media and society after 1989. Among his many publications are a monograph on Hannah Arendt’s relationships with key postwar German writers such as Uwe Johnson, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hilde Domin, and Rolf Hochhuth; an “intellectual biography” of Hannah Arendt; and an edition of Thomas Brasch’s poetry. Most recently, he co-edited Arendt’s conversations and correspondence with the eminent German historian and political essayist Joachim Fest. Additionally, he is a literary critic and cultural correspondent for the major German dailies Süddeutsche Zeitung and Der Tagesspiegel.

Time: 4:15 pm
Date: March, 31st
Location: OLIN 201 [map]

Free & Open to the Public
R.s.v.p. not required

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center and the Political Studies Program
Olin Humanities, Room 201  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Theodore J. Lowi (July 9, 1931 – February 17, 2017) was one of the most influential political scientists of the 20th century. Lowi authored numerous books included the hallmark “The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States”, along with “The Politics of Disorder”, “American Government: Incomplete Conquest”, and “Hyperpolitics: An Interactive Dictionary of Political Science”. He also edited “The Pursuit of Justice”, Robert F. Kennedy’s book about his tenure as attorney general.

Thomas Dumm is the author of six books that cover a range of topics in political theory and political culture as well as many articles and other essays. Among his books are Loneliness as a Way of Life (Harvard, 2008) and My Father’s House: On Will Barnet’s Paintings (Duke, 2014). He served as the founding co-editor of the international journal of contemporary political thought Theory&Event, as well as a non-fiction editor for the Massachusetts Review. His new book, a meditation on the (im)possibility of being at home in the twenty-first century, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.

NYTimes Obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/us/theodore-lowi-dead.html
 
Roger Berkowitz on Remembering “The End of Liberalism”: https://medium.com/amor-mundi/ted-lowi-in-memoriam-of-his-work-bc88822b3419#.8exnpsb2p

Time: 5:00 pm
Location: OLIN 201 [map]
Free & Open to the Public
Info & Contact: [email protected]

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center and the German Studies Program
Olin Humanities, Room 204  6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Hannah Arendt’s engagement with judgment begins in the 1950s. She meets it first of all as an ethical problem posed by the massive breakdown of personal judgment - the capacity to distinguish right from wrong - in the Third Reich. Arendt responds to this issue with her contentious claim about the “banality of evil.” Her formulation sees the industrially organized mass murder not as rooted in a kind of pleasure in or will to evil, and not even in hatred or conviction, but rather as a result of what she calls “thoughtlessness,” that is a specific lack of reflective judgment. On the other hand, Arendt addresses judgment as an 'epistemological' challenge: as the question of how one is to judge this massive breakdown in the capacity for judgment itself; and, how one is to judge, which is historically ‘novel’ in totalitarianism: morally, juridically, philosophically, politically, and historically.

Susanne Lüdemann's talk claims that, from the book on totalitarianism onward, Arendt dedicates her thought and writing to coping with this doubled challenge of judgment through the rupture in civilization in the extermination of the Jews on the one hand, and through the rupture in tradition of Modernity on the other. At the core of Arendt's work, judging and distinguishing are thus not only to be viewed as recurring themes or objects of her thought but also as ways of thinking and writing, as operations performed in her own discursive practice.

Time: 6:30 pm
Location: OLIN 204 [map]
Free & Open to the Public
Info & Contact: [email protected]

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Dr. Ulrich von Bülow (The German Literary Archive)
Olin Humanities, Room 204  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The papers of W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) are preserved at the German Literary Archive in Marbach (Germany). In this talk, Dr. von Bülow, head of Marbach’s Archive Department, will display and discuss rarely seen items from Sebald’s literary estate. The themes of memory and remains —both literary and non-literary— are prominent in Sebald’s fiction, and as a scholar and author, he was more concerned than many authors about the fate of his papers after his death. Just as he created in his writings a literary persona by means of factual material, he also carefully pre-selected what should be handed down to his reading public posthumously. This tour through Sebald’s fascinating archive will culminate with a look into the manuscripts for Sebald’s last great unfinished and unpublished book project.

Dr. von Bülow has published books and articles on German writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, Peter Handke, Franz Fühmann, Tankred Dorst, and W. G. Sebald. Among the books he has edited are volumes by Rainer Maria Rilke, Erich Kästner, Karl Löwith, and Martin Heidegger. His most recent publication is a book on Hannah Arendt in Marbach.

Ulrich von Bülow is currently a Visiting Research Scholar with the German Studies Program and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.

Olin Humanities, Room 204  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Lecture by Jerome Kohn (Hannah Arendt Literary Trust; The New School). Discussant: Thomas Bartscherer (Bard College)

In this talk, the work of art is not employed as a synonym for an artwork. One of its references is to what artists do when they make artworks; another is to what spectators do when they preserve – through their apperception – artworks over periods of time. The unprecedented evil of the 20th century, according to Hannah Arendt, has left us with a “broken thread of tradition.” From the point of view of the world – though not of history – every end is a beginning, a beginning whose end is not known in advance. A matter of increasing wonder to Arendt was how and where we can realize a new beginning today. The Work of Art will explore this question in conversation with thinkers such as Plato, Kant, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Rilke, and several eminent visual artworks. In his talk, Jerome Kohn will for the first time present from his unpublished book manuscript “The Work of Art.”

Jerome Kohn is the Trustee of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust. He has published several volumes of Arendt's uncollected and unpublished writing, such as Essays In Understanding, Responsibility and Judgment, The Promise Of Politics, and The Jewish Writings. He is currently preparing a new edition of collected unpublished texts by Hannah Arendt titled Thinking Without Bannisters.

Thomas Bartscherer is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Bard College. He is co-editor of Erotikon: Essay on Eros, Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts. He is currently completing a book titled Toward an Erotics of Tragedy and is co-editor of Arendt’s The Life of the Mind for the forthcoming Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works.

This event is co-sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, German Studies Program, Literature Program, and by the Philosophy Program

Location: Olin 204 [MAP]
Date: Wednesday, October 19th, 2016
Time: 6:00 p.m.

Rsvp not required
Free & open to the Public

Thomas Pfau, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English, Professor & Chair of Germanic Languages & Literatures, Duke Divinity School
RKC 103  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture will explore three case studies of visual attention and its ethical dimensions: a photograph by Sebastião Salgado; two paintings by Cézanne discussed by R. M. Rilke, and the harvesting scene opening Part III of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. In each instance, Thomas Pfau's focus will be on how the response elicited by a specific image triggers a distinctive ethical insight, a type of knowledge impossible to capture in propositional terms and achievable only through the medium of the image. The ethics of attention solicited by the image and subsequently articulated in writing involves empathy and, ultimately, demands a kind of participatory action on the part of the beholder. The lecture's overriding aim is to present attention as a form of knowledge neither "owned" nor "controlled" by the beholding subject but, on the contrary, transformative of the beholder.

Olin Humanities, Room 204  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us for a special lecture hosted by the German Studies Program and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanites at Bard College on Monday, September 12.

The rise of political protest movements in recent years has accentuated the need for an understanding of the meaning of political protest in and for modern democracies on the one hand, and to consider suitable criteria to distinguish between emancipatory and non-emancipatory forms of protest on the other. The talk seeks to address these needs by developing a fully-fledged concept of political protest. A special Q&A session will follow the lecture with Thomas Wild, Associate Professor of German, Director of German Studies Research Director at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College

Christian Volk is Professor of Political Theory and History of Ideas at the University of Trier. He studied Politics, Economics and Economic and Social History at the RWTH Aachen University. Since mid-2011 he has headed the DFG research project "The concept of sovereignty in the transnational character". Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow and scientific coordinator of the research project "International dissidence" Goethe University (2010-2011) and the DFG Research Training Group "Multilevel Constitutionalism" of the Humboldt University of Berlin (2009-2010).The discussion following Prof. Volk's presentation will be moderated by Thomas Wild, Associate Professor of German, Director of German Studies and Research Director at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.

Date: Monday, September 12
Location: Olin 204
Time: 5 PM

Free & Open to the Public

  (Locations in description)  Come weekly to the German Evenings and practice this beautiful language.

1st Monday of the Month: Language Table (Kline President's Room)
2nd Monday of the Month: Games Night (Olin LC 203)
3rd Monday of the Month: *Movie Night (Olin LC 203) *English Subtitles
4th Monday of the Month: Singing (Olin LC 203)

  (Locations in description)  Come weekly to the German Evenings and practice this beautiful language.

1st Monday of the Month: Language Table (Kline President's Room)
2nd Monday of the Month: Games Night (Olin LC 203)
3rd Monday of the Month: *Movie Night (Olin LC 203) *English Subtitles
4th Monday of the Month: Singing (Olin LC 203)

  (Locations in description)  Come weekly to the German Evenings and practice this beautiful language.

1st Monday of the Month: Language Table (Kline President's Room)
2nd Monday of the Month: Games Night (Olin LC 203)
3rd Monday of the Month: *Movie Night (Olin LC 203) *English Subtitles
4th Monday of the Month: Singing (Olin LC 203)

  (Locations in description)  Come weekly to the German Evenings and practice this beautiful language.

1st Monday of the Month: Language Table (Kline President's Room)
2nd Monday of the Month: Games Night (Olin LC 203)
3rd Monday of the Month: *Movie Night (Olin LC 203) *English Subtitles
4th Monday of the Month: Singing (Olin LC 203)

  (Locations in description)  Come weekly to the German Evenings and practice this beautiful language.

1st Monday of the Month: Language Table (Kline President's Room)
2nd Monday of the Month: Games Night (Olin LC 203)
3rd Monday of the Month: *Movie Night (Olin LC 203) *English Subtitles
4th Monday of the Month: Singing (Olin LC 203)

  (Locations in description)  Come weekly to the German Evenings and practice this beautiful language.

1st Monday of the Month: Language Table (Kline President's Room)
2nd Monday of the Month: Games Night (Olin LC 203)
3rd Monday of the Month: *Movie Night (Olin LC 203) *English Subtitles
4th Monday of the Month: Singing (Olin LC 203)

  (Locations in description)  Come weekly to the German Evenings and practice this beautiful language.

1st Monday of the Month: Language Table (Kline President's Room)
2nd Monday of the Month: Games Night (Olin LC 203)
3rd Monday of the Month: *Movie Night (Olin LC 203) *English Subtitles
4th Monday of the Month: Singing (Olin LC 203)

  (Locations in description)  Come weekly to the German Evenings and practice this beautiful language.

1st Monday of the Month: Language Table (Kline President's Room)
2nd Monday of the Month: Games Night (Olin LC 203)
3rd Monday of the Month: *Movie Night (Olin LC 203) *English Subtitles
4th Monday of the Month: Singing (Olin LC 203)

  (Locations in description)  Come weekly to the German Evenings and practice this beautiful language.

1st Monday of the Month: Language Table (Kline President's Room)
2nd Monday of the Month: Games Night (Olin LC 203)
3rd Monday of the Month: *Movie Night (Olin LC 203) *English Subtitles
4th Monday of the Month: Singing (Olin LC 203)

  (Locations in description)  Come weekly to the German Evenings and practice this beautiful language.

1st Monday of the Month: Language Table (Kline President's Room)
2nd Monday of the Month: Games Night (Olin LC 203)
3rd Monday of the Month: *Movie Night (Olin LC 203) *English Subtitles
4th Monday of the Month: Singing (Olin LC 203)

  (Locations in description)  Come weekly to the German Evenings and practice this beautiful language.

1st Monday of the Month: Language Table (Kline President's Room)
2nd Monday of the Month: Games Night (Olin LC 203)
3rd Monday of the Month: *Movie Night (Olin LC 203) *English Subtitles
4th Monday of the Month: Singing (Olin LC 203)

  (Locations in description)  Come weekly to the German Evenings and practice this beautiful language.

1st Monday of the Month: Language Table (Kline President's Room)
2nd Monday of the Month: Games Night (Olin LC 203)
3rd Monday of the Month: *Movie Night (Olin LC 203) *English Subtitles
4th Monday of the Month: Singing (Olin LC 203)

  Preston Theater, 110  8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
All films are shown with German subtitles or no subtitles.  If this is a concern for you, please contact Dennis King.

Held on Sundays, 10/18, 10/25, 11/8, 11/22, 12/6.

  Kline, President's Room  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The German Language Table offers everyone a free opportunity to practice their German in a relaxed setting.

Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Every Monday until December 7, 2015.

  Kline, President's Room  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The German Language Table offers everyone a free opportunity to practice their German in a relaxed setting.

Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Every Monday until December 7, 2015.

  Preston Theater, 110  8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
All films are shown with German subtitles or no subtitles.  If this is a concern for you, please contact Dennis King.

Held on Sundays, 10/18, 10/25, 11/8, 11/22, 12/6.

A conversation hosted by Hannah Arendt Center Post Doctoral Fellow, Samantha Hill, and Founding Director Institute for International Liberal Education Bard, Susan H. Gillespie
Arendt Center  3:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In 1962, a politically active Elisabeth Lenk moved to Paris and persuaded Theodor W. Adorno to supervise her sociology dissertation on the surrealists. Adorno, though critical of Surrealism, agreed. The Challenge of Surrealism presents their correspondence, written between 1962 and Adorno’s death in 1969, set against the backdrop of Adorno and Walter Benjamin’s disagreement about the present possibilities of future political action, crystallization, and the dialectical image. The letters offer a fresh portrait of Adorno and expand upon his view of Surrealism and the student movements in 1960s France and Germany, while Lenk’s essays and Bischof’s introduction argue that there is a legitimate connection between Surrealism and political resistance that still holds true today. Please join us at the Hannah Arendt Center for a conversation with Elisabeth Lenk and Rita Bischof to celebrate the English translation of The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk. 

Elisabeth Lenk is a German literary scholar and sociologist. She studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt and turned down the offer of an assistantship with Adorno to move to Paris, where she met André Breton and became a member of the surrealist group. Later, she was an assistant to Helge Pross and Peter Szondi and since 1976 Professor of Literature (now emerita) at the University of Hanover. She is the author of collections of essays on Adorno, surrealist aesthetics, and other subjects.

Rita Bischof studied philosophy, sociology and literature in Frankfurt, Marburg and Berlin. She conducted research in Paris and Florence and taught at various universities. Bischof has published numerous books and articles, among other things about Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin and Surrealism. Her most recent book, Nadja revisited, includes letters and drawings by Léona Delcourt alias Nadja.  She is a freelance writer living in Berlin.

Susan H. Gillespie is founding director of the Institute for International Liberal Education at Bard College, where she is Vice President for Special Global Initiatives. Her translations from German to English include numerous works by Theodor W. Adorno and the poetry of Paul Celan. 

Samantha Rose Hill received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2014. Her research and teaching interests include critical theory, the Frankfurt School, aesthetic theory, poetic thinking, and German literature. She recently joined Bard College as a Hannah Arendt Center Post Doctoral Fellow and teaches in the Political Studies Program.

Location: (click for directions)
Hannah Arendt Center
1448 Annandale Road, Bard College

Time: 3pm
Free & Open To the Public
Kaffee und Kuchen will be served!

  Olin Humanities, Room 201  7:00 pm – 8:30 am EST/GMT-5
Want to tutor Bard Prison Initiative students next semester? Come to our first info session to learn how to apply.

  Kline, President's Room  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The German Language Table offers everyone a free opportunity to practice their German in a relaxed setting.

Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Every Monday until December 7, 2015.

  Kline, President's Room  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The German Language Table offers everyone a free opportunity to practice their German in a relaxed setting.

Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Every Monday until December 7, 2015.

  Preston Theater, 110  8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
All films are shown with German subtitles or no subtitles.  If this is a concern for you, please contact Dennis King.

Held on Sundays, 10/18, 10/25, 11/8, 11/22, 12/6.

  Kline, President's Room  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The German Language Table offers everyone a free opportunity to practice their German in a relaxed setting.

Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Every Monday until December 7, 2015.

  Kline, President's Room  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The German Language Table offers everyone a free opportunity to practice their German in a relaxed setting.

Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Every Monday until December 7, 2015.

  Preston Theater, 110  8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
All films are shown with German subtitles or no subtitles.  If this is a concern for you, please contact Dennis King.

Held on Sundays, 10/18, 10/25, 11/8, 11/22, 12/6.

  Kline, President's Room  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The German Language Table offers everyone a free opportunity to practice their German in a relaxed setting.

Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Every Monday until December 7, 2015.

  Preston Theater, 110  8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
All films are shown with German subtitles or no subtitles.  If this is a concern for you, please contact Dennis King.

Held on Sundays, 10/18, 10/25, 11/8, 11/22, 12/6.

  Kline, President's Room  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The German Language Table offers everyone a free opportunity to practice their German in a relaxed setting.

Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Every Monday until December 7, 2015.

  Kline, President's Room  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The German Language Table offers everyone a free opportunity to practice their German in a relaxed setting.

Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Every Monday until December 7, 2015.

  Kline, President's Room  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The German Language Table offers everyone a free opportunity to practice their German in a relaxed setting.

Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Every Monday until December 7, 2015.

  Kline, President's Room  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The German Language Table offers everyone a free opportunity to practice their German in a relaxed setting.

Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Every Monday until December 7, 2015.

Heidegger’s Handiwork of Thinking: An Exploration of Unknown Papers from His Archive
Olin Humanities, Room 102  Martin Heidegger saw the oral form of thinking as original and exemplary. After all, Socrates, whom he distinguished as “the purest thinker of the west”, operated exclusively through oral conversation but “wrote nothing.” But as much as Heidegger may have valued the spoken word, his papers, which are preserved in the German Literary Archiv Marbach, show that he also required paper to think. He thought in writing; he would jot down ideas in the earliest stages of their development and prepared oral lectures and speeches first at his desk, word for word with pen in hand. Dr. von Bülow, head of Marbach’s Archive Department, discusses by means of concrete examples and unknown archival documents Heidegger’s ways of thinking and writing.Dr. von Bülow has published books and articles on German writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, Peter Handke, Franz Fühmann, Tankred Dorst, and W. G. Sebald. Among the books he’s edited are volumes by Rainer Maria Rilke, Erich Kästner, Karl Löwith, and Martin Heidegger. His most recently publication is a book on Hannah Arendt in Marbach.Von Bülow is currently a guest scholar with the German Studies Progam and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College for the month of September 2015.

  Kline, President's Room  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The German Language Table offers everyone a free opportunity to practice their German in a relaxed setting.

Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Every Monday until December 7, 2015.

Writing in and on Berlin
Olin Humanities, Room 203  Reading and Discussion, in German and English With Berlin Writer and German National Book Award Nominee,  Michael WildenhainMichael Wildenhain’s eminent literary works are closely related to the city of Berlin. His more than twenty books of novels, short stories, poems, and plays address the historically layered grounds of what is now (again) Germany’s capital. His stories span from the Second World War to our contemporary period, with a particular focus on the 1970s and 1980s. This was the time when West Berlin was the stage for often violent confrontations between a young generation seeking social and political autonomy, and a state facing left-wing terror attacks while also showing a disturbing reluctance to address its national-socialist pastWildenhain was an activist in the Berlin squatters’ movement during those years. His dedication to fighting racism and other forms of injustice has shaped his political persona, and it has impacted his writings, not the least his compelling books for young adults.At Bard College, Michael Wildenhain will read from his current, unpublished prose work-in-progress (in German and English). He will also read from and discuss earlier works, including his award-winning novel The Smile of the Alligators (Das Lächeln der Alligatoren, 2015). Among the many literary awards Wildenhain has won are the prestigious Alfred-Döblin-Preis, the Tankred-Dorst Award for Film Scripts, and a Distinguished Fellowship at the German Academy in Rome.

  Olin 102  Interested in applying for a Fulbright Scholarship, a Watson fellowship, or another postgraduate scholarship or fellowship? This information session will cover application procedures, deadlines, and suggestions for crafting a successful application. Applications will be due later this month, so be sure to attend one of the  two information sessions!

With Distinguished German Playwrights, Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler
Olin Humanities, Room 102  Two of Germany’s most distinguished contemporary playwrights, Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler, will be in residence at Bard College in October to research and develop My Discovery of America, an epic new play dealing with the experience of German prisoners of war in the Hudson Valley during World War II. In this public presentation, Dorst and Ehler talk about and read from their work in progress, framed by a moderated conversation on their previous collaborations. Tankred Dorst, in collaboration with Ursula Ehler, has published more than 50 literary works, he written and directed seven films, and is the author of several libretti. Both artists co-directed a performance of Richard Wagner’s Ring Circle in Bayreuth/Germany in 2006. Their work has been awarded the most prestigious prizes in the world of European theater, among them the Georg-Büchner-Preis, the Faust-Preis, and the European Literature Award. Dorst and Ehler’s oeuvre includes Merlin, a re-writing of the King Arthur legend; Toller, a play based on the Socialist revolutionary Ernst Toller; and The Forbidden Garden, a collection of fragments exploring the Fascist-friendly literary genius D’Annunzio. In each of these works, Dorst and Ehler investigate the fraught intersection of the imaginative and the political worlds. Free – Reservations through the Fisher Center Box Office required!

  Kline, College Room  Meet students who have studied at Bard College Berlin during their first year and learn about the spring, 2015 application process.  

  Morning: Aspinwall 302 / Afternoon: RKC 103  9:00 am – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Student Workshop in Aspinwall 302

      Panelists include: Eugene Bata Daniel Krakovski Robert Isaf Melanie Mignucci Courtney Morris Yuko Okamura Christopher Shea Alissa Rubin Melissa Weaver
2:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. Faculty Workshop in RKC 103

      Panelists include: Thomas Bartshcerer Jonathan Brent Peter Filkins Susan Gillespie Wyatt Mason Justus Rosenberg Olga Voronina

  Join Bard Theater & Performance Program in Traveling to the Theater Der Welt (World Theater Festival) in Germany this Summer.
Fisher Center  This summer, join Bard's Theater and Performance Program on a trip to the Theater der Welt festival, one of the foremost international theater festivals, which is held in Germany every three years. This year's festival, taking place May 23 – June 8, 2014 in Mannheim, Germany, is curated by Matthias Lilienthal, the former artistic director of Berlin's HAU Theater. The Theater & Performance Program will visit the festival’s second weekend, May 26 – June 2, which is organized around the theme “Performing Politics.”


See the work of International Artists Including:

*Philippe Quesne (France): Next day (world premiere)
*Simon Stone (Australia): Thyestes
*Leonardo Moreira (Brazil: Ficcao
*Manuela Infante (Chile): ZOO
*Guillermo Calderon (Chile): Escuela
*Gob Squad (Germany/UK): The Conversationalist
*Kim Nobel (UK): You are not alone
* Hotel Shabby Shabby (Germany)


As a part of Performing Arts Campus, students will:

*Spend your evenings attending performances by artists from around the world.

*Participate in daily seminars responding to performances at the festival, alongside students from international universities such as the Goethe-University, Frankfurt and the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw.

*Participate in workshops in small groups with artists and curators presenting in the festival, creating your own work in response to the performances you see.

*Learn about performance curating from festival curator Matthias Lilenthal.


Included in trip:

Two meals per day, lodging at festival, transfer to and from Frankfurt airport


Your costs:

Flight booked individually, performance tickets: $75 total, 1 meal per day, Bard reservation fee $250/ due with letter of permission by February 14.


To reserve your spot:

Turn in deposit and permission form due by February 14, 2014


Schedule:

10-Dec-13 Tuesday Information Session 1
6- Feb-14 Tuesday Information Session 2

14-Feb-14 Friday deposit deadline /letter of permission

28-Feb-14 suggested flight booking deadline & apply for travel documents

24 & 25 May-14 Saturday Bard Commencement weekend

26-May-14 Monday NYC > Frankfurt Flight. optional: travel with Professor Miriam Felton-Dansky

27-May-14 Tuesday Frankfurt: Arrive/transfer to Mannheim. Morning: meet at Frankfurt airport

28-May-14 Wednesday Mannheim: Campus II, May 27-June 1

29-May-14 Thursday Mannheim: Campus II, May 27-June 1

30-May-14 Friday Mannheim: Campus II, May 27-June 1

31-May-14 Saturday Mannheim: Campus II, May 27-June 1

1-Jun-14 Sunday Transfer from Mannheim, Flight Frankfurt > NYC: Flight/ Arrive NYC


For more information, contact Miriam Felton-Dansky at [email protected], or Bob Bangiola at [email protected], or call 845-758-7957.

Frances Lee, piano
Bitó Conservatory Building  In conjunction with her Senior Project in German Studies, Conservatory student Frances Lee will give a short talk followed by a performance of Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel's piano cycle Das Jahr (The Year).

  Every Wednesday
Kline, back corner (by President's Room)  Join us for weekly language practice.

All levels welcome!
Come for as little or as long as you would like.

Come learn about the festival and the trip.
LUMA Theater Conference Room  This summer, join Bard's Theater and Performance Program on a trip to the Theater der Welt festival, one of the foremost international theater festivals, which is held in Germany every three years. This year's festival, taking place May 23 – June 8, 2014 in Mannheim, Germany, is curated by Matthias Lilienthal, the former artistic director of Berlin's HAU Theater, and will feature the work of major international artists such as Philippe Quesne (France), Gob Squad (UK/Germany), and Guillermo Calderón (Chile).

For the first time in 2014, Theater der Welt is hosting a new program called Performing Arts Campus, in which students from around the world are invited to attend seminars and workshops with artists and curators working in the festival.

Bard's Theater and Performance program will travel to Theater der Welt to participate in Performing Arts Campus's second session, May 29 – June 2, which is organized around the theme of "Performing Politics."

Participants will:
*Attend performances by some of the leading international artists working today
*Participate in seminars hosted by leading curators and critics to discuss and respond to the work
*Take part in intensive workshops with artists presenting work at the festival
*Meet other students of theater and performance from universities around the world

For more information, please join us on Tuesday, December 10, or contact Miriam Felton-Dansky at [email protected].


--
Miriam Felton-Dansky
Visiting Assistant Professor
Theater and Performance Program

  Every Wednesday
Kline, back corner (by President's Room)  Join us for weekly language practice.

All levels welcome!
Come for as little or as long as you would like.

  Every Wednesday
Kline, back corner (by President's Room)  Join us for weekly language practice.

All levels welcome!
Come for as little or as long as you would like.

Every Man Dies Alone
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  The German Studies Program is excited to invite you to an extraordinary opportunity to see the 2012 Luc Perceval production at the Thalia-Theater Hamburg, Germany, ofHans Fallada: Jeder stirbt für sich allein
Every Man Dies Alone
based on the novel "Alone in Berlin" by Hans Fallada
in an adaptation by Luk Perceval and Christina Bellingen

WEIS CINEMA – SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2013 2:00-6:00

This production - 4 hours! In German – No subtitles! -  is being performed in Hamburg as we speak – receiving raving reviews. It is therefore a great honor to have received permission by the Thalia Theater, Hamburg, to allow the Bard Community to see - more or less live –a video taping of the 10/27/2012 production and thus  what is happening on a German stage today !The production has won several awards, including ‘Production of the Year’ for director Luc Perceval and ‘Best Scenography’ for Annette Kurz.


“The Führer has murdered my son!”
With these words scrawled on a postcard begins a most unusual resistance battle waged by a simple working-class married couple in Second World War Berlin. Fallada tells the tale of Anna and Otto Quangel, who after losing their son take up the fight against the Nazi state machine by the most simple means. Between the years 1940 and 1942 the couple delivers over two hundred handwritten postcards and letters, left out on the staircases and hallways of randomly selected apartment buildings. Their activities soon come to the attention of Chief Inspector Escherich, himself more career-orientated collaborateur than fervent Nazi, but who under the pressure of his superiors’ scrutiny is required to act. An initial ray of light in the darkness of his seemingly futile investigation is provided by the legal proceedings initiated by a doctor’s receptionist. She accuses the work-shy malingerer Enno Kluge of placing a highly treasonable postcard outside her employer’s surgery. This false trail leads Inspector Escherich into the twilight world of bookies and petty criminals. All too late does he come to understand the futility of his efforts. There seems to be only one way for him to obscure his failures from sadistic Obergruppenführer Prall: Enno Kluge must die.Like trapped rats, the denizens of Berlin are caught within what remains of their daily shrinking War-State. Spies and  informers, good-for-nothings, gamblers and con-men inhabit the once great city. Workers’ apartments, back yards, betting shops, dance parlours, Gestapo offices and finally the prison at Plötzensee set the scene for this chase through Berlin, of which set designer Annette Kurz has constructed a gigantic architect’s model using 4000 everyday household objects of the time.

Hans Fallada based his novel on the case files of the married couple Otto and Elise Hampel, who were executed by the Nazis at Plötzensee and whose postcards survive to this day. A helpless, badly organized and inconsequential attempt at resistance by a pair of isolated individuals? For Luk Perceval it is precisely the naiveté and selflessness of this unique couple which provide the utopian volatility of the piece. 60 years after his death, Fallada’s novel hits the bestseller lists, for the first time in its original form. It is the earliest resistance novel by a non-emigrating author, written with breathtaking hypergraphic energy. In between stays at mental institutions, Fallada manically writes 899 pages in four weeks, dying three weeks later of heart failure. [Premiere: 13th October 2012 at the Thalia Theater]

text: hans fallada
adaptation: luk perceval/christina bellingen
direction: luk perceval
scenography: annette kurz
costumes: ilse vandenbusche
lighting design: mark vandenesse
dramaturgy: christina bellingen
music: lothar müller Otto Quangel - Thomas Niehaus
Anna Quangel - Oda Thormeyer
Kommissar Escherich - André Szymanski
Eva Kluge / Cathérine Seifert / Enno Kluge - Daniel Lommatzsch
Trudel Baumann/ Anwalt Erwin Troll - Maja Schöne
Kammergerichtsrat Fromm/ Obergruppenfuehrer Prall - Barbara Nüsse
Emil Barkhausen/ Kommissar Laub/ Schup - Alexander Simon
Schauspieler Max Harteisen - Mirco Kreibich
Frau Rosenthal/ Hete Haeberle/ Kriminalrat Zott - Gabriela Maria Schmeide
Der Säugling/ Oberpostsekretaer Millek -  Benjamin-Lew Klon     

  Every Wednesday
Kline, back corner (by President's Room)  Join us for weekly language practice.

All levels welcome!
Come for as little or as long as you would like.

  Every Wednesday
Kline, back corner (by President's Room)  Join us for weekly language practice.

All levels welcome!
Come for as little or as long as you would like.

A Reading and Discussion (in German & English) On the Aftermath of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Bard Hall  With Distinguished German Writer Uwe Kolbe 
and Tenor Rufus Müller (reading the English voice) His new novel “Indolence” is the most significant book of contemporary German literature reflecting on the aftermath of ‘1989’ and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Uwe Kolbe’s reading at Bard will be a world premiere. For his stirring book about a young man and emerging composer seeking to find his tone under the intricate conditions of dictatorship will come out only in spring of 2014. Kolbe will read from the German original, while distinguished tenor and Bard Music Professor Rufus Müller will read the English voice; the translation by acclaimed New York writer and translator Anne Posten was commissioned by the German publisher S. Fischer Verlag especially for this event.Uwe Kolbe is an eminent poet, essayist, writer of prose, and translator. His first volume of poetry, “Hineingeboren,” (“Born Into”) appeared in East Berlin in 1980. The increasingly critical nature of his writing led to a ban on publication in the GDR soon after. During the early 1980s, he edited the illegal journal “Mikado.” Eventually, he was permitted to travel abroad and lived between Hamburg and East Berlin. Until 2003 he was Director of the "Studio Literatur und Theater" at the University of Tübingen. He was a writer-in-residence at the University of Austin and at Oberlin College. Uwe Kolbe is author of eleven books of poetry. His latest collection of essays, “Vineta’s Archives” (2012), was awarded with the prestigious Heinrich-Mann-Award by the Academy of Arts Berlin.The English-German tenor Rufus Müller, Associate Professor of Music at Bard College, has had a distinguished career in opera, oratorio, and recital. He has performed and taught, and coached throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. He has worked under Franz Welser-Möst, Gustav Leonhardt, Frans Brüggen, Ivan Fischer, René Jacobs, and other eminent conductors. CD recordings include performances in Bach’s St. John Passion under John Eliot Gardine, and Mozart’s The Magic Flute under Roger Norrington.

  Every Wednesday
Kline, back corner (by President's Room)  Join us for weekly language practice.

All levels welcome!
Come for as little or as long as you would like.

  Every Wednesday
Kline, back corner (by President's Room)  Join us for weekly language practice.

All levels welcome!
Come for as little or as long as you would like.

  Every Wednesday
Kline, back corner (by President's Room)  Join us for weekly language practice.

All levels welcome!
Come for as little or as long as you would like.

  Every Wednesday
Kline, back corner (by President's Room)  Join us for weekly language practice.

All levels welcome!
Come for as little or as long as you would like.

  Every Wednesday
Kline, back corner (by President's Room)  Join us for weekly language practice.

All levels welcome!
Come for as little or as long as you would like.

  Every Wednesday
Kline, back corner (by President's Room)  Join us for weekly language practice.

All levels welcome!
Come for as little or as long as you would like.

Reading and Discussion (in English)
With Eminent German-Jewish Writer Esther Dischereit
Olin Humanities, Room 204  The German Studies Program is pleased to welcome 
Esther Dischereit

Esther Dischereit is one of the most exciting writers and thought-provoking public intellectuals in Germany today. Her poems, novels, essays, plays, including radio plays, her opera libretti and sound installations offer unique insights into the Jewish life of contemporary Europe. She collaborates with composers and musicians and founded the avant-garde project “WordMusicSpace/Sound-Concepts.” Coming from a survivors’ family, commemoration (of the Holocaust) has been a constant reference point in her work. Dischereit’s writings also reflect on what it means to be a woman and an intellectual. The Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia on Jewish Women calls her an “outstanding writer” among Jewish artists in the twenty-first century. For more information, including bibliography, see: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/dischereit-esther 

Recently, a series of racist killings, committed by the so-called "National Socialist Underground" (NSU) organization, has shocked the German public. Dischereit can be regarded as the most important independent voice covering the legal and political investigations of this unprecedented crime in post-war Germany. While the media focused pre-dominantly on the killers, Dischereit writes on for the victims, their families and friends, and started initiatives on their behalf. She addresses society’s responsibility that is, our common task not to look away. She challenges widespread racism and xenophobia wherever it arises, including the high ranks of the police and secret service. Dischereit has commented on the topic on television, radio, and in prominent newspapers. As an artist she responded with an amazing collection of “Mourning Songs,” which eventually will evolve into an opera – songs of lament, and songs of accusation.  

  302  Current senior project I students in German Studies present and discuss their projects with an audience of faculty and peers. Topics include: F. Mendelssohn's Italian Journey, "Hair" - Paul Celan, Orientalism - Weltliteratur - Goethe's West-Eastern Divan, Ethno-Linguistics - Minor Literature - Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Moderated by Prof. Thomas Wild. Open to the public.

  Barbara Sukowa reteams with director Margarethe von Trotta (Rosa Luxemburg) for her brilliant new biopic of influential German–Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt.


Olin Hall  7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Arendt’s controversial reporting on the 1961 trial of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann in the New Yorker introduced her now-famous concept of the “Banality of Evil.” Using footage from the actual Eichmann trial and weaving a narrative that spans three countries, von Trotta turns the often invisible passion for thought into immersive, dramatic cinema.

An official selection at the Toronto International and New York Jewish Film Festivals, Hannah Arendt also co-stars Klaus Pohl as philosopher Martin Heidegger, Nicolas Woodeson as New Yorker editor William Shawn, and two-time Oscar Nominee Janet McTeer as novelist Mary McCarthy.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with the film's writer Pam Katz, the film's star, Barbara Sukowa, who plays Hannah Arendt in the film, and Roger Berkowitz, the Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.

Admission to this event is free and open to the public. No tickets or reservations are necessary.

A Cross-Disciplinary Workshop for Students and Faculty
Olin Humanities, Room 102  This day-long workshop brings together Bard faculty and students to explore a range of questions on teaching and learning about cities in an academic context.

We will ask: How do the reading of texts, the building of cultural monuments, and the creation of artistic works transform our understandings of the city? Is it possible to read the city as a text or view it as a cultural monument? Are there cities better preserved in cultural memory than physical space? How are identities and ideas of cities formed through literature, film, and other media? In what ways can these different strategies of representation transform the urban experience and the city itself?

Students will present their work on cities at a panel, to be followed by a roundtable for faculty on teaching methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and principles of canon formation to consider when discussing cities and urban space in the classroom.

"This Beautiful Place," A Reading by Anne Posten

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  Anne Posten’s award-winning translation of Tankred Dorst’s novella, This Beautiful Place, appeared last year from Hanging Loose Press. She lives in New York City, where she also writes fiction and teaches writing at Queens College. Tankred Dorst and his co-author Ursula Ehler are two of the most significant contemporary German playwrights. Their work has been translated into more than 20 languages. This Beautiful Place explores the mysterious forces that drive people into catastrophic adventures against their better judgment.Open to the Public and Free of Charge

The Poet and Translator, Thomas Brasch
Olin Humanities, Room 204  A presentation and reading with Anne Posten (New York) and Thomas Wild (Bard College)

Thomas Brasch (1945-2001) is one of the most fascinating figures in German literature after 1945. His poems, inspired by Brecht, Heine and the European avant-garde, inspire people up to date, his plays intriguingly think through the political turmoils of the 20th century, his films were celebrated at festivals in Cannes and Nice, and his translations of Shakespeare are the best to be found in German language.

Anne Posten‘s essay on translating Thomas Brasch was recently published in an issue of Text + Kritik dedicated to that author’s work and legacy.  Her award-winning translation of Tankred Dorst’s novella, This Beautiful Place, appeared last year from Hanging Loose Press. Anne Posten lives in New York City, where she also writes fiction and teaches writing at Queens College.Thomas Wild is Assistant Professor of German at Bard College. His publications include books on Hannah Arendt, as well as 20th century German literature and political history. He recently edited a collection of essays on Thomas Brasch's work and legacy with Text+Kritik.

  Journal for International Perspectives
Weis Cinema, Bard College  

Presentation & Discussion

Jenny Friedrich-Freksa
Editor-in-chief, KULTURAUSTAUSCH (Berlin)

  Olin Hall  The masterful and groundbreaking song settings by Hugo Wolf of the poetry of Eduard Mörike will be performed in two concerts presented by the musicians of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program and the Post-Graduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship. Each concert will include a brief talk by Dr. Franz Kempf, Professor of German and Director of German Studies at Bard College, on the life and works of Mörike. Both concerts will be given with supertitle translations of the poetry.

  Olin Hall  The masterful and groundbreaking song settings by Hugo Wolf of the poetry of Eduard Mörike will be performed in two concerts presented by the musicians of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program and the Post-Graduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship. Each concert will include a brief talk by Dr. Franz Kempf, Professor of German and Director of German Studies at Bard College, on the life and works of Mörike. Both concerts will be given with supertitle translations of the poetry.