Events

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.