 |
 |
Apologies for crossposting Seminar Series: All welcome From 'Stasiland' to 'Ostalgie': Remembering the GDR Twenty Years On Two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a wide variety of interpretations and representations of the GDR (former East Germany) have emerged. Twenty years is the halfway point of the celebrated ‘forty years’ (also the title of his autobiography) that Günter de Bruyn and others claimed would be needed to come to terms with the forty years of the socialist state. It also means that a generation has come to adulthood with the GDR only as an inherited memory. This seminar series marks the twentieth anniversary of the end of the GDR and explores what has become of the state that existed there for so long as history, memory and myth: examining the way it has been remembered and re-imagined during the last twenty years and the traces it has left in modern German politics, philosophy, landscape, literature and film. Is it a ‘footnote in world history’ (Timothy Garton Ash) or fundamental to understanding the dynamics of contemporary Europe? Eight leading experts from UK, Germany and USA offer their views. It is only through understanding that very particular history and the ways we choose to remember it that we can understand the Germans today. Week 1 (20th Jan) Prof. Wolfgang Emmerich (Bremen) Cultural Memory East / West: Is what belongs together growing together? Week 2 (27th Jan) Prof. T.J. Reed (Oxford) Revisiting the Wende Week 3 (3rd Feb) Prof. Katrin Kohl (Oxford) Conceptualising the GDR - 20 Years After Week 4 (10th Feb) Dr Peter Thompson (Sheffield/Oxford) ‘Die unheimliche Heimat’: The GDR as the Presence and Absence of Hope Week 5 (17th Feb) Dr Daniela Berghahn (RHUL) Remembering the Stasi: from DEFA Gegenwartsfilm to the Stasi fairytale Das Leben der Anderen Week 6 (24th Feb) Dr Lyn Marven (Liverpool) ‘Berlin ist bekannt [...] für die Mauer, die es aber nicht mehr gibt’(Monika Maron): the persistence of East Berlin in the contemporary city Week 7 (3rd March) Dr Chloe Paver (Exeter) Memory and Place in the New Bundesländer Week 8 (10th March) Prof. Timothy Garton Ash (Oxford) ‘A Footnote in World History’: The GDR as Memory, Myth and History These seminars will all take place at 5.30pm in the Noël Salter Room in New College, Oxford. Wine will be served. All welcome. Professor Jan-Wener Müller (Princeton University) will give a special lecture Thursday May 21st to round off the series. A programme with full details and abstracts and directions is available at: http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/german/rememberthegdr Contact: [log in to unmask] -- K.J. Leeder Professor of Modern German Literature Fellow and Tutor in German, New College, Oxford