German in the World: King's German Seminars, Autumn Term 2014
Wednesday 19 November: 12.30-2pm (Virginia Woolf Building, Room 6.06)
Book Burning--American Style: The Allied Destruction of NS Literature and the US Reaction
Professor Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania
On May 13, 1946, the Allies issued Order No. 4, dictating the seizure and destruction of publications deemed to promote Nazism and militarism. The American press and library profession immediately reacted with outrage, likening the policy to Nazi book burnings. The
controversy reveals divisions at home and abroad over the meaning of books and reading in dictatorships and democracies. Occupation authorities, influenced by psychological warfare and communications research, believed that Nazi publications had poisoned the
‘German mind’ and had to be eradicated. At home, opponents of the order defended the right to read as a precondition of citizenship, expressing concern not only about German reconstruction, but also anxiety about American civil liberties in a burgeoning ‘leviathan
state.’ My paper examines this controversy and the effort to find an acceptable solution to it, one that, ironically, brought American librarians directly into the machinery of censorship and destruction.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/german/eventrecords/2014-15/researchsem3.aspx
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King’s German Seminars: 'German in the World'
This seminar series emerges out of a UK symposium held in June 2014 at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, as well as discussion at the DAAD-sponsored UK Heads of German meeting 2013 on the changing face of German Studies in a globalized world. The series brings together international German Studies scholars to explore aspects of ‘German in the World’ as a field of critical cultural discourse within a globalized public sphere. The papers, which explore transnational and multilingual aspects of artistic works from the domains of prose, poetry, film and dance, consider possibilities for critically reworking established historical and conceptual paradigms, as well as pointing to a more flexible, multidisciplinary architecture for German Studies and its future as a field of research.
All seminars take place on Wednesday lunchtimes from 12.30-2pm in Room 6.06, Virginia Woolf Building, 22 Kingsway, London, WC2B 6NR.
All very welcome!
Wednesday 8 October 2014: 12.30-2pm
Tobias Boes, University of Notre Dame
Thomas Mann as a World Author
Tuesday 21 October 2014: 6.30-8pm - Anatomy Lecture Theatre, Strand Campus
Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam
Notes from Underground: On Marx & Belatedness in Alexander Kluge
Wednesday 5 November 2014: 12.30-2pm
Kate Elswit, University of Bristol
On Tangling with Histories: Reconstructing Reconstructions on a Global Stage – Kurt Jooss, Lilavati Häger & Future Memory (2012)
Wednesday 19 November 2014: 12.30-2pm
Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania
‘Book Burning – American Style’: The Allied Destruction of NS Literature and the US Reaction
Wednesday 26 November 2014: 12.30-2pm
Chantal Wright, University of Warwick
But I don’t speak Bulgarian! Translating Tzveta Sofronieva’s German-language poetry
Wednesday 14 January, 2015: 12.30-2pm
Charmian Brinson, Imperial College, London & Richard Dove, University of Greenwich
The Defence of the Realm? MI5 and the Surveillance of Anti-Nazi Refugees, 1933-1950
Wednesday 4 March 2015: 12.30-2pm
Anna Linton, King’s College London
Millenarianism in Bromley by Bow: Quirinus Kuhlmann Visits Restoration London