Conferences Abroad

The First World War as Caesura? Continuities and Ruptures in German Architecture, Urban Planning and Open Space Development

University of Kassel, October 16th – 17th, 2014
Deadline for abstracts by April 25th, 2014

“Es ist wohl vielen Künstlern so gegangen, dass sie sich aus unbewussten Gründen nach dem Kriege künstlerisch anders ausdrückten wie vorher. (…) Ich merkte mit einer Art innerem Staunen, dass ich eine neue Sprache beherrschte, in der ich nur mit den Mitteln der Gruppierung, der Proportion, der Lichtführung und der Farbe alles auszusprechen vermochte, was mir am Herzen lag.”
~ Fritz Schumacher, Stufen des Lebens. Erinnerungen eines Baumeisters, 1935

In 2014, the topic of the First World War has already become a central focus among a host of international conferences, symposia and workshops. The conference “The First World War as Caesura? Continuities and Ruptures in German Architecture, Urban Planning and Open Space Development,” will examine the significance of the First World War specifically for the institutions and disciplines of German Architecture, Garden Architecture and Urban Planning.

Bringing together both historians and planners, we hope to generate a body of interdisciplinary research, illuminate the nascent planning and building practices of the early twentieth century, and explore this historical phenomena within their political and socio-cultural contexts. The conference aims to examine the most influential wartime events as well as consequences of the “Great War” in the field and discipline of German Planning History. For the sake of conference coherence and a possible publication we ask that all papers make a concerted effort in addressing the following central question: To what extent did the First World War form or determine the work of city-builders, architects, garden architects and urban planners through the War and beyond?

Proposed papers are encouraged – but are not required – to consider the following conference questions: Which continuities and ruptures of the pre-war and experience of world conflict were most influential in the development of planning disciplines? Which political, social and economic questions emerged in the aftermath of the War as central imperatives for the Weimar Republic? How did planning objectives change and radicalize? Which positions, strategies and tactics developed out of the experience of the technology-driven “la Grande Guerre”? How were military practices such as areal photography transmitted into public planning discourses? What or how did German planners, (garden)
architects and engineers give new expression to this new post-war lingua franca (Schumacher) within building forms and socio-spatial designs? The subsequent topical list offers a thematic framework for the conference and book publication:

German Planning Kultur:

• From feudalization to modern living – from imperial politics of Kultur to a culture of social engineering
• Industry, form and world markets – the German Werkbund in transition
• Reconstruction or starting from scratch – confronting the city in ruins
• Anatomy, economics and competition – large-scale building projects in the communal economy

Lebenswelten:

• Utopia and dystopia – the relationship between technology and nature
• Drafting lifestyles and models of living – reform approaches and conceptions of value
• Long beards, bob-cuts – planner biographies and the question of gender equality
• Regional, national, global – identity and Heimat, health and tradition

Politics of Planning:

• The State as architect – representations of German Empire and Weimar Republic
• Imperial and colonial metropoles – German colonial planning with and without empire
• The land of unbounded opportunity – Americanization and rationalization
• Associations, institutions and individuals – public and private in urban space

We are interested in bringing together an intellectually diverse and enthusiastic group of established scholars and academic newcomers in both Germany and abroad. We believe this interdisciplinary perspective is essential to a successful conference, and most importantly, to a subsequent book publication. Papers and presentations will be held in German, but exceptions during discussion sessions will be made. Presentations will be limited to a maximum of 20 minutes each.

We look forward to receiving your abstracts (written in German, max. 3,000 characters) and abridged C.V.s (max. 1 page) by April 25th, 2014. Please entitle all documents with “Continuities and Ruptures” and send them as duplicates in PDF and Word formats to hennecke@uni-kassel.de. Selection process and notifications by June 2014.

Conference organizers:

Stefanie Hennecke, Prof. for Open Space Development, University of Kassel, Germany
Thorsten Dame, DFG Alumni, Center for Metropolitan Studies, TU-Berlin, Germany
Patrick C. Hege, DFG Fellow, Center for Metropolitan Studies, TU-Berlin, Germany

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Looted Art and Restitution in the Twentieth Century:
Europe in transnational and global perspective

18-20 September 2014
Newnham College, Cambridge

Over the past decade the subject of looted art and the restitution of
cultural property have captured the attention of the media and the public
alike through a range of popular recollections that included novels,
exhibitions, documentaries and more recently even a blockbuster movie,
Monuments Men. In these narratives, the historical complexities that
characterized wartime looting or under duress sales and the ensuing efforts
to restore cultural artifacts to their pre-war conditions have often been
put aside in favour of vivid literary accounts that occasionally present a
tale of heroic sacrifice and the fulfillment of justice. Alongside, a
diverse and wide-ranging academic literature has developed, providing
insights from legal, historical and art historical perspectives. Based on a
rich plurality of case studies, a substantial part of the existing
literature focuses on the roles and actions of individual actors or groups
– in particular the crimes of the Nazi elites – and the legal aspects of
restitution. Other contributions approach the subject with an in-depth
analysis of the fate of specific collections or art works, either belonging
to individuals, families or museums.

The field remains, however, highly compartmentalized along institutional,
disciplinary and national boundaries. The geographical and chronological
spread of studies also still proves rather uneven. This conference aims to
overcome these fragmentations by establishing connections between the
public and private responses to art looting across institutional and
national borders over the course of the twentieth century. We seek
contributions investigating the nexus between private individuals, national
governments and international organizations in order to question the impact
on notions of national, international and regional identity in European
nation-states and gain a deeper understanding of the processes of
restitution of cultural property as a political and cultural practice in
transnational and global perspective.

We welcome papers on the following themes:

§  Changing definitions of looted and restituted art: criteria, motifs and
limitations

§  National policies, decision-making processes and the development of
international cooperation  – including the work of both private and public
actors

§  Identity and restitution: cultural property,
international/national/local power structures and identity politics

§  Public debates and cultural representations of restitution claims: which
claims capture the public imagination, which remain only a concern for
experts and why?

§  The (trans)national art world and restitution: the impact on museums,
galleries, art dealing and collecting practices

§  Restitution and decolonization: connections and contrasts between
post-WWII and post-colonial claims and policies

§  Continuities and ruptures: is restitution history structured by
political history? Towards a periodization of restitution history

§  Memories of restitution: the use and legacy of institutional and
collective restitution debates, from the Napoleonic Wars to the present

The conference language is English. Papers will be pre-circulated in early
September. Accommodation for two nights and travel costs will be provided
for external participants. Please send a proposal of max 400 words,
accompanied by a short CV, to Bianca Gaudenzi (bg265@cam.ac.uk) by 13
April 2014.

Organisers:
Bianca Gaudenzi (University of Cambridge)
Mary-Ann Middelkoop (University of Cambridge)
Astrid Swenson (Brunel University, London)

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“Critical Time in Modern German Literature and Culture”

Symposium at the University of Nottingham
11-12 July 2014

The emergence of the modern sense of critical time that Reinhart Koselleck
defined as the “Verzeitlichung” (temporalization) of all areas of human
knowledge around 1800, of subjectivity, history and nature in the modern
experience and mind, has long been seen as a defining feature of modernity
and modernism. Hartmut Rosa, arguably the most prominent German critic of
temporality in our digital age, believes that acceleration defines the
temporality of modernity as well as modern society; echoing cultural
criticism around 1900 he views the renewed acceleration of life in late
modernity today as a threat to civilization. Literary and cultural
engagement with modern critical time, however, goes well beyond the theme
of acceleration: there is, to give just a few examples, the contrapuntal
fascination with deceleration and ecstatic moments (epiphanies), the
dialectic of speed and deliberate slowness, the notion polyphonous time and
simultaneity (“Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen”), the distention of
time between the past, the present and the future in the human mind (Saint
Augustine), the intrinsic link between temporalization and a revalidation
of memory (both individual and collective), or the idea that complex
aesthetic temporalities (“ästhetische Eigenzeiten”) break with the modern
time-regime – a now prominent research focus which raises questions as to
the role of literature and the arts in the reflection, production, staging
and critique of modern time-regimes and the very conceptualisation of time
and temporality.

While the modern sense of critical time first emerged in political,
historical and anthropological discourse, it also transformed the
long-standing discourse about social time (Norbert Elias) and the ethics of
time (Emmanuel Lévinas). In literature it has produced its own genres –
such as the “Zeitromane” and “Zeitgedichte” of the long nineteenth century
– and helped to redefine the epistemology of writing and literary poetics
more widely. It is not coincidental that a recent collection of “Die
allerschnellsten Geschichten der Welt” (the very fastest stories of the
world) is entitled “Moment!”, hence highlighting the moment that oscillates
precariously between the fleeting moment of transience, the living moment
of multiple embeddedness, and the critical imperative to recalibrate our
attention. It is equally intrinsic to modern critical temporalities that
the rethinking of time goes along with the rethinking of space; the
nineteenth-century spatio-temporal revolution embodied by the railways is
only the most obvious instance of this dialectic, which recurrs prominently
in contemporary discourse about the digital revolution and the
paradoxically spatial temporality of the internet.

This symposium will combine theoretical and critical approaches to the
changing face of time and temporality since c. 1800 with case studies on
the engagement with the modern sense of critical time in German literature
and culture from 1800 to the present. Comparative and interdisciplinary
papers are as welcome as those focusing on German sources to explore the
politics of time, the ethics of time, the epistemology of time, the poetics
of time, and related themes.

Please email your proposals (300-500 word outline plus 200 word cv) to
Professor Dirk Göttsche, email: dirk.goettsche@nottingham.ac.uk by 15
March 2014.

Speakers will benefit from funding for travel and accommodation.

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Dreams of Germany:
Music and (Trans)national Imaginaries in the Modern Era
German Historical Institute, London
5.-7. February 2015

Keynote Speakers: Celia Applegate (Vanderbilt); Berthold Hoeckner (Chicago).

Convenors: Andreas Gestrich (GHIL) Neil Gregor (Southampton), Tom Irvine
(Southampton)

A little over a decade ago Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter’s
groundbreaking collection of essays on ‘Music and German National Identity’
sought to map both the historical terrain on which the notion of Germans as
‘the people of music’ was constituted and an intellectual terrain on which
that trope might be fruitfully historicised.   Their emblematic
introduction registered both the constructed nature of the central
proposition – an idea called forth by writers, critics, pedagogues and
philosophers, cemented in literary genres such as journals, catalogues, and
critical editions, institutionalized in university departments,
conservatoires and concert associations, and monumentalized in statues and
commemorative culture – and, at the same time, its longevity, its power,
and its capacity to transcend the specific politics of time and place.
Animated by a critical spirit which drew not least on the then guiding
inspiration of Benedict Anderson, it placed music at the centre of an
ongoing process of imagining national community throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth century.  In doing so, it simultaneously recognised the real
effects this invented tradition had on the wider culture of which it was
part and cautioned against overemphasizing its historical importance in
retrospect.

In the intervening decade, inspired not least by the questions Applegate
and Potter raised, a significant volume of work has been undertaken which
explores further the promise and the limits of thinking about musical
cultures in Germany within that national frame.   Significant new
approaches have emerged within the discipline, which permit the exploration
of those same questions from different perspectives.   Our understanding of
identity politics has moved further beyond the consideration of ideology as
inscribed in literary or material culture, and more in the direction of
exploring the emotional and the visceral qualities of German, as well as
other, subjectivities, and seeks to understand better the imaginaries which
lie anterior to discourse; our habits of thinking ‘nationally’ about the
histories we seek to explore have been challenged by the turn towards
transnational histories; at the same time, a considerable amount of work
has been done on the many regional varieties of national thinking and
feeling,  emphasizing the existence of multiple, sometimes competing but
often co-existing, cultural imaginaries.

In this conference, we seek to revisit the questions asked by Applegate and
Potter, take stock of the scholarly literature as it now stands, and
explore the problem space further in the light of approaches which have
emerged in the meantime.  In taking the modern era, broadly understood, as
the time-frame we not only wish to acknowledge the modern qualities of
national thinking and feeling, but also to explore the ways in which
particularly modern economic, social and political frames – institutional
exchanges, cultural diplomacy, tourism, international study visits,
experiences of exile – have served to co-constitute national imaginaries
from outside, and thus to insert an overtly transnational aspect to the
account.   In working with the rubric of ‘dreams’, meanwhile, we seek to
acknowledge both the visceral qualities of a set of imaginaries that cannot
be reduced to a corresponding set of politics, but work as often as not
independently of them, and also the presence of a recognizably German set
of histories for which the vocabulary of dreams – of fantasies,
projections, recollections, nightmares – provides an equally recognizable
metaphorical language.

We invite papers on all aspects of modern musical culture which would sit
meaningfully inside the rubric ‘Dreams of Germany’, for example:

How does class function in relation to musical Germanness? Is the dream
of a musical Germany a dream of *Bürgerlichkeit*? How do national feeling
and *Bürgerlichkeit *interact with and inform each other? To what extent do
dreams of German music change when conceptions of *Bürgerlichkeit* do (for
instance in 1918, 1933, 1945 and 1968?)

How, similarly, might Germany as a musical construct be inflected
by gender? Where are women in the ‘Land of music’?

To what extent to declarations of musical Germanness exclude or
embrace registers other than ‘art’ or ‘E-Musik’ (operetta, Tanzmusik, jazz
diasporic and otherwise, Rock ‘n Roll and specifically German forms like
the *Neue Deutsche Welle *and Techno/House?)

How did young people (for example the *Jugendmusikbewegung*, the
generation of the ‘Stunde Null’ and the ‘1968ers’) imagine German music?

More broadly: How did the upheavals of 1918, 1933, 1945 and 1968
and their attendant aesthetic echoes (modernism, expressionism,
avant-gardes) inflect ideas of German national identity in music?

How did emigrants and other outsiders from Edward Dannreuther to
Theodor W Adorno to (the Austrian) Falco (‘Rock me Amadeus’) imagine German
music and musical culture?

How did music play into conceptions/dreams of the German colonial
mission How did music, and inscriptions of Germanness in discourses about
music play in specifically German colonial and post-colonial contexts (SW
Africa, China)?

How did the idea of Germany as a musical nation play in
non-colonial contexts such as Britain, Japan, Latin America, the United
States and Israel/Palestine? Did, for instance, musical emigrants in the
early twentieth century United States or dream ‘their’ Germany in music?

To what extent are signal developments in postwar German culture
such as the Darmstadt School and the Historical Performance movement
re-statements and/or challenges to German national feeling in music?

To what extent were cultural politics post-1989 inflected by
ideas of a specifically German national musical identity
(multiculturalism, *Leitkultur* debate etc)

For further details or queries please contact Neil Gregor or Tom
Irvine at dreamsofgermany@gmail.com.

Closing Deadline for Proposals: 30th April 2014.

Present at Conferences in the U.S.

Women in German Poster Session: Open Topic

We invite submissions to the poster session at the 2014 WiG conference in Shawnee on Delaware, PA. The purpose of the poster session is to allow scholars to employ visual forms to initiate conversations about their research, teaching, or academic life. Examples of visual forms include: posters, 3-D art, interactive exhibits, and multimedia presentations. “Posters” from past sessions have addressed a great variety of topics such as teaching, literature, film, cultural studies, history, politics, the balancing of career and family. Presentations have taken the form of PowerPoint presentations, websites, dioramas, installations, games, cardboard posters, etc. We encourage participants to be creative in the construction and presentation at this session. Please be advised that presenters must provide their own materials and equipment, including projectors, computers, headphones, and extension cords. To ensure that your information is available throughout the conference, all presentations MUST be accompanied by a simple explanatory handout.

Many universities support the production of posters as a way of publicizing research. You may want to find out what your institution offers in terms of audiovisual support and travel funds. Get creative – the poster session is a great way to get valuable feedback on your newest, brilliant idea!

Please submit abstracts of 300-400 words describing the project’s content, thesis, and form. This must include a description of the layout, design, material, and technology that will be used. Please send your proposals electronically by March 1, 2014 to the session organizers Nichole Neuman, University of Minnesota, and Nicole Grewling, Washington College, at wigposter2014@gmail.com.

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Feminist Embodiments and Empowerment: Pre-, Pro-, Post-, Anti-, Trans- and Queer — From Bachmann’s Malina to Mutti Merkel

Women in German 2014 Conference (Oct. 23-26, Shawnee on Delaware, PA)

This panel seeks to engage discussions of the many faces of feminism and cognate areas of study, interrogating historical critiques of embodiment and offering new theoretical frameworks for recent and contemporary debates. We invite original papers examining connections among gender and sexual politics; body, voice, performance, and representation; and agency, power, and knowledge in literary and cultural texts. Medium and period are open, and we welcome submissions on male, masculine, queer, and trans embodiments, as well as papers addressing intersectionality with an eye to class, race, ethnicity, faith, ability, age, and technology.

Presentations may take feminist approaches to bodies and power, including the following:

• feminist integrations and performances of empowerment (such as pole dancing)
• feminist icons past and present, and their legacies (such as Alice Schwarzer)
• the self-fashioning of contemporary political and cultural figures (such as Angela Merkel and Lady Bitch Ray)
• representations and performances of (dis)empowerment through masculinity, cross-dressing, and passing (such as Marlene Dietrich, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina)
• performance studies and the genderqueer body (such as Bridge Markland’s cabaret and renditions of German classics like Faust in the Box)
• feminism and race; Turkish-German feminism; Afro-German feminism; feminist interrogations of whiteness
• sexual agency and aging; prostitution; youth sexuality
• postfeminist movements; debates about mothering and careers
• the body in Islamic feminism and anti-Muslim feminism
• the commodification of the body in neoliberal society
• technology, cyborgs, and electronics
• transnational feminisms, social transformation, and global change
• intersections of feminist studies with digital humanities

Especially welcome are proposals for presentations that are innovative, creative, interactive, polemical, or nontraditional, and that invite us to think outside of the familiar and customary frames of feminism.

Please send inquiries and proposals of 200-300 words to both organizers by February 20, 2014: Erika Berroth (berrothe@southwestern.edu) and Faye Stewart (fayestewart@gsu.edu)

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25th Annual Graduate Student Conference in German Studies at Yale University

Conditions of Precarity: Life, Work, Literature

April 11-12, 2014
Yale University

Keynote Speaker: John Hamilton (Harvard University)

In the last decade, “precarity” has been invoked to describe working conditions and social life under late capitalism. Thinkers such as Paulo Virno and Franco Berardi have noted that privatization, neoliberal deregulation, and debt culture have given employers unprecedented bargaining power, and a collection of disconnected groups–migrant workers, unskilled laborers, part-timers, and independent contractors–have been made to exist under vulnerable conditions of contingent employment: McJobs, adjunct positions, and temporary contracts. Plato’s call in the Republic for “one citizen, one job” has reached a new level of absurdity as capital continues to produce an adaptable “reserve army of labor” willing to be yoked under any number of insecure positions emerging in the crevices of a sterile labor market. At the same time, the expansion of powers and resources devoted to the institutional practices of security and surveillance have only intensified the experience of human life as intermittent, tenuous, and unpredictable. What is truly new about precarity, and how is this felt as an absence of the continuation of other forms of life? What happens when a permanent underclass of precarious workers becomes a necessary condition of the reproduction of capital in its current form?

Our conference does not seek merely to apply to these conditions a ready-made concept of precarity, but first to concretely describe and reflect theoretically on its effects. We propose to do so within the sphere of the humanities, where the possibilities for thinking through precarity are promising: beyond the empirical analysis of the social sciences, inquiry in the humanities opens up the space to describe current phenomena of precarity, situate what is new in the context of a long tradition of human experience and critically engage with this tradition. The humanities reflect on what makes thinking precarity possible, on the conditions under which knowledge in general is produced, and on the potential tensions and contradictions implied in such a project: does the concept of precarity allow for representation without mere aestheticization, that is to say, a naive or reactionary romanticization?

A wealth of literary material can be brought to bear on the contemporary experience of precarity: from the vicissitudes of Job to the abandonment of humanity by the gods in Epicurus; from the “wound” of human nature Aristophanes speaks of in the Symposium to the chaotic “natural” insecurity of Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes; from Arnold Gehlen’s description of the human as a creature of lack (Mangelwesen) and the “thrown-ness” (Geworfenheit) of Dasein in Heidegger to Agamben’s Homo sacer; from the vicissitudes of bureaucratic unknowability explored by Kafka to precarious forms of contemporary art practice (Thomas Hirshhorn, Nicolas Bourriaud); and from the observations of precarious urban life in Baudelaire and Rilke to the more provincial exploitation of figures in Robert Walser. Finally, the humanities–in what the Modern Language Association has recently called “Vulnerable Times”– have experienced a thoroughgoing reduction of financial resources in the academy, in contemporary poetry, and in the production of art. The humanities, as this conference hopes to demonstrate, can draw on its deep reserves in the project of reflecting on the conditions of precarity.

Since precarity is experienced in an untold number of forms, we invite contributions from the broad range of disciplines that can speak to our topic. Proposals of up to 300 words for a 20-minute presentation should be sent by January 31st, 2014 to Josh Alvizu, Jason Kavett, and Andrew Kirwin at conditionsofprecarity@gmail.com.

For more information, including resources to contemporary work on precarity, please visit the conference website:  http://conditionsofprecarity.wordpress.com/

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20th Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar
Nineteenth-Century German History
Washington, May 7-10, 2014

The German Historical Institute Washington and the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University are pleased to announce the 20th Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar in German History. Organized by Anna von der Goltz (Georgetown University) and Richard F. Wetzell (GHI Washington), the 2014 seminar will be devoted to the nineteenth century and take place at the GHI Washington on May 7-10, 2014.

The seminar brings together junior scholars from Europe and North America who are nearing completion of their doctoral dissertations.We plan to invite up to eight doctoral students from each side of the Atlantic to discuss their dissertation projects.The organizers welcome proposals on any aspect of nineteenth-century German history. Doctoral students working in related disciplines — such as art history, legal history or the history of science — are also encouraged to apply, as are students working on comparative projects or on the history of Austria or German-speaking Switzerland. The discussions will be based on papers (in German or English) submitted six weeks in advance. The seminar will be conducted bilingually, in German and English. The organizers will cover travel and lodging expenses.

We are now accepting applications from doctoral students whose dissertations are at an advanced stage (that is, in the write-up rather than research stage) but who will be granted their degrees after June 2014.

Applications should include:

• brief cover letter,
• dissertation project description (including title, chapter structure, and current stage of completion; max. 1000 words)
• one-page outline of the dissertation,
• curriculum vitae
• letter of reference from the major dissertation advisor (commenting on progress toward completion and foreign language skills)

German-speaking applicants should submit their materials in German; English-speaking applicants in English. The first four documents should be combined in a single PDF file and emailed to Ms. Susanne Fabricius at fabricius@ghi-dc.org by February 1, 2014. Letters of reference should be emailed (preferably in PDF format) directly by the advisor by the same date. Questions may be directed to Richard Wetzell at wetzell@ghi-dc.org.  For further information on the GHI please go to: www.ghi-dc.org

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SEMINARS @ THE 2014 GSA CONFERENCE

“German-Jewish Literature after 1945: Working Through and Beyond the Holocaust”

Conveners: Helen Finch (University of Leeds), Katja Garloff (Reed College), Erin McGlothlin (Washington University in St. Louis) and Agnes Mueller (University of South Carolina)

Scholars interested in participating are invited to apply by January 30th through the German Studies Association website: https://www.thegsa.org/conference/documents/GSA_Seminars_2014.pdf

Seminar size: 12-15 participants

This seminar examines the creation of a ‘new’ German-Jewish literature in the wake of 1945. Its aims are twofold: to create a robust and close network of scholars working on related aspects of German-Jewish literature, and to create a volume examining the central questions to be discussed at the seminar in 2014. It is particularly concerned with the following intersecting set of questions:

German-Jewish literature?

• How can we re-interrogate the terms ‘Jewish’ and ‘German’, particularly as these identities reconstituted themselves in the wake of 1945?

German-Jewish literature working through the Holocaust:

• What relation did German-Jewish literature post-1945 bear to the tradition of German-Jewish literature that existed prior to the Holocaust?
• How did German-Jewish literature by exiles relate to literature written by remigrants
• How does German-Jewish Holocaust literature relate to transnational questions about Holocaust literature, especially since this literature is by definition transnational? Here, we think for example, of Jean Améry’s correspondence with Primo Levi, or the ways in which Edgar Hilsenrath was received outside the German-speaking world.

German-Jewish literature beyond the Holocaust:

• To what extent did the caesura of 1989 create a renewed impetus in German-Jewish literature?
• Can we speak of generational discourses within German-Jewish literature? How has literature by Jewish immigrants to Germany after 1989 (such as Maxim Biller, Julya Rabinovitch) reconfigured the German-Jewish literary landscape in particular its relationship to the Holocaust and to the German past?
• To what extent can we now speak of a transnational, hybrid or cosmopolitan German-Jewish literature?

German-Jewish literature in canon

• To what extent has the Holocaust influenced the creation of a new “canon” of German-Jewish literature after 1945? What topics and authors became “canonized,” and which fell out of favor? What methodological tools, such as Bourdieusian “field” theory or the analyses of the German canon initiated by Saul and Schmidt (2007), can help us to interrogate the formation of such a canon and how its status might have shifted in the period 1945-present?
• How does German-Jewish literature relate to Jewish literatures outside Germany and in other languages? Does literature written in the German language have an uncomfortable relationship to post-war Jewish literatures?
• How does German-Jewish literature interact with the wider canon of post-

1945 German-language literature?

• How has German-Jewish literature travelled, transferred or been re-mediated in the digital age?

The seminar will meet three times over the three days of the conference. Participants will be asked to read pre-circulated position papers of ca. 1000 words each, sent by each of the participants one month in advance of the conference.

• Suggested readings will be distributed to all participants in early February.
• Participants will be asked to submit their position papers by July 1, 2014, giving the convenors time to read and comment on these initially.
• Position papers will be distributed to all participants by August 1, 2014, along with a proposal for a volume based on the submissions.

The first seminar will be dedicated to a discussion of the readings and the key questions arising from the topic. The subsequent two sessions will be dedicated to reading and discussion of the position papers. The final session will also discuss the volume to emerge from the seminar, including prospective publishers.

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Black German Studies: Then and Now

The deadline for applications is January 30, 2014. For directions on
enrolling in this seminar, please visit the GSA webpage and the following
link: <https://www.thegsa.org/conference/current.html>.

Black German Studies (BGS) has experienced significant growth over the past three decades outside of and within the academy, integrating disciplines such as Gender Studies, Diaspora Studies, History, Media, and Performance Studies. The past decade saw an increase in the volume and visibility of Black German cultural productions. The launching of Black British author Sharon Otoo’s English-language *Witnessed Series *(2012), as a space for Black German cultural expression, has expanded the transnational dialogue first initiated with the translation of the volume *Farbe bekennen *(1986)
in 1992. These developments continue, especially with the Ballhaus Naunynstraße’s staging of a month-long celebration in September 2013 entitled, *Black Lux: Ein Heimatfest aus Schwarzen Perspektiven, *which showcased Black German aesthetic productions across multiple genres in Berlin.

*The Black Book: Deutschlands Häutungen*, *Not So Plain as Black and White*, and *Mythen Masken und Subjekte*, as well as historical analyses of race relations and racial discourse outlined by Katharina Oguntoye, Fatima El-Tayeb, Tina Campt, and Maria Höhn represent the significant academic output and impact that BGS has had in the past decades. These works along with those of Leslie Adelson, Rita Chin, and Andreas Huyssen have interrogated the categories of race, gender, diaspora, and nation within the German multicultural context. As a result, this seminar asks where the field is now? This seminar explores the nuances of how the colonial, Weimar, National Socialist, post-1945, and post-*Wende *pasts inform the present and the future of BGS; how present generations of Black Germans look to those of the past for direction; how discourses shift due to diverse power structures; and how Black Germans affirm their agency and
cultural identity through cultural productions, engendering counter-discourses and counter-narratives. In appraising BGS as a critical, hermeneutic field of inquiry, participants will complicate narratives, interrogate interdisciplinary methods, and introduce theoretical approaches to advance the field. The seminar is organized around three themes: Practices, Productions, and Progressions.

Practices:
Afro-German poet May Ayim’s inclusion of Ghanaian Adinkra symbols into her collections offers one example of integrated practices used to express the “textured identities” (Campt) of Black Germans in their cultural (con)texts. Exploring Black German intellectual, cultural, and artistic practices this session questions: What other African diasporic practices have been and are being utilized and transformed by current generations of
Black Germans? What German cultural elements have Black Germans re-imagined or repurposed through their works? What transnational trends and technologies have been employed?

Productions
The cultural productions of People of Color (particularly, Women of Color) embody the idea of the “Fugitive Archetype of Resistance” (Ajalon), by escaping classification and rendering categorization obsolete via elision of ‘clearly’ delineated boundaries. Examining the range of genres through which Black German subjectivity is polyphonically (Bhaktin) performed, this session investigates how norms are made visible; generic conventions are
combined, mixed, and adapted; and new spaces are created and imagined for individual and collective expression vis-à-vis contemporary Black German productions, evinced, for example, in the performances of the Berlin-based theater troupe, *Label Noir*.

Progressions
This final session explores how Black German identity, activism, and politics coincide with current developments in the socio-political landscape of contemporary Germany. From the *Kinderbuch- *and *Blackfacingdebatten *to the court cases abolishing the legality of racial
profiling and Karamba Diaby’s delegation as the first Black German parliament member in 2013, this session interrogates how positive change has been enacted and what (f)actors, including Merkel’s comment on the failures of multiculturalism, Thilo Sarrazin’s publication, and the integration debate, have worked to inhibit the improvement of race relations and social equality in the German nation.

Feel free to contact the conveners with any questions:

Tiffany Florvil (tflorvil@unm.edu)
Vanessa Plumly (plumlyvd@uc.edu)

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Rethinking Migration and German Culture

A quick survey of the 2013 German Studies Association’s annual conference program shows a decline in the number of sessions devoted to migrant literature and film. There was a three-part series devoted to Transnational Hi/Stories, a panel on Navid Kermani, sessions on trans-cultural narratives and transnational drama, but nothing on major authors or filmmakers. It might simply be that Akin, Özdamar, and Zaimoglu have not produced anything recently, that Özdogan is not quite up to serious scholarly attention, and that Thilo Sarrazin is no longer making headlines; but it is likely that the topic will rise again, once the next set of novels and films, perhaps produced by a new, as of yet unfamiliar set of creative artists, appears in cinemas and bookstores. Turkish German writers and filmmakers may no longer dominate, but migrants will probably remain a central force in contemporary German culture. It is, however, just as possible that Zaimoglu was correct in his 2006 assessment: “Migrationsliteratur ist ein toter Kadaver.” If so, we need to reassess interpretative works by Adelson, Cheesman, Fachinger, Mani, Seyhan, and others, because they describe a passing fashion rather than a “Turkish turn in contemporary German literature” (Adelson). A third option, which serves as the organizing principle behind this seminar, would be to use the tension between these two views as the starting point for a broader rethinking of migration in German culture.
With very few exceptions, the scholarly discourse surrounding migrants as a cultural force assumes that migration to Germany began in 1955, when the Federal Republic started recruiting “Gastarbeiter.” While it is certainly true, as the previous paragraph suggests, that this paradigm helped scholars deal with literary and filmic texts that broke through the canonic structures of previous literary history, the object of inquiry has always been oddly narrow. Migrant literature began to gain legitimacy within Germany in 1985, when the Chamisso-Preis was first awarded for “important contributions to German literature” by “nonnative German authors” (Weinrich). Not only does that definition cry out for unpacking, but the prize’s namesake was also an early nineteenth-century refugee from the French Revolution who was able to enter the canon of German literature with a work about migration, Schlemihl. In other words, migration, including culturally significant migration, has a much longer history. It was well underway by the eighteenth century, when it coincided and conflicted with early theories of ethnic and linguistic nationalism, which meant that Jews, starting with Moses Mendelssohn, were treated as migrants. Huguenots extend the timeframe into the seventeenth century.  In the twentieth century a re-imagined category might include the Vertriebene (Grass, Lenz, Wolf, Hein) and citizens of the GDR, groups whose writers and filmmakers often explored the same questions of status within the hegemonic culture as their post-1955 compatriots. Using integration and identity to describe these efforts binds us to contested terms, so rethinking would have to explore categories such as post-migrant, global, and trans-national. The time seems ripe and a GSA seminar the perfect venue for such a reexamination.

Seminar Structure: This seminar proposes a restructuring of the way scholars conceive of and deal with the issue of migration in German culture. Participants might find these ideas stimulating or crazily unproductive, but it would be useful for them to respond to the provocation that we are presenting in writing so that the seminar can start from a set of shared positions, questions, and ideas that need clarification. The conveners propose starting that conversation by asking participants to respond to essays that they have been working on, in part as presentations at previous GSA conventions: Brent Peterson, “Adelbert von Chamisso’s Schlemihl, the Chamisso Prize, and the Status of Migrant Literature in Germany” and Robert R. Shandley, Sigfried Lenz’s Heimatmuseum as Migrant Literature.” We would circulate our essays by late spring, and ask for responses by September 1, in order to give everyone a chance to read the entire set of essays before the seminar begins. Five- to seven-page papers would give participants enough space to stake out their own positions, which would not necessarily involve any research on their part, although it would be welcome

In addition, we would ask participants to read Zaimoglu’s very short essay, “Migrantenliteratur ist ein toter Kadaver” and Olga Grjasnowa’s 2012 novel, Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt, because it raises the issues of language and belonging in a manner that might be unfamiliar to people who specialize in Turkish German texts. The novel’s heroine is a Jewish refugee from Azerbaijan who came to Germany with her family and acquired German citizenship, but ends up in Israel. A talented linguist—she speaks Russian, German, Turkish, French, and Arabic, but not Hebrew—she, like the cast of characters in Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite (2006), is at home everywhere and nowhere. These two works provide the starting point for a discussion of what the future of migrant literary and cinema studies might look like once we have expanded its past. The arc of our deliberations over the seminar’s three meetings would take us from the eighteenth century to the present.

We would be happy to respond to any inquires.

Brent O. Peterson, Ph.D.
brent.peterson@lawrence.edu

Dr. Robert R. Shandley
r-shandley@tamu.edu

GSA 2014 Panel Proposals

Below are calls for proposals for the 2014 German Studies Conference (Kansas City). Please note two important GSA rules: All panel participants including the commentator and moderator must be registered GSA members by February 17, 2014. No individual at the GSA Conference may give more than one paper/participate in a seminar or participate in more than two separate capacities.

German Wood: Material & Metaphor from Forest to Fireside and Beyond

“The German Forest has moved into the German living room,” wrote liberal politician Friedrich Naumann in response to a 1906 exhibition of modern wooden furniture designed by the progressive Munich architect Richard Riemerschmid and fabricated with the help of machines.   What might sound at first like a humorous (or even ironic) comment on the overabundance of natural wood visible in Riemerschmid’s modern “machine furniture,” was actually freighted with economic, social, and cultural weight.  For the material product of the “German Forest” – wood – was not only an important resource and major export of the lately established German nation, it had also constituted the utilitarian backbone of German domestic life for centuries; and its cultural resonance was rooted in the legendary Battle of the Teutoborg Forest, when Germanic tribes, emerging from the trees (as the
story goes), had vanquished the Roman legions of Ceasar Augustus.  But like the account of the Teuton victory – part history, part myth – the notion of a “German Forest,” as historian Jeffrey K. Wilson has recently shown, was a cultural construct: an abstract (though powerful) idea – not a concrete thing.  The German lands enclosed a variety of wooded territories, each distinct in its topography and biology.  But there was, in actuality, no single “German Forest”; the concept had been cobbled together – like the German nation itself – from various regional examples and traditions to form an ideal or *myth* of unity, ripe for public figures (like Naumann) to exploit.

This interdisciplinary, diachronic panel will probe the paradox of abstract and concrete embodied by the entry of the “German Forest” into the “German living room.”  Its aim is to reveal and untangle the interlaced complexities inherent in wood as indigenous material, utilitarian product, and cultural symbol.  Proposals are welcome that consider the significance of “German wood” from any period and in any manifestation, in its dual role
as object and concept.  Topics might examine the role that German wood has played in confrontations between: past and future; the domestic and the wild; authenticity and artificiality; the living and the inert or “wooden”; naturalism and folklore; history and myth; the utilitarian and the symbolic; the prosaic and the poetic; the everyday and the marvelous; the vernacular and the cosmopolitan; science and spirituality.
Historiographical and theoretical investigations, as well as specific case studies, will be considered.  Proposals are encouraged that move beyond the reductive nationalist rhetoric of “the German Forest” to problematize images of Germans and their trees from the Teutons to today.

Please email a C.V. and proposal of no more than 400 words by Friday, February 7, 2014 to:

Freyja Hartzell (Post-Doctoral Fellow in Material and Visual Culture, Parsons The New School for Design) at hartzelf@newschool.edu

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War & Violence

The War and Violence Network of the German Studies Association (GSA) invites paper proposals for the upcoming 2014 GSA meeting in Kansas City (Sept. 18-21). This GSA interdisciplinary network seeks to bring together scholars concerned with any aspect of the field of war and violence studies. The network focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to a range of topics under a broad methodological umbrella, including comparative history, entangled history, and cultural transfer history [Vergleichs-, Verflechtungs-, Transfergeschichte], as well as approaches from literary and cultural studies areas such as narrative-theoretical approaches, trauma theory, psychoanalysis, and media studies.

The network will sponsor a series of panels for the 2014 GSA meeting:

“War and Violence: Concepts, Approaches, and Examples of an
Interdisciplinary Field”

This panel series seeks to discuss fundamental theoretical and methodological questions that arise in the field of war & violence, as well as the interdisciplinary nature of the field. The goal is to find commonalities but also reflect upon the differences that arise for
interdisciplinary research in German Studies on “war & violence”, bringing together interdisciplinary research inspired by history, political studies, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, film studies, museum studies, and other disciplines and sub-disciplines. We invite proposals that emphasize theoretical and methodological questions, as well as concrete case studies from the middle ages to the present from which reflections on concepts and approaches in the interdisciplinary field of “war and violence” can be deducted. Violence can be read as military violence in the widest sense, i.e. it includes analyses that relate violence in society to war, or violence to civilians triggered by military conditions. All approaches should relate to war & violence, not simply to one side of the conceptual pairing.

Please send abstracts, a brief c.v., and a specific request of AV needs, if
applicable, before January 26 to all three network coordinators:

•  Jörg Echternkamp (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) at joerg.echternkamp@geschichte.uni-halle.de
• Stephan Jaeger (University of Manitoba) at stephan.jaeger@umanitoba.ca
• Susanne Vees-Gulani (Case Western Reserve University) at shv2@case.edu

Successful applicants will be informed by February 7, 2014. This allows unsuccessful applicants to submit their proposals directly to the GSA by February 17, 2014.

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DEFA and America. Screening the Cold War in East and West

We invite abstracts (200-300 words) of papers for a series of panels exploring the multiple relationships between film-making in the former GDR and the USA during the Cold War (and its aftermath). While many studies of DEFA to date have focused on East German Cinema as a primarily national phenomenon, the aim of these panels is to situate East German film production within a broader transnational context, and to consider DEFA’s
changing role in the culture of the Cold War not only in terms of European art-house cinema, but also in the light of developments in popular and genre cinema in the USA (including Hollywood).

We welcome proposals for papers that analyze some of the many different ways in which the USA and its role in the Cold War are mediated in East German cinema (in both documentary and feature films). We are particularly interested in submissions that seek to widen current critical debates by considering the impact of contrasting models of industrial film production in East and West, and which address such issues as technology, distribution, marketing, import/export, mise-en-scene, music, color, and the management of the star system to name but some. In what ways did DEFA seek to respond to developments in film production in the USA (including both popular and genre cinema)? In this context we also welcome proposals for papers that explore the impact of television on the representation of the USA in East German film-making. Finally we are keen to solicit proposals that consider what might loosely be described as the ‘American discovery of Eastern Europe’, and that explore the ways in which filmmakers and actors from the USA working within both popular and art-house cinema have engaged with the GDR and its role during the Cold War.

Our intention is to publish a selection of these papers (in English) in an edited volume for which final versions would be required by 1 May 2015

Please send abstracts, plus a brief cv (in the form of a paragraph), and a specific request of AV needs, if applicable, before January 24 to both:

• Carol Anne Costabile Heming (University of North Texas) at Carolanne.Costabile-heming@unt.edu
• Seán Allan (University of Warwick, UK) at s.d.allan@warwick.ac.uk

Successful applicants will be informed by February 7, 2014.

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Panels on “Asian-German Studies”

At GSA annual meetings over the last few years, “Asian-German Studies” panels have produced lively discussions on various topics that have connected the German-speaking world with Asia. These panels have provided an important forum for comparing such phenomena as political issues, works of literature and art, and the theories and practices of transnational history. We would like to continue such efforts to comprehend relations between German Central Europe and Asia through a series of panels at the 2014 GSA conference.

Scholars interested in “Asian-German Studies” are invited to submit proposals for panels or individual papers dealing with any aspect of Asian-German Studies, but we invite everyone to consider the list below as a possible way to start the creative flow. Proposals from all disciplines are welcome.

Representative topics for Asian-German Studies include but are not
limited to such ideas as the following:

• German notions of “Asia” (From Istanbul to Beijing/Tokyo? Southeast Asia? India? Pacific Islands? Oceania? East of Germany?)
• Genderizing Europe and Asia (Notions of Masculinity/Femininity, Gender relations/roles)
• German depictions of  “Asians”/Depictions of “Germans” in Asia
• German-Asian relations (alliances, business, colonialism)
• Cross-cultural influence (literature, film, translation, philosophy, art)
• Asians in Europe/speakers of German in Asia (immigration, Chinatown)
• Comparative Germanistik (the discipline as practiced variously in German-speaking world and Asia?)
• Asian Studies in the German-speaking world (Sinology, Japanology, Indology)

Please send proposals (200-300 words) and a brief CV via email to all three by January 20, 2014:

• Joanne Miyang Cho, choj@wpunj.edu,
• Douglas McGetchin, dmcgetch@fau.edu
• Lee M. Roberts, robertlm@ipfw.edu

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 “Revolutionizing German-language Crime Fiction”

George Bernard Shaw famously remarked that there are two things that Germans have no talent for: revolution and crime novels. More than 100 years later, this dismissive view of German crime writing doesn’t seem to have evolved in Anglo-Saxon thinking. In a December 2012 episode of PRI’s “The World,” Lisa Mullins questioned experts about the lack of popularity of German thrillers in the US, and received the answer that they are “Too
local, too regional, too German.” The dynamic crime landscape in contemporary German-language literature and film challenges such continuing misperceptions with an ever-expanding range of adaptations and applications of the crime schema that engages readers and critics alike. This panel will explore innovative techniques, perspectives and themes in contemporary German-language crime fiction. Individual paper abstracts are invited for one or possibly two panels on any related topic which might include, but is
not limited to, the following areas:

• subgenres or hybrid genres, such as the Frauenkrimi, Regiokrimi, Häkelkrimi, noir, thriller, or historical crime novel
• innovative representations of subjects such as detectives, victims, police, side-kicks
• new reader/spectator roles
• diaspora in German-language crime fiction
• representing criminalized femininity/masculinity
• intersections of criminal, political, social and literary discourses
• crime fiction and cultural/national identities
• transnational, translocal and transcultural crime narratives
• crime fiction as a cultural export
• crime fiction as cultural criticism
• borrowings, adaptations and transformations
• postmodern crime fiction
• representations of crime in TV and Film
• crime and media
• representations of true crime
• crime fiction reinforcing a lack of order and resolution
• crime and (social / political) revolution

Please send inquiries and proposals by January 20, 2014 to:

Anita McChesney: anita.mcchesney@ttu.edu

and Joseph W. Moser: josephwmoser@gmail.com