Past Event Category: German Events
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Nov 20Virtual Lecture: The German Audience for the U.S. Declaration of Independence
Emily Sneff
Free and open to the public, but registration is required. Click here to register for a Zoom link. July 4, 2026, will mark the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. Almost immediately after being adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, the document was translated into German. Join Dr. …
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Nov 4Ofer Ashkenazi, Rebekka Grossmann, Sarah Wobick-Segev, and Shira Miron, “Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany”
Virtual Event
Still Lives is a systematic study of the ways Jews used photographs to document their experiences in the face of National Socialism. In a time of intensifying anti-Jewish rhetoric and policies, German Jews documented their lives and their environment in tens of thousands of photographs. German Jews of considerably diverse backgrounds took and preserved these photographs: professional and amateurs, of different ages, gender, and classes.
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Oct 27Alice Lovejoy, “Chemistry, Autarky, and Empire: Manufacturing Film in Fascist Germany”
Memorial Library Rm 126
We often think of cinema’s politics as matters of subject and style, distribution and reception. This talk, however, locates them in film’s raw materials—in substances like silver, gelatin, and cotton, on which cinema’s play of light and shadow depends. It does so through the case of Nazi Germany, examining the Agfa film company’s embrace of the fascist politics of autarky (material and economic self-sufficiency).
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Oct 24Qinna Shen, “Visualizing German and European Politics through Jiny Lan’s Message Painting”
206 Ingraham
Qinna Shen will present a lecture based on her forthcoming book, “Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion: Chinese-German Culture and Politics through a Feminist Lens.”
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Oct 6A German Music Student in Madison, 1966-67: The Letters of Michael Kopfermann
5520 Humanities
The German composer and musicologist Michael Kopfermann (1936-2010) spent his student years on a scholarship that brought him to Madison in 1966-67 to study with Pro Arte violinist and School of Music faculty member Rudolf Kolisch. Musicologists Dörte Schmidt (Berlin) and Reinhard Kapp (Vienna) have uncovered a large cache of Kopfermann’s letters to his family, in which he offers a rare and detailed account of the cultural and intellectual life in Madison in the 1960s and the vibrancy of the community of German émigrés who made Madison their home after World War II.