Ulrike Draesner and Michael Eskin: “Speaking of Germany and the World Today: A Discussion”

Co-sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies and the Department of European Studies.

In this conversation, Ulrike Draesner and Michael Eskin think through what it means to be German – or to be living in Germany – today. They open up a personal space for reflection, invite us to question the images we have of ourselves and ‘others’, and shift our perception. Analytical and poetic, wistful and humorous, this dialogue tells the story of identity and change, migration and multilingualism, “Bio-Germans,” and Germans with a Nazi background. Attentiveness, responsibility, vulnerability, and human empathy hang in the balance.

Michael Eskin is an author, critic, translator, philosopher, publisher and co-founder of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., in New York City. He has taught at Rutgers, Cambridge and Columbia Universities. His books include: Nabokovs Version von Puskins “Evgenij Onegin”: eine übersetzungs- und fiktionstheoretische Untersuchung (1994); Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan (2000); Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky (2008); 17 Vorurteile, die wir Deutschen gegen Amerika und die Amerikaner haben und die so nicht ganz stimmen können (2008; under the pseudonym Misha Waiman); The DNA of Prejudice: On the One and the Many (2010; Winner of the Next Generation Book Award for Social Change); The Wisdom of Parenthood (2013); Yoga for the Mind: An New Ethic for Thinking & Being (2013; with Kathrin Stengel, Winner of the Living Now Book Award); “Schwerer werden. Leichter sein” – Gespräche um Paul Celan. Mit Durs Grünbein, Gerhard Falkner, Aris Fioretos und Ulrike Draesner (2020); Descartes der Metapher: Neun Tauchgänge ins Dichterdasein Durs Grünbeins (2022); On Writing Philosophy: A Manifesto (2022); Gespräch über Deutschland (2024; with Ulrike Draesner); Childhood: An Essay on the Human Condition (2024); The Emprise of Poetry: Durs Grünbein, America, Antisemitism, and the Pursuit of Liberty (2024 forthcoming) His essays, reviews and translations have appeared in TLS, World Literature Today and The New Yorker. Michael Eskin lectures regularly on cultural, philosophical and literary subjects across the US and Europe.

Ulrike Draesner born in 1962 in Munich, is a poet, a writer of long and short fiction and cultural essays. She has published six major poetry collections, eight novels, two of which were nominated for the German Book Prize, three collections of stories, and various collections of essays. Draesner has received numerous literary prizes, most recently the Gertrud-Kolmar-Prize for Poetry (2019), the Prize of Literatour Nord (fiction, 2020), the Bavarian Book Prize (2020), the German Prize for Nature Writing (2020), the Großen Preis des Literaturfonds (2021), the Spycher-Preis Leuk of Switzerland (2023) and the Literaturpreis Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation 2024. She has been awarded poetic readerships at German and international Universities. Draesner lived at Oxford as poet in residence in 2015-2017; in 2018 she was appointed Professor for Creative Writing at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut Leipzig, and the taught German Literature and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College/US in 2022. She is a member of the P.E.N. Germany, the Berlin Academy of Arts and the German Academy of Language and Poetry.