Events

Timothy Snyder, the Housum Professor of History at Yale University, will be visiting the University of Waterloo to give the 2017 Grimm Lecture at the Waterloo Centre for German Studies. Snyder is best known for his 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, and his recent Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. 

For more information on the lecture, go to the WCGS website.

WCGS and GSS invite one and all to browse the halls of the Modern Languages building for an exclusive look at a poster exhibition of Reinhard Kleist's graphic novel Berliner Mythen.

Martin Dean’s novel Meine Väter (“My Fathers,” 2003) follows Robert, a Swiss man of Indo-Trinidadian origin, whose daughter’s birth triggers an existential crisis over his uncertain identity. Raised by his Swiss mother and Indo-Trinidadian stepfather, Robert seeks answers from his biological father, Ray. Yet when he finally finds Ray in London, living in a nursing home and mute following a racist attack, Robert’s search becomes an exploration of absence rather than revelation. Robert and his father’s subsequent journey to Trinidad unfolds as a quest for truth that remains unresolved, fragmented across conflicting accounts from relatives, friends, and cultural artefacts. I argue that Dean’s novel employs psychoanalytic and postcolonial frameworks, in particularly trauma, hybridity, dislocation, and Homi Bhabha’s “third space,” to stage the impossibility of recovery and self-coherence. Ray’s muteness functions as both the bodily trace of colonial violence and an aesthetic “void,” positioning Meine Väter as a compelling example of Swiss postcolonial literature.

I bring discussions of lyric poetry and its affordances together with thinking about race and identity, specifically through postcolonial theory and poetics. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s conception of “Relation” as multidirectional and dynamic interconnection, I trace paths from Rainer Maria Rilke in Paris to Algeria, Sudan, and the Caribbean. In doing so, I aim to re-think the canon and the margins of German poetry as porous and open to contestation. This means both expanding definitions of “Germanness” and setting Germanophone and other language texts into relation, tracking routes of mutual strangeness and influence.

From Vienna to Hollywood: Independent Films, Exile, and the Shaping of Hollywood Genre

When the Nazis rose to power in Germany in 1933, they instituted laws that systematically excluded Jewish Germans from cultural and social life and thus marked the start of a wave of forced immigration. Many filmmakers, writers, and actors forced into exile initially went to Austria, where they were able to produce independent films until the Anschluss of 1938. This talk focuses on director Henry Koster, who began his career in Berlin, made several independent films while in exile in Austria, and finally reached Hollywood, where he was one of a fairly small number of exile directors to build a truly successful career. By tracing continuities across his work, I will consider how Koster’s Austrian independent films, which were marked indelibly by the experience of exile, shaped his later work and contributed to the development of Hollywood genres.