NC German Studies Seminar & Workshop Series

When Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek’s play Die Schutzbefohlenen premiered in 2014 in Mannheim, Germany, it prompted debate about the representation of refugees in European theater. Jelinek’s text, loosely based on Aeschylus’ The Suppliants, features an undefined “we” telling of flight across the sea, and … Read more

The presentation examines the widespread antagonism and hostility that victims of flight and expulsion faced upon their arrival in Germany between 1945 and 1949 and expellee responses. A condensed version of chapter three of his dissertation, Peter argues that in … Read more

The presentation will discuss the contribution of German communists to the revolution against slavery and the defeat of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. While the Lincoln administration and top Union generals developed a military strategy to restore the … Read more

Claire Greenstein is a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. She received her PhD in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in July 2018. Her dissertation focuses on … Read more

Ofer Ashkenazi is the Director of the Richard Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at Hebrew University. He is also a Senior Lecturer in the History Department and the School of Arts at the Hebrew University. He received his PhD in … Read more

Jakob Norberg is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at Duke University. This event is part of the North Carolina German Studies Workshop and Seminar Series.

The author of over 200 plays, August von Kotzebue (1761-1819) was one of the most prolific and successful writers of his day. Yet Kotzebue’s career was shadowed by controversy and bitter disputes, which culminated in his assassination by the student … Read more

During the Cold War, a competition emerged between East and West Germany over their political legitimacy based upon their mutual goals of leaving the Nazi past behind and offering a more promising, yet distinct, model for the future. As time … Read more

This presentation explores the rise in popularity of African American classical musicians in interwar Germany and Austria. Singing Lieder by Schubert, Brahms, and others, they challenged audiences’ expectations of what a black performer looked and sounded like in the transatlantic … Read more

The literary figure of the criminal child in German realism is framed not as a problem of rising industrialization and urbanization but rather as a problem of the emerging bourgeois family. Theodor Fontane’s Grete Milde (1879) and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s … Read more