(X-post H-German)
250 Years after Goethe's Birth
50 Years after the Founding of the Federal Republic of Germany
10 Years after Reunification
A conference at the University of Chicago
The University of Chicago invites you to a discussion of political culture in today's Germany. Two hundred fifty years after Goethe's birth, fifty years after the founding of the Federal Republic, and ten years after German reunification, we now stand at a point where the success of the German Federal Republic as a democratic state is unquestioned. Yet fundamental issues regarding the role of a reunified Germany in a newly united Europe remain unresolved and give us reason to reflect carefully as we approach the millennium. We will be looking at the relationship between current German political culture and the cultural ideals of a new Europe. And we wish to do so specifically in the light of the lessons learned from German unification and European union.
Keynote speaker RICHARD VON WEIZSAECKER, former President of the Federal Republic of Germany, will provide a framework for analyzing German self-awareness in the age of a unifying Europe. A day-long series of presentations will follow, in which distinguished speakers from Germany and the United States will focus on individual cultural visions in German society and offer insights on how these visions connect and/or separate Germany from the European community both now and in the future.
Speakers will include: HENRYK BRODER, MICHAEL ENGELHARD, TOM FREUDENHEIM, SANDER GILMAN, ANDREAS GLAESER, BARBARA JOHN, DAVID LEVIN, DANIEL LIBESKIND, DAGMAR LORENZ, HELMUT MUELLER-SIEVERS, SASKIA SASSEN, PETER SCHNEIDER, HOWARD SULKIN, and MONIKA TREUT.
The last time such a formidable group of scholars, social critics, and government leaders came together to discuss this topic was exactly fifty years ago. In June 1949, the faculty at the University of Chicago organized a conference to commemorate the Bicentennial of the birth of the German poet-statesman, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The renowned anti-Fascist Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, professor of Italian at the University of Chicago, exiled professor of German at the University of Milan, and the son-in-law of Thomas Mann, spearheaded the commemoration. He was enthusiastically joined in his efforts by Robert M. Hutchins, the President of the University of Chicago, then two decades into his restructuring of American higher education, and Walter Paul Paepcke, head of the Container Corporation of America and a member of the University of Chicago Board. Held in Aspen, Colorado it was the formative act of the famed Aspen Institute. It was also the moment in American and German history when a defeated and destroyed Germany was thought to be brought back into the community of nations through the power of culture.
The missionary-physician Albert Schweitzer (on his first and only trip to the United States) keynoted the conference, speaking first on the Hyde Park campus and then again in Aspen. Citing Goethe's definition of duty as "what the day demands," Schweitzer issued a call to build a new world, and in it a new Germany, without the horrors of hatred and war. The Goethe Bicentennial marked the moment following the Nazi horrors when the world learned that Goethe's ideal nation of culture would be the model for the new Federal Republic of Germany. It was also the moment when a defeated and devastated Germany,through its cultural ideals, symbolically regained a place in the international community.
We now stand at another critical juncture in history and must once again ask: Can Goethe's ideals of an international culture continue to be the guideposts for Germany's sense of self in the next half-century?
7:00 pm Keynote Address: RICHARD VON WEIZSAECKER, Former President of Germany
9:30 Opening Remarks: SANDER L. GILMAN, Chair, Department of Germanic Studies, The University of Chicago
10:00 DANIEL LIBESKIND, architect of the new Jewish Museum in Berlin, will speak on a German vision of the city in a new Europe
11:00 The novelist and journalist PETER SCHNEIDER will discuss the future of German culture and language
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch Break
1:00 Avant-garde film director MONIKA TREUT will explore the role of German cinema in contemporary European filmmaking
2:00 TOM FREUDENHEIM, Deputy Director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, will discuss the concept of memory and memoralization in German and European culture
3:00 The Secretary for Foreigners of the Senate of Berlin, BARBARA JOHN, will examine the outlook for a multicultural Germany within Europe
4:00 HENRYK BRODER, columnist and correspondent for Der Spiegel, will look at the future of German literary culture within European culture
All events take place in the lecture hall on the third floor of Swift Hall (the Divinity School) on the University of Chicago campus, 1025 E. 58th Street, Chicago, Illinois.
The conference is free and open to the public. For further information, see our website at:
<http://humanities.uchicago.edu/german/>
or contact Todd Herzog at (773) 702-8494 or hrherzog@midway.uchicago.edu.
Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance should contact the Department of Germanic Studies in advance at (773) 702-8494.
The conference is sponsored by The German American Marshall Fund, The German Academic Exchange Service, the Philip and Ida Romberg Fund for German American Relations in the Department of Germanic Studies of the University of Chicago, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities of the University of Chicago.
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