Writer, journalist, and translator Susanne Schädlich
will read from and discuss her book
December, Time and Again: The West, the Stasi, the Uncle, and Me.
Tues. Oct. 11, 7:00 pm. Craig Auditorium (Science Center)
Schädlich is the Max Kade German Writer-in-Residence for the fall semester of 2011 at Oberlin College. She was born in East Germany. Her family was forced to move to West Germany when she was twelve because her father, a writer, ran afoul of the regime. In the early 1990s, after reunification, she learned that her father's brother had worked for many years as an informant for the East German Secret Police. December, Time and Again is an exploration of the complicated histories of her family and of post-war Germany, and an autobiographical account of what it meant to come of age in exile, caught in a no man's land between two seemingly similar yet very different cultures.
"For forty years East Germany was a dictatorship. But after 1961, most of its almost seventeen million citizens did nothing against it. Today when you remind them of this fact, when you tell the truth, they feel personally attacked. They feel a sense of guilt. That makes it difficult to talk about coercion and cowardice. It also engenders a nostalgia – “Ostalgie” – for the past, and an idealization of the political reality of life in the DDR. .... We can’t deal with history by putting on rose-tinted glasses. We must find the courage to tell the truth."
Part of the lecture and film series Remembering Communism: The Poetics and Politics of Nostalgia marking the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union
An Event Sponsored by The Department of German Language and Literatures The Oberlin Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies The Department of Russian Language, Literature, and Culture
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
The Department of German Language and Literatures at Oberlin College invites you to the Max Kade Distinguished Lecture for 2011 Professor Alvin Rosenfeld
“‘Is it Possible to Understand the Germans?’ The Life and Writing of Primo Levi.”
Professor Rosenfeld’s lecture will be held in English.
Sunday, November 13, 2011 at 4:00 p.m. Max Kade German House Lounge
104 South Professor Street, Oberlin, Ohio
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, holds the Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies and is Director of the university’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. He founded Indiana University’s well-regarded Borns Jewish Studies Program and served as its director for 30 years. The editor of William Blake: Essays (1969) and the Collected Poetry of John Wheelwright (1972), he is also the author of numerous scholarly and critical articles on American poetry, Jewish writers, and the literature of the Holocaust. Indiana University Press published his Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel (co-edited with Irving Greenberg) in 1979 and, in 1980, published his A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (the book has since appeared in German and Polish translations; a Hungarian translation is forthcoming). With his wife, Erna Rosenfeld, he translated Gunther Schwarberg’s The Murders at Bullenhuser Damm, a book on Nazi medical atrocities published by the Indiana University Press in 1984. His Imagining Hitler was published by Indiana University Press in 1985 (available also in a Japanese translation). He edited Thinking About the Holocaust: After Half a Century (Indiana University Press, 1997), a collection of articles by 13 scholars, which includes his essay, “The Americanization of the Holocaust.” His The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature appeared with Indiana University Press in 2009. His most recent study, The End of the Holocaust, is due to be published in 2011. In recent years, he has also written about contemporary antisemitism, and some of his articles on this subject have evoked intense debate. He is also editor of a series of books on Jewish Literature and Culture published by Indiana University Press.
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