April 2022

This hybrid seminar is a collaboration between UCLA's Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and the Thomas Mann Hosue. The course, which is open to undergraduate and graduate students, examines the long history of exchange between Los Angeles and Europe. It begins with an overview of transatlantic cultural, literary, and historical studies going as far back as the colonial era (New Spain, Mexican California). Then, it examines the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples in southern California by Anglo-Americans and European settlers during the nineteenth century, followed by a targeted investigation of transatlantic relations between Angelenos and German immigrants during the twentieth century.

Students apply their newly acquired knowledge to current transatlantic debates in culture, politics, and society. By integrating these lessons into community-engaged interviews with four Thomas Mann Fellows, they explore on a weekly basis concrete, praxis-oriented approaches to transatlantic European studies. Part of the class will be the Thomas Mann Fellows Sunhild Kleingärtner, Christine Landfried, Andreas Nitsche, and Claus Pias. Students go back and forth between Professor David Kim’s seminar on campus and a community-engaged project. In addition, they participate in an interview workshop led by Lynell George, a renowned journalist and essayist. Last but not least, they work with Jimmy Zavala at the UCLA Library Special Collections and with Michaela Ullmann at the USC Libraries Special Collections. The outcome of their individual and collaborative work is a set of public-facing projects shared with communities near and far and during a presentation at the Thomas Mann House in June.

The seminar is led by David D. Kim, Professor at the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles in collaboration with Nikolai Blaumer, Program Director, and Benno Herz, Project and Communications Manager.

In English.

We invite you to join the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles for a four-day, multi-platform program in April 2022 with innovators from academia, artistic fields and politics to discuss concrete steps for restoring public trust in Germany and the U.S. Through virtual discussions, video statements, podcasts, articles and streamed conversations from the Thomas Mann House, experts will address how we can strengthen public trust in the areas of international relations, security, elections, diversity, local communities and the broader media landscape. Check out the full program on this website and watch, read and listen to programs at your convenience or sign up for the live events! Be a part of our social wall by posting and commenting on the contributions and find out what is happening at #RestoringPublicTrust.

Visit the event webpage for all information!

Trust in political institutions has been severely shaken in many Western democracies. This is especially true in the United States, where a large portion of the population believes that their democracy is in danger of failing. Even though developments in Germany are less dramatic in comparison, public trust also declined during the Covid pandemic. A majority of citizens who classify themselves as belonging to lower socioeconomic classes are not satisfied at all with the state of democracy in Germany.

This crisis of trust is putting Western democracies to the test. This is all the more true in light of the challenges posed by the ongoing Covid pandemic, the rapid spread of anti-democratic content, growing economic inequalities and the outbreak of war in the heart of Europe. Urgent tasks arise that can only be solved by society as a whole and in international alliances.

Many participants are already confirmed for this timely program, including sociologists Larry Diamond (Stanford University) and Craig Calhoun (Arizona State University), author Mithu Sanyal, political scientists Christine Landfried (University of Hamburg), lawyer and criminologist Walter Katz, media scholars Anya Schiffrin (Columbia University) and Robin Stevens (University of Southern California), legal scholar Lawrence Douglas (Amherst), artists Suzanne Lacy and Gregory Sholette, archaeologist Sunhild Kleingärtner and journalists Mohamed Amjahid, Aiko Kempen, Olaya Argüeso Pérez and Tom Zoellner (Los Angeles Review of Books), among others.