Juni 2024

In her 2022 novel Auf See (At Sea), nominated for the German Book Prize, author Theresia Enzensberger tells a story about utopian promises of new communities and happiness in the face of doom. The main character, Yada, grows up as a citizen of a floating city in the Baltic Sea. Her father, a libertarian tech entrepreneur, has designed the seaside town as a salvation from the chaos in which the rest of the world is sinking. Against the backdrop of current developments, such as “California Forever,” a plan for a future city for which a group of tech billionaires quietly purchased 60,000 rural acres of land in Solano County, utopian visions like in Enzensberger’s novel are not limited to SciFi literature anymore. Writer and artist Claire L. Evans recently published a volume titled Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn, an anthology of near future science fiction from VICE’s acclaimed, innovative digital speculative story destination. The book shows the predictive capacity of science fiction and seeks “new, vivid, and visceral ways to depict the future, translating the decay and anxiety that surround us into something else, something unexpected, something that burns like a beacon and upends the conventional ideas of where we’ll end up next.” 

The conversation will be moderated by Sherryl Vint, Professor and Director of the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on speculative fiction, especially relationships with science and technology. In her publications she explores how science fiction can give us tools for conceptualizing and perhaps shaping the ways that science and technology have an impact on daily life. Together they will talk about the benefits of technological speculations, potential new futures and the politics of innovation through a transatlantic literary lens. 

Theresia Enzensberger studied film at Bard College in New York and is a writer of prose, essays, reportage, and criticism. In 2014 she founded BLOCK Magazin which was named “best newcomer magazine” at the 2016 Lead Awards. In 2017, her first novel Blaupause (Blueprint)was published by Hanser Verlag. It was translated into several languages and awarded the Alfred Döblin Medal. Her recent novel Auf See (At Sea), published in 2022, was nominated for the German Book Prize. Enzensberger is a 2024 Thomas Mann Fellow. 

Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician exploring ecology, technology, and culture. She is the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, co-founder of VICE’s imprint for speculative fiction, Terraform, and co-editor, with Brian Merchant, of the accompanying anthology Terraform: Watch Worlds Burn (MCD Books, 2022). Her writing has appeared in MIT Technology Review, VICE, Rhizome.org, The Verge, Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Document Journal, Eye on Design, and Aeon, among others. She is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow.  

Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she founded the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She has published widely on science fiction, including, most recently, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction(2021), Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge, and Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracy (2022, co-authored with Jonathan Alexander). She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is an editor for the journal Science Fiction Studies and the book series Science in Popular Culture.   

The experience of exile is often characterized by states of uncertainty and the challenge of adapting to new social, cultural, and political circumstances. In offering opportunities to process and reflect on moments of intense crises, music and art play can play key roles in this experience. Realities of exile vary widely: from forced displacement due to conflict or persecution to voluntary migration in search of better opportunities. In many cases, exile entails a rupture with familiar surroundings and the need to navigate unfamiliar territories. As a means of processing these realities in times of crisis, music and art can offer hope and solidarity, as well as a space for emotional release and reflection, often fostering a sense of community and shared resilience. Across different cultures, composers and musicians have drawn inspiration from their own exile journeys, and in their music, one can often hear the echoes of longing, resilience, and hope.

What roles can art play in the exile experience? In conceiving of – and potentially realizing – a future that precludes it? In this concert-discussion, music serves as a point of departure for exploring ways in which exiled creators negotiate between rejection of and nostalgia for ‘home’; cynicism and idealism with respect to the sociopolitical future; lamentation of personal victimhood and responsibility for collective rebirth.

Bringing the experiences of 1940s-era German refugees into dialog with those of contemporary Iranian exiles, the event strives to shed new light on the experiences of individuals from two iconic communities that have found refuge in LA and to complicate narratives about the sociopolitical tragedies from which they fled.

The concert portion of the event will include selections from Hanns Eisler’s Hollywooder Liederbuch and music for strings by Gity Razaz, Nasim Khorassani, Adib Ghorbani, and Hesam Abedini. The conversation will feature music critic and 2024 Thomas Mann Fellow Aida Baghernejad, music scholar Joy Calico (UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music), and renowned music critic Alex Ross (The New Yorker). The conversation will be moderated by musicologist Julius Reder Carlson.

Aida Baghernejad is a journalist who studied media studies in Berlin, Barcelona, and London. Her work focuses on how cultural products such as music, film, and social media content influence the socio-political state of the world. In addition to numerous contributions for Die Zeit, Der Tagesspiegel, Missy Magazine, and others, she also co-hosts the podcast 55 Voices for Democracy, a collaboration between the Thomas Mann House, the Goethe-Institut, dublab radio, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Joy Calico joined the faculty at UCLA in August 2023, where she is Professor of Musicology at the Herb Alpert School of Music and affiliated faculty in Jewish Studies. She has published monographs on two luminaries of the Austro-German diaspora in Los Angeles: Bertolt Brecht at the Opera (2008) and Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe (2014), both with University of California Press. She is a member of the international working team of the Black Opera Research Network (BORN). Her current projects include a book about operatic scene types in 20th- and 21st-century opera based on Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin, and a co-edited volume entitled Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900. 
 

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His second book, Listen to This, is a collection of essays. His latest book is Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, an account of Wagner’s vast cultural impact. He has written often about Thomas Mann and the émigré community in L.A. for The New Yorker. He was awarded with a MacArthur Fellowship and the Belmont Prize.

Julius Reder Carlson is Associate Professor of Music and Artistic Director of The Da Camera Society at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles and co-founder of the Santa Monica Youth Orchestra (aka Sounds Like LA). His recent publications explore the transnational resonances of the South American Nueva Canción, particularly the work of Cold War-era singer-songwriters Atahualpa Yupanqui and Wolf Biermann.

Ciani-Sophia Hoeder is a journalist and author from Berlin. She studied journalism and politics in Berlin and London. In 2019, she founded the online magazine RosaMag, which addresses a variety of challenges faced by Black individuals in German-speaking countries. In her work, Hoeder celebrates Blackness rather than problematizing it. In 2020, RosaMag was nominated for the Grimme Online Award, and in 2021, Hoeder received the Golden Blogger Award. Her debut book Wut & Böse was published with hanserblau in 2021. She is a 2024 Thomas Mann Fellow. 

Jamiah Hargins is the Founder and Executive Director of Crop Swap LA. He worked as a stock and options trader in Chicago, where he also participated in a community garden. In Brazil, Hargins managed a social enterprise that leveraged rural agriculture and urban business to sustain an orphanage. Energized by the experience, and seeing first-hand what creative, mission-driven businesses can accomplish, he returned to the U.S. to study public policy at Columbia University and identify opportunities for impact. Along the way, he worked as an executive headhunter in the education field—a position that he says became excellent training for his work at building and managing Crop Swap LA.  

*Diese Veranstaltung findet auf englischer Sprache statt*

The Student Council consists of a team of highly engaged, talented, and diverse undergraduate and graduate students who invite prominent guest speakers to discuss topics relating to society, politics, culture, and art. In conversation with academics, journalists, politicians, and artists, the students will explore the various threats to democratic institutions and principles worldwide, as well as strategies to potentially overcome these threats.  

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Ajuan Mance is a Professor of African American literature at Mills College in Oakland, California as well as a writer and artist. Throughout her comics and illustrations she uses the elements of humor and bright colors to explore race, gender, and power, and the people and places in which they intersect. Her work has appeared in a number of digital and print media outlets, including most recently The Women’s Review of Books, Blavity.com, BET.com, Transition Magazine, Buzzfeed.com, KQED.org, The San Francisco Chronicle, NYTimes.com, KPIX News, and Publisher’s Weekly.

How can authors face the challenges of portraying experiences and cultures they have not personally lived, and the importance of avoiding stereotypical portrayals of their fictional characters? Do writers and their works bear responsibility for social conditions? To what extent do literature and literary writers negotiate moral convictions in their characters and stories? Does a writer have to act as a judge of good and evil and right and wrong through the choice of their character’s perspectives? The evening will provide valuable insights into how writers can navigate the delicate balance of respecting and honoring the identities of others while enriching their narratives with diverse perspectives.

Julia Franck is an author based in Berlin. She studied philosophy, modern German literature, and Ancient American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Frank published her first novel, Der Neue Koch, in 1997. Her work has received numerous prizes and awards, including a residency at Villa Massimo in Rome in 2005 and the German Book Prize in 2007. Franck also writes essays on literature, film, and art and is a member of Exil-PEN and PEN Berlin, among others. In 2023 she took the position of editor for Die Andere Bibliothek. Her work has been translated into 40 languages to date. She is a 2024 Thomas Mann Fellow.

Arnon Grunberg is a Dutch novelist and reporter. After being kicked out of high school, he worked as assistant in a drugstore, as dishwasher, publisher, and playwright for an Amsterdam theater company. In 1994, at age of 23, he made his debut with the internationally acclaimed novel Blue Mondays which won him two awards: for the best and for the bestselling debut novel. Grunberg's work has been translated into thirty different languages. He writes reports, book reviews, columns and essays for Dutch media and regularly publishes essays and stories in literary magazine Hollands Maandblad. He has contributed to The New York Times, The Times of London, The Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Standard, Die Welt, Bookforum, among others.  

Lynne Thompson served as Los Angeles’ 4th Poet Laureate and received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of four collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press); Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield; and Blue on a Blue Palette, published by BOA Editions in April 2024. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize.

The workshop "Archives in / of Transit: Historical Perspectives from the 1930s to the Present" explores new ways of thinking about archives, archival records, and other artifacts historians might use as primary sources to gain deeper insight into the history of migrants in transit and the knowledge they possessed, produced, transmitted, or lost. With a starting point in the history of Jewish migration from National Socialist-occupied areas, the workshop broadens out to investigate the experiences of refugees and migrants fleeing genocide, armed conflict, and persecution throughout the twentieth century. Specifically, it uses the idea of “lost knowledge” (Steinberg/Strobl) to ask how migrants who leave their homes try to convey both the sense of loss and the disorientation that accompany the navigation of new lived realities—from the geographical to the socio-cultural, political, and beyond—in correspondence or other materials that capture any aspect of their flight and migration.

The workshop is convened by the German Historical Institute Washington; USC Shoah Foundation; Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway; University of London; Queen Mary, University of London; and the Wiener Holocaust Library, London. Partners of the event are USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research; Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles; Villa Aurora, Los Angeles; and Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The full program of the closed workshop can be found here.