Thomas Mann House Events Archive
March 2021
Freedom from Fear – Video Series with Felicitas Hoppe, Sasha Waltz, Peter Sellars, Sam Durant, Rainer Forst, Martha Nussbaum & more
Berlin
Information
Our new bi-weekly series “Freedom from Fear”, directed by Florian Giefer and Peter Göltenboth (pet&flo directors), premieres on March 4 on YouTube and in Berlin right outside the Gorki Theatre’s STUDIO Я: In his 1941 State of the Union address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed four goals for “people everywhere in the world”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
These Four Freedoms became part of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Roosevelt equated “Freedom from Fear” mainly with overcoming war and violence. Today, the global consequences of the pandemic, climate change and of rapid digital evolution and the resulting social change have triggered various fears all over the world.
As social seismographs, the protagonists of the “Freedom from Fear” video series Felicitas Hoppe, Sasha Waltz, Peter Sellars, Sam Durant, Rainer Forst, Martha Nussbaum and James Conlon, just to name a few, will reflect on the significance of the right to live without fear in search of answers: How can literature, dance, music, philosophy and politics address social fears?
Premiere on March 4, 6 p.m. (CET)
March 5 through 14, 4 until 10 p.m. (CET)
Façade of Studio Я (Maxim Gorki Theater), Hinter dem Gießhaus 2, 10117 Berlin
Partner
Radical Diversity: Discussion Series with Mohamed Amjahid & Max Czollek (San Francisco)
Online
Information
Mohamed Amjahid and Max Czollek will engage in a conversation with guests in the U.S. about strategies for a more open, diverse and just society in Germany and the U.S. Thomas Mann Fellow and author Mohamed Amjahid and poet and publicist Max Czollek talk about political activism and diversity. In their work, they discuss the politics of history in the discourse on integration in both countries and raise the question: How is social diversity expressed in politics and art in both countries? What are counter-concepts to white, hegemonic culture?]
Ancestral wisdom reapplied: Chief Tribal Judge Abby Abinanti implements indigenous values and traditions in tribal court and in communal life. An icon in the legal community and in the Native-American society, Abinanti will talk with German authors Max Czollek and Mohamed Amjahid about how the culture and heritage of the Yurok contains everything for a thriving, fair, and equal society.
Tune in on March 10 at 1 p.m. (PT) / 22:00 (CET) for this latest episode of the Radical Diversity conversation series.
Kindly register for this live event here.
No admission.
Participants
Abby Abinanti, Yurok Chief Judge is an enrolled Yurok Tribal member, she holds a Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of New Mexico School of Law, and was the first California tribal woman to be admitted to the State Bar of California. She was a State Judicial Officer (Commissioner) for the San Francisco Superior Court for over 17 years assigned to the Unified Family Court (Family/Dependency/Delinquency). She retired from the Superior Court in September 2011 and on July 31, 2014 was reappointed as a part-time Commissioner for San Francisco assigned to Dependency, and Duty Judge for that Court where she served until 2015. She has been a Yurok Tribal Court Judge since 1997 and was appointed Chief Tribal Court Judge in 2007, a position she held in conjunction with her Superior Court assignment until 2015.
Mohamed Amjahid was born as the son of so-called guest workers in Frankfurt am Main. He studied political science in Berlin and Cairo and conducted research on various anthropological projects in North Africa. During his studies, he worked as a journalist for taz, Frankfurter Rundschau and Deutschlandfunk. He has worked as a political reporter for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and the Zeit Magazin. Anthropologically and journalistically, he focuses on human rights, equality and upheaval in the US, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Mohamed Amjahid is a 2020 Thomas Mann fellow.
Dr. Max Czollek completed his doctorate studies at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin. Since 2009, Czollek has been a member of poetry collective G13, which has published books and organized lectures. In 2018, his essay Desintegriert Euch! (Disintegrate!) was published at Carl Hanser. His second essay, Gegenwartsbewältigung (Coping with the Present), was published in August 2020.
Partner
"Radical Diversity" is presented by the Goethe Institutes in North America in cooperation with Thomas Mann House, the Institute for Social Justice & Radical Diversity, funded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America.
LAYKA Lens Series: "Sumurun:" Virtual Discussion with Boris Dralyuk, Deniz Göktürk & Nikolai Blaumer
Online
Information
Shortly before his emigration to the United States, director Ernst Lubitsch created a silent film in which he himself participated as an actor for the last time. Set in Baghdad in the Islamic Golden Age, Sumurun tells of the unrequited love of a hunchback (played by Lubitsch) for a traveling dancer and the elicit love between the enslaved harem girl Sumurun and a cloth merchant. Writer Thomas Mann saw the film in Munich in 1920 and later incorporated the film experience into his novel The Magic Mountain. While Sumurun has been often criticized for stereotypes and historical distortion, the film’s orientalism is also a European projection that tells us much about the social order after the end of the German monarchy and the early Weimar Republic.
The event was part of Yiddishkayt’s LAYKA Lens Series, in partnership with the Thomas Mann House.
We suggest to watch the film prior to joining us for the discussion on March 14th, 11 a.m. (PST) / 19:00 (CET). You can watch the film here.
Participants
Deniz Göktürk, Professor at the German Department UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on moving images, multilingual literature, and theories of migration, social interaction and aesthetic intervention in a global horizon.
Boris Dralyuk, Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is a literary translator, author and the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016)
Nikolai Blaumer, Program Director at the Thomas Mann House. Since 2014, he has been working for the Goethe-Institut’s Department of Culture. He is co-editor of the book Teilen und Tauschen (S. Fischer Verlag, 2017).
The conversation is moderated by Rob Adler Peckerar, Executive Director of Yiddishkayt.
Watch "Sumurun"
Watch the Discussion
Partners
The event is part of Yiddishkayt’s LAYKA Lens Series, in partnership with the Thomas Mann House and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The Socio-Economic Impact of the Pandemic with Jutta Allmendinger, Birte Meier & Richard V. Reeves
Online
Information
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect lives around the world, it is becoming clear that the pandemic and its economic fallout are having a regressive effect on gender equality. Sociologist Jutta Allmendinger recently claimed the pandemic will set Germany back 30 years in terms of the equality achieved between men and women. Mothers in particular are disadvantaged by existing containment strategies. But, was the situation really much better to start with or is the pandemic only exacerbating inequities that long predated the virus, as economist Richard V. Reeves recently suggested?
This panel discussion will feature Jutta Allmendinger (President of WZB Berlin Social Science Center) and Richard V. Reeves (Senior Fellow and Director of the Future of the Middle Class Initiative, The Brookings Institution). The discussion will be moderated by Birte Meier (Journalist, ZDF) whose residency at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles to work on "Equal Pay in California and what Germany can learn from it" was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.
Partners
In cooperation with WZB Berlin Social Science Center and American Council on Germany
The Thomas Mann Fellowships are supported by Berthold Leibinger Stiftung, Robert Bosch Stiftung and Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung.
Europeans in Exile: Thomas Mann’s L.A. | Capstone Seminar at UCLA
Los Angeles
Information
Thomas Mann was one of many European artists and intellectuals who made Los Angeles their new home in the 1930s and 40s. This seminar will examine Mann's connections to the city and his network of intellectuals with whom he was in dialogue, including sociologists Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, writers such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, and filmmakers Ernst Lubitsch and Jean Renoir.
The seminar will be led by Professor Wendy Perla Kurtz and Anthony Caldwell, Assistant Director of the Digital Research Consortium at UCLA, and offered by Nikolai Blaumer, Program Director of the Thomas Mann House, and Benno Herz, Project and Communications Manager at the Thomas Mann House. Through readings, workshops, and discussions, students will connect practices in digital humanities to the subjects of the course.
For more information visit: https://dh.ucla.edu/undergradcourses/
Partners
The Seminar is a cooperation between the UCLA Digital Humanities Department and the Thomas Mann House.
Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V. is supported by the German Federal Foreign Office and Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Radical Diversity: Discussion Series with Mohamed Amjahid & Max Czollek (New York)
Online
Information
For the new episode of Radical Diversity, we travel to New York, one of the U.S.’s media and journalism hubs. We’ve invited Carla Murphy, a journalist, writer, and editor who focuses on inequality and diversity in journalism and journalism reform. Murphy will speak with Max Czollek and Mohamed Amjahid about how to build diverse and sustainable newsrooms, as well as challenging the troubled history of objectivity in journalism.
Mohamed Amjahid and Max Czollek will engage in a conversation with guests in the U.S. about strategies for a more open, diverse and just society in Germany and the U.S. Thomas Mann Fellow and author Mohamed Amjahid and poet and publicist Max Czollek talk about political activism and diversity. In their work, they discuss the politics of history in the discourse on integration in both countries and raise the question: How is social diversity expressed in politics and art in both countries? What are counter-concepts to white, hegemonic culture?
Live online webinar on March 31, 2021, 9 a.m. (PT). Please register here.
No admission.
Participants
Carla Murphy is a social justice journalist and editorial consultant. Her struggle as a reporter to cover news for, not about, marginalized or low-income communities fuels her current focus on journalism reform. Through the News Integrity Initiative, she leads data-driven diversity projects for student and working journalists of color and newsroom management. She is editor of the Lewis Raven Wallace podcast and has been commissioned by the Center for Community Media to research and write, The State of Black News Media in the U.S. (forthcoming).
Mohamed Amjahid was born as the son of so-called guest workers in Frankfurt am Main. He studied political science in Berlin and Cairo and conducted research on various anthropological projects in North Africa. During his studies, he worked as a journalist for taz, Frankfurter Rundschau and Deutschlandfunk. He has worked as a political reporter for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and the Zeit Magazin. Anthropologically and journalistically, he focuses on human rights, equality and upheaval in the US, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Mohamed Amjahid is a 2020 Thomas Mann fellow.
Max Czollek completed his doctorate studies at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin. Since 2009, Czollek has been a member of poetry collective G13, which has published books and organized lectures. In 2018, his essay Desintegriert Euch! (Disintegrate!) was published at Carl Hanser. His second essay, Gegenwartsbewältigung (Coping with the Present), was published in August 2020.
Partners
"Radical Diversity" is presented by the Goethe Institutes in North America in cooperation with Thomas Mann House, the Institute for Social Justice & Radical Diversity, funded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America.