September 2022

The event is organized by 1014 and the Institute for Media and Communication Policy (IfM), in collaboration with the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium and with generous support from Stiftung Mercator.

The work of city planners and architects worldwide has come under pressure. A lack of affordable housing, climate change and migrant movement challenge the traditional image of the architect as designer of objects in the built environment.

The term Public Interest Design expands the practice of architecture and design towards a multidimensional process that addresses issues such as disaster preparedness and recovery, scarcity of food and water as well as shelter. During her Fellowship at the Thomas Mann House, the architecture journalist and author Friederike Meyer explores how planning structures and strategies can support new forms of living together in changing heterogenous societies.

Sergio Palleroni, director of the Center for Public Interest Design in the School of Architecture at Portland State University and Thomas Mann Fellow Friederike Meyer discuss how architects and planners can re-engage with society to meet the needs of increasingly diverse communities and how public interest design can create a healthy, resilient and sustainable living environment.

A recording of the conversation will premier on our YouTube channel on 10th of September at 10 am (PT).

In his recent op-ed piece for the New York Times, journalist Ezra Klein warns that when the border between entertainment and political discourse becomes blurred, entertainers might be the only ones able to fulfill our expectations for politicians and coverage of political events might become “entertainment packages.” Prominent examples can be found throughout history and across political camps, such as the presentation and setting of Volodymir Zelensky’s video addresses, Donald Trump’s background in reality TV, and the serial style and format of the recent news coverage of the January 6^th hearings. In an attention economy, methods of production and writing in audiovisual media leave their mark on the way political debate is presented to the public. From the first televised presidential debates to famous actors-turned-politicians such as Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger, media technologies and their use within the entertainment industry have always shaped and influenced public discourse and the way in which politicians have made use of these media environments.

2022 Thomas Mann Fellow Christoph Bieber, Professor for Political Science at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum, and U.S. television producer and writer Stephen Engel will engage in a conversation about how political debate is narrated and presented in a rapidly changing political public sphere. Political actors rely on routines, formats, and narratives originally developed in entertainment media, not only during campaign season, but also within everyday political processes such as plenary sessions or committee hearings. By analyzing and discussing different media formats and historic examples, the discussion will explore the benefits and pitfalls of the entanglements between the entertainment industry and political discourse. The conversation will be facilitated by Lorraine Ali, television critic at the Los Angeles Times and award-winning journalist, who has written in publications ranging from the New York Times to Rolling Stone.

In person event at the Thomas Mann House. By invitation only.

"Memory culture" (German Erinnerungskultur) is a central concept in current debates about the ways Germans remember, commemorate, and historicize the era of National Socialism and its aftermath. The term relates to the question whether Germany has largely accepted responsibility for and learned from its past crimes. From school education and memorials to art monuments, films and public discourses, the idea of an active and successful memory culture plays an important role in contemporary German discourses, for instance about a post-Berlin Wall united identity for Germany after 1989. While many international voices praise Germany’s self-reflexive commemoration of its national trauma, a new generation of German-Jewish artists and intellectuals raise an important point of critique: What if Germany’s culture of memory is merely a "theater of reconciliation"? Whom does this form of remembrance actually serve, and to what end?

German poet Max Czollek, who writes about contemporary Jewish life in Germany, argues that German memory culture created a "symbolic Jew" as a counterfigure to a German "we." According to him, Germany is mistaking remembrance for reconciliation, with the recent rise of racist and anti-Semitic violence and right-wing populism as a consequence. For Czollek, a functioning and productive culture of memory must confront its “fantasies of homogeneity,” question concepts of national greatness, and include contemporary minority voices into its discourse.

Yasemin Yildiz, Professor at the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, engages with questions of German memory culture from another angle. She is currently working on the book project Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance, co-authored with Michael Rothberg, in which she explores the effect of transnational migration on German cultural memory relating to National Socialism, the Holocaust, and World War II, opening up new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between memory and migration at present.

Max Czollek and Yasemin Yildiz will engage in a conversation around cultures of remembrance: What new perspectives and critiques do minority discourses offer on the questions and debates surrounding contemporary German memory culture? And what is the takeaway for those of us in the United States? How can these discussions inform our local debates and controversies about commemoration and memory practices? The conversation will be moderated by Joes Segal, Chief Curator and Director of Programming at The Wende Museum.

The Event is a collaboration between the Wende Museum & the Thomas Mann House.