Department Events: Spring 2025
The German Department hosted a number of events during the Spring 2025 semester!
Dr. Kurt Beals and the newly translated All Quiet on the Western Front.(Photo credit: TaKeisha Woodson)
On Wednesday, February 19, we welcomed Dr. Kurt Beals (University of Richmond) to the Arrupe Multipurpose Room for a reading from All Quiet on the Western Front, a classic of anti-war literature. The novel first appeared in German (and A.W. Wheen’s English translation) in 1929 and became an instant bestseller. A new English translation by Dr. Beals was published by W.W. Norton in January 2025. During this event, Dr. Beals also discussed the challenges (and necessity!) of re-translating a literary classic.
Dr. Saskia Fischer
On Friday, March 14, the German Department organized a talk with Dr. Saskia Fischer, current Max Kade Visiting Professor at Michigan State University. Dr. Fischer presented a lecture titled “Does Art Conceal or Reveal Antisemitism? The Case of Contemporary Germany,” in which she discussed the novel Der falsche Gruß by German Jewish author Maxim Biller and the role that the arts play in German society as a presumed medium of tolerance.
Dr. Carl Niekerk, introduced by Prof. Mary Helen Dupree
On March 21, Dr. Carl Niekerk (University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana) gave a lunchtime talk on “Race, Enlightenment Anthropology, and Radical Thought.” Taking place in the Georgetown Humanities Center, this was the second talk in a two-part series on “Race and Enlightenment” organized by Professor Dupree. Dr. Niekerk discussed his forthcoming book chapter, which investigates the understanding of ‘race’ in texts by Enlightenment anthropologists in the late eighteenth century, using Jonathan Israel’s framework of a radical vs. moderate Enlightenment. Graduate student Ross Parks led an informal discussion prior to the talk. The talk was well attended by students and faculty from the German Department, as well as faculty members from George Mason University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Congratulations to Prof. Kick and Lucy Johnson!
On March 27, Lucy Johnson, a sophomore in the School of Foreign Service and Minor in German, and Prof. Verena Kick participated in the Great Women Writers event, organized for the fourth time by Prof. Irina Denischenko, a faculty member in the Department of Slavic Languages and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown. The event is an evening of bilingual lightning readings of women’s writing from across the globe. This year’s theme was utopia/dystopia, and for their performance, Lucy and Prof. Kick chose an excerpt from Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand, published in 1963. In this novel, the female protagonist vacations in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, waking up one day to discover that a transparent wall has been placed that closes her off from the outside world. Lucy and Prof. Kick performed, using both voice and body, the moments the protagonist encounters the wall. At the end of the night, they were awarded the prize for best overall performance. Lucy generously used her prize money ($100) to purchase treats for her fellow classmates in Prof. Kick’s course Black Germany (Schwarz und Deutsch sein).
Tigermilch (dir. Ute Wieland, Constantin Films, 2017)
Toward the end of the spring semester, the German Department welcomed Prof. Javier Samper Vendrell (University of Pennsylvania). On Friday, April 4, Dr. Samper Vendrell presented a lecture titled “Girls Coming of Age in Tigermilch,” which examined Ute Wieland’s film adaptation of the novel Tigermilch by Stefanie de Velasco. This was followed by a workshop with German Department faculty and graduate students on “Growing Up Queer: Coming of Age in Contemporary Literature and Media.” The workshop considered how contemporary queer authors and filmmakers have turned to the coming-of-age genre to portray the lived experiences of people who don’t “fit in.” Two recent novels – Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch (2022) and Julia Jost’s Wo der spitzeste Zahn der Karawanken in den Himmel hinauf fletscht (2024), a graphic novel – Claus Daniel Herrmann’s Pinke Monster (2024), and television series – Schwarze Früchte (2024) – served as the basis for the discussion on how queer creators are developing original narrative and aesthetic strategies to describe what being young and queer is like in the twenty-first century.