Spring 2008 Core Humanities Lecture Series

Aaron Santesso - Wednesday, March 5, 4:00pm, OSN 204

"Poetry and the Right to Privacy"

"Privacy" is a relatively recent concept, and, particularly in the field of law, it remains surprisingly difficult to define. Indeed, modern privacy law is often criticized for using language and imagery that is somewhat mystical and poetic. This lecture will show how this language is not a coincidence, but rather a legacy of earlier poetic investigations of privacy.

Valerie Weinstein - Thursday, April 10, 4:00p, RSJ 101

"Generations of Trauma:
The Legacy of the Holocaust in
Jurek Becker’s Bronstein’s Children"

The final installment in a series on the aging of Germany’s World War II generation, this talk will focus on Bronstein’s Children by Jurek Becker, East German Holocaust survivor and author of such well-known works as Jacob the Liar. In this 1986 novel, set in East Berlin in 1972, eighteen-year old Hans Bronstein narrates his attempts to come to terms with the events unleashed when he discovers his father and his friends, all aging Holocaust survivors, torturing a former concentration camp guard, whom they are holding hostage. This novel not only treats the antifascist politics of East Germany but also explores how violence begets more violence, and how the trauma of the Holocaust is bequeathed from generation to generation. Specifically, the novel outlines the vexed relationship between young Germans and those of the World War II generation, and the difficulties both have moving on from the experiences of the Nazi years.