Cultural Programs

Virtual Dialogue

Counter Memories: Susan Neiman & Paul Holdengräber | Berlin

This episode will become available beginning on January 29, on the Counter Memories YouTube channel. Follow the link to visit the channel and watch the existing four episodes of the series!

The fifth episode of our Counter Memories series brings us to Berlin, Germany. Philosopher Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum, joins curator Paul Holdengräber for a conversation about the Soviet Memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park. The monument was erected in 1949, in memory of the thirteen million fallen soldiers of the Soviet Union who gave their lives fighting fascism. Each anniversary of the end of World War II, people commemorate their fallen loved ones there. But despite its monumental size, it has little presence in the collective consciousness of the German capital.

Counter Memories

Aiming for Hopelessness, Elana Katz, 2021

Film & Discussion | January 30 - February 5

The Body as Trigger: Confronting Landscapes of Trauma via Performance Art

In the framework of our Shaping the Past series, The Body as Trigger: Confronting Landscapes of Trauma via Performance Art features works by Berlin-based artist Elana Katz. Two films resulting from Katz’s site-specific performances in public space about social trauma and collective memory, Aiming for Hopelessness (Romania, 2016-21) and Running on Empty (Serbia, 2017-18) will be screened in exhibition windows in New York and Berlin, available online, and analyzed in a concluding online discussion with artist Elana Katz, curator and interdisciplinary artist Melissa Hilliard Potter, and moderated by David C. Terry, Director of C24 Gallery, New York.

This program is presented by the Goethe-Institut New York. The online discussion with Elana Katz will take place on Friday, February 5; registration is required for participation.

The Body as Trigger

Image courtesy of Thomas Mann House

Podcast

55 Voices for Democracy

The series “55 Voices for Democracy” is modeled after the BBC radio speeches, through which Thomas Mann, from his home in California, turned to listeners in Germany, Switzerland and occupied Netherlands and Czechia during the war. From 1940 until November 1945, Thomas Mann pleaded to thousands of listeners to resist the Nazi regime and thus became the most important German voice in exile. Thomas Mann’s conviction that the “social renewal of democracy” is condition and warrant for its victory seems more relevant than ever.

"55 Voices for Democracy" is an initiative launched by the Thomas Mann House in October 2019. With the new podcast series, Los Angeles Review of Books, Goethe-Institut Boston, the Goethe Pop Ups in Seattle, Houston, and Kansas City as well as Wunderbar Together expand the successful series. Tom Zoellner and his co-hosts will engage in vivid conversations with intellectuals, artists, and activists about the question of how to renew democracy today. Among the first guests are Rebecca Solnit, the political scientist Chantal Mouffe, novelist Daniel Kehlmann, and the Belarusian opposition politicians Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Franak Viačorka.

55 Voices for Democracy