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Inga Markovits, a University of Texas Law School professor who is currently working on a history of Humboldt University’s law faculty under Party-rule, investigates how religiously, how eagerly, and how effectively one group of prestigious lawyers in the GDR served Party goals and to what degree authoritarian law not only advanced, but also undermined the obsessions of a power-hungry state.
Historian Timothy Snyder speaks about his collaborative book Thinking the Twentieth Century, written with the late Tony Judt, at the Bertelsmann Residenz, with historian Paul Nolte, followed by a Q&A period.
Using the unlikely conglomerate of Stanley Cavell, Stephen Wright, Andy Warhol, and Thomas Struth, poet and philosopher Richard Deming talks about the burdens and blessings of self-consciousness, Emersonian style, and how confronting everyday life with attentive questioning can make the ordinary become suddenly less than normal.
The fifty-six-year-old Vladimir Nabokov published Lolita in 1955. It was his twelfth novel, his third in English, the finest he would ever write, and amongst the finest ever written. Since then, Lolita has been read by millions and written about by thousands. It has been transformed for the stage and screen and been the subject of several court cases of note. Modern dance pieces and pop songs have found inspiration in it. Leland de la Durantaye asks whether Nabokov's masterpiece is art for art's sake, or a work of rare moral force.
There were two distinct parts to Berthold Leibinger Fellow and UCLA historian M. Norton Wise's talk on the steam-powered gardens of Potsdam and Berlin: one that covered the royal gardens around Potsdam from 1815 to 1850, and the second concerns Berlin's industrial growth during the second half the nineteenth century. Both play a role, he says, in the fascinating history of topiary aesthetics and industrialization of Berlin and its environs during the swift change of the industrial era.
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