Video & Audio

The Enlightenment philosophers Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant were strong defenders of religious liberty; the state had no right to establish a preferred religious belief or practice. In this lecture, philosopher Paul Guyer defends of Mendelssohn against Kant on some of the finer points.

Artist Kerry James Marshall, the American Academy's inaugural Max Beckmann Distinguished Visitor, sat down on the afternoon of Saturday, April 29, 2017, with Chris Dercon, former director of the Tate Modern, to discuss Marshall’s art and its impact. The event was held at villa Grisebach, which was exhibiting two of Beckmann's recent paintings.

Historian Kate Brown explains that Cold War "plutopias" were successful because they appeared to deliver the promises of the American Dream and Soviet Communism. In reality, they concealed monumental radioactive disasters that remain highly unstable and threatening to this day.

On the evening of April 26, 2017, the American Academy in Berlin celebrated the inauguration of the Max Beckmann Distinguished Visitorship and its first recipient, Kerry James Marshall, who delivered a lecture about his incredible forty-year career.

Media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is working on a monograph and a series of digital projects entitled “Discriminating Data," in which she investigates the persistence and transformation of categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the era of network analytics.

Musicologist Mark Pottinger examines the role of the natural sciences in the definition of the supernatural in early Romantic opera in France, Germany, and Italy. More specifically, on the friendship and collaboration between Giacomo Meyerbeer and Alexander von Humboldt.

In his Academy project, “Mendelssohn and Kant: Forms of Freedom,” Paul Guyer examines the two figures’ intellectual exchange over the course of their careers. Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn met once and exchanged only a handful of letters.

Hamburg-born, New York-based critic Manuela V. Hoelterhoff tells the story of the German heldentenor Max Lorenz, who first triumphed in Bayreuth in the fateful year of 1933, when Richard Wagner's little town also welcomed Germany’s new chancellor and chief opera buff: Adolf Hitler.

Kate Brown is a professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who is "trying to recover the lost histories of modernist wastelands." She is the author, most recently, of Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (Chicago, 2015).

On the occasion of her visit to the American Academy in Berlin, Stanford University historian Marilyn Yalom sat down with Academy fellow Brenda Stevenson, herself a historian from UCLA. Their topic was one of shared interest: women. From Abigail Adams to Hillary Clinton, Yalom and Stevenson discuss the historical role of women and the current…