Setting the scene: Gray November skies, seasonal blues at full volume. This Friday: Black. There’s no escaping the loud advertisements in the shop windows, at bus stations, in every mailbox and inbox. They all proclaim that this Friday, the one after Thanksgiving, is the time to start shopping. Even if your country, like Germany, doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Black Friday, consumer culture’s biggest holiday, is one very successful American export. Yet, how we currently view success might not be in tune with the successful continuance of humanity or even a habitable planet earth.
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Tag Archives: Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
America and the Holocaust
Beyond a severely limited immigration quota kept to a bare minimum, fewer than a thousand Jewish refugees from Europe were admitted into the U.S. during World War II. In August 1944, they were brought on a single U.S. Liberty ship, then interned behind barbed wire on an old U.S. Army camp upstate New York until after the war had ended. That small lucky group included my father Ivo, his sister Mira, and their parents Otto and Ruza.
Native American History Month and Hostile Climates
This article has been started and scrapped time and time again. An American studies blog should run Native American stories regularly and most definitely for Native American Heritage Month this November. But then I, the author, am just another white European trying to share somebody else’s stories. So here’s what I decided to do: I’ll use this platform as a reminder to listen elsewhere, all year around.
The Big Bang Blog: The Toxic Relationship Comedy
The Big Bang Theory is pure poison in a society that just got a wake-up call.
Just yesterday, I saw another post revealing its problematic themes. What truly shocked me were the comments – most of them in defence of their beloved series. “Don’t get your feelings hurt. It’s just a funny show!” they claim. But it’s not.
Like many others, I also enjoyed watching The Big Bang Theory in my teenage years. I was happy that there was a show that portrayed nerd culture and referenced it. I didn’t question the harmful themes the show relies on. To be honest, I didn’t even see them. Now that my eyes are opened, I can’t unsee them. I can barely stand to watch an entire episode. The characters’ behavior around women and each other is just too painful.
I can’t wrap my head around why this show ran for so many seasons and wasn’t cancelled earlier. Sheldon’s quirkiness is so funny after all, isn’t it?
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Special Events You Won’t Want to Miss
What do pornography, fake Indians, the climate crisis, and firefighters in New York City have in common? Well, these are all topics of this season’s lecture series “Maple Leaf & Stars and Stripes.”
As usual, the lecture series starts out with a bang: Award-winning documentary filmmaker and one of Canada’s leading writers, Drew Hayden Taylor, will present his new movie, The Pretendians. The film, which celebrates its German premiere at Leuphana University Lüneburg, asks the question why so many people in the public eye claim Native heritage. Taylor, himself an Anishnaabe and resident of Curve Lake First Nation reserve, is making his 5th trip to Lüneburg.
And if that’s not enough, we also feature Anne Nelson, American journalist, author, playwright, and lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She’ll join us via Zoom to discuss her play, The Guys. Written shortly after 9/11, it features a firefighter who seeks the help of a writer to compose eulogies for his dead comrades.
Art and pornography are at the heart of Anne Breimaier’s talk, which will critically reconstruct a lecture of radical feminist Dorchen Leidholdt in 1980. Breimaier will relate Leidholdt’s critique of a commodification of violence against women in visual media of the 1980 to contemporary image cultures.
The lecture series wraps up with a talk by Johan Höglund, “An end to Eating? Future Food Imaginaries and the Climate Emergency.” Höglund will discuss how fiction set in a future transformed by climate change describes the act of ingesting food as “feeding” (what babies and animals do) rather than “eating” (what humans are typically understood to be doing and what counts as a social and cultural practice).
For the poster as well as the dates and times:
The Reviews Are In: Babylon Berlin Sets the Scene for Unusually Visionary Television, Intercontinentally
Granted, Babylon Berlin has at its disposition all the means necessary to become a true blockbuster. But it isn’t every day the viewer gets to experience just how phenomenally a big budget can be spent on a TV series – without compromises between bombastic montages and cinematography for lovers, between fast-paced story development and credibly complex characters, that is.
For Babylon Berlin, produced in Germany by German production companies, the commitment to an unflinching and unreserved depiction of a nation on the verge of fascism pays off. As a bit of an inside tip, the show’s spectacular efforts are appreciated far beyond its country of origin, as demonstrated by almost exclusively glowing U.S. reviews.