Entries tagged with Germany

Document 52: Plan B

Plan B is Poem of the Week!

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Mark Olival-Bartley has published the first 22 (of 101) tercets of “Plan B,” my poem refusing normalization after the 2016 election, in his Poem of the Week series in Munich. I will read it, and Franziska Ruprecht will perform the poem in German translation, along with other work, on Thursday, July 6, 7:30 PM, at the JYM in Munich. Click here for more information.

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Barrett Watten will read “Plan B,” a poem written in the aftermath of our national catastrophe, over four days in which the intensity of distorted discourse, media frenzy, and psychological projection fused in a mass of contradictions so real one could simply reach out and grab them to make a poem. The resulting work stands as a kind of “knowledge base” for the symbolic detritus of the election and the state of political crisis it produced. The keyword Gleichschaltung is drawn from the German experience of 1933 and is used as a “discrepant analogy” to the imperative not to “normalize” the result of the election—an imperative that continues for many. Both terms appear at regular intervals through the poem. Also evoked is the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald—a 1975 maritime disaster on the Great Lakes (and ballad by Gordon Lightfoot) that is iconic for residents of Michigan, for whom it represents the destruction of the state as well as the wreck itself. One might immediately compare this reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland to achieve the kinds of discrepant analogy the poem explores. For the reading in Munich, performance poet Franziska Ruprecht has translated “Plan B” into German, which she will perform. The reading will also present other texts evoking poetry as a “knowledge base,” on the one hand, and as record of catastrophe, on the other.

See above for details; click on image to download flyer. 

 

Tag des Offenen Denkmals
(Day of Open Monuments)
Berlin, 9–11 September 2016

“Gemeinsam Denkmale erhalten”

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The following are links to the numerous sites I visited during the Day of Open Monuments in Berlin this September. To come: sites I visited in the past, and sites I wanted to see but could not get to over the two-plus-day program.

Friday, September 9

Historische AEG-Kantine vom Kabelwerk Oberspree

Saturday, September 10

Opening ceremony: Ev. Kaiser-Friedrich-Gedächtniskirche

Hansaviertel

Ehem. Krematorium Wedding

Siedlung Schillerpark

U-Bahnlinie 9: von der Osloer Straße bis zum Rathaus Steglitz

Ehem. Umspannwerk Christiania

Wiesenburg

Stadtbad Mitte

James Turrell und die Kapelle auf dem Dorotheenstädtischen Friedhof I

Das Tieranatomische Theater

Sunday, September 11

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt (Ringsiedlung)

Atelierwohnung Hans Scharoun

Gartenstadt Falkenberg (Tuschkastensiedlung)

Historisches Gutshaus am Falkenberg

PanoramaLounge im ehem. Haus Berlin

Spanienkämpferdenkmal im Volkspark Friedrichshain

Kaiser Wilhelms Märchenbrunnen im Volkspark Friedrichshain

Closing ceremony: Berliner Rathaus

[more t/k]

Berlin, 6–12 September 2016
Tuesday, September 6

Donna Stonecipher
Florian Werner

Wednesday, September 7

Ulf Stolterfoht

Belladonna of Sadness, dir. Eiichi Yamamoto (Babylon Mitte)

Thursday, September 8

Berlin Biennale 9 (Kunstwerk, Akademie der Künste, ESMT)

High-Rise, dir. Ben Wheatley (Central Mitte)

Friday, September 9

Suzanne Reumschüssel, Industriesalon, Oberschöneweide

Kai Mailander @ Martin Mertens

… More

          Berlin (23–30 May 2016)

Scott DeGregoris
Donna Stonecipher
Manfred Uhlitz
Shane Anderson
Ulf Stolterfoht
Christian Hawkey
Uljana Wolf
Florian Werner
Josepha Conrad
Dorothee Haffner
Susanne Reumschüssel

          Paris (30 May–1 June 2016)

Linda Watten
Hélène Aji

… More

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Bavarian-American Academy
Amerikahaus, Munich

University of Regensburg
10–23 May 2015
(after On Kawara)

Heike Paul
Volker Depkat
Marga Schweiger-Wilhelm
Markus Heide
Silvia Spitta
Florian Tatschner
John Landreville
Mary Catherine Lawler
Jessi Lee Jackson
Barry Shank
… More

Document 31: Zero Hour

Just published
in an interdisciplinary,
transnational essay collection

Barrett Watten, “Zero Hour/Stunde Null:
Destruction and Universals at Mid Century”

in Die Amerikanische Reeducation-Politik
Nach 1945: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven
auf “America’s Germany,” Katharina Gerund
and Heike Paul, eds. (Bielefeld: transcript
Verlag, 2015); for more information click here

With Herbert Sirois, Michael Hochgeschwender,
Frank Mehring, Jeanpaul Goergen, Philipp Baur,
Reinhild Kreis, Dorottya Ruisz, Dieter Meindl,
Phillip Beard, Werner Sollors, Winfried Fluck

from the introduction:

Barrett Watten problematisiert die Vorstellung einer Stunde Null als politisches und als ästhetisches Konzept aus der Perspektive eines “radical historicism,” der konsistente und wohlgeformte Erklärungen und Narrative zugunsten von Brüchen, Krisen und Kontingenzen in Frage stellt. Die Stunde Null wird als metahistorisches Ereignis verstanden, das vor allem hinsichtlich seiner verschiedenen Repräsentationen und deren kultureller Arbeit untersucht wird. Watten identifiziert retrospektive, antizipatorische und punktuelle Konstruktionen des historischen Moments in literarischen und visuellen Darstellungen und setzt diese in Beziehung zu dem historischen ‘Ereignis.’ Er untersucht exemplarisch die antizipierte Zerstörung als poetisches Prinzip in den Werken von William Carlos Williams sowie die retrospektive Konstruktion der Stunde Null in dem Film Judgement at Nuremberg (1961, Regie: Stanley Kramer) und in den Fotografien von Lee Miller. Er illustriert anhand dieser Beispiele seine zentrale These, dass Zerstörung die notwendige Vorbedingung des Universellen ist” (introduction, p. 15). [Translation t/k]

Event 47: MSA Pittsburgh

Modernist Studies Association
University of Pittsburgh
6–9 November 2014

“Modernism @ Stunde Null: Lee Miller, Hannah Höch, and A Woman in Berlin

This presentation is a part of a larger project on the intersection of literary and visual modernism with the “moment” of destruction that ended World War II: Stunde Null or Zero Hour. A range of modernist poets—Eliot, Pound, Williams, H.D., Breton, and later Olson, Plath, Duncan, and others—interrogated universal ethical and aesthetic values through this “moment.” In this presentation, I read the literary and visual testimony of three women caught up in the moment of destruction as witnesses, victims, or even perpetrators. Lee Miller’s war journalism, published in Vogue through the war, is complemented by the traumatic record and reparative work of her war and Holocaust photography. Hannah Höch, the dada painter and collagist, emerged from internal exile outside of Berlin to participate in the first modernist exhibitions in the destroyed city after Stunde Null; these early exhibitions set the stage for the recuperation of modernism after its banishment and humiliation under Nazism. Finally, the anonymously authored A Woman in Berlin, documenting the survival strategies necessary in a climate of mass sexual predation by Soviet troops immediately after the defeat, may be read in relation to search for or skepticism about universal values in modernism. In each case, writing or art not only add their testimony to history but posit and test new ways of being during and after the experience of trauma—they are prospective and retrospective.

Event 40: I Met (Texas)

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Frank de la Teja and Jessica Pliley, UT San Marcos

I Met (Texas)
6th Annual Exchange Program
Bavarian-American Academy, Munich
University of Texas, San Marcos
31 May-10 June 2014
(After On Kawara)

Robin Coleman
Scott DeGregoris
Marcus Merritt
Felicia Preece
Frank de la Téja
Antoni Gorny
Marta Usiekniewicz
Mahshid Mayar
Evelyn Huber
… More

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Berlin July 2013.