The Europe Center is jointly housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division.
FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.
The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.
Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Professor Winkler portrays the 'German Question" through the lens of history in the past 150 years. He examines a variety of key issues that have arisen throughout German history and acknowledges that this 'German Question' period has come to an end. Professor Winkler also looks to Germany's future in Europe.
Synopsis
To Prof. Winkler, the reunification of Germany in 1990 resolved the ‘German Question.’ However, he argues that it has been a question not just since World War I but since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. Prof. Winkler believes that this event was not simply a struggle for territory but also involved striving for unity and freedom. These two key values, which Prof. Winkler emphasizes throughout his lecture, can be characterized by a constitutional nation-state. Prof. Winkler explains that although the 1848 Revolution was a failure, it was a step forward in that Germany realized that Austria was not going to be part of this nation-state when it would be created. Prof. Winkler cites that in creating the Prussian nation-state in 1871, Bismarck took care of the unity aspect. However, “parliamentization,” as he Prof. Winkler puts it, only occurred in 1918. He argues that this democratization of post-World War I Germany helped Hitler’s rise to power and then collapsed once Hitler started taking control of the government.
However, Prof. Winkler explains that Hitler’s fall initiated a learning process for the German people that was even more severe than after 1918, but this time not all had the chance to turn to democracy. Although many Germans longed to be reunited with their compatriots, a new mission for European integration of West Germany arose in as early as the late 1940s. Prof. Winkler explains it was an intellectual movement, primarily advanced by Catholic conservatives, which gradually shifted more to the middle and left. By 1986, this movement had shifted thoroughly left, at a time where many Germans had come to feel that the separation of East and West Germany was necessary, pointing to Auschwitz to support their point.
Prof. Winkler argues that once the Berlin Wall fell, the post-national identity that West Germany had created still remained. This created issues with many desiring European integration before German reunification. However, Prof. Winkler explains this notionwas argued down by notables such as Willy Brandt, who felt the guilt of World War II could not fade through indefinite division. Prof. Winkler argues that once Germany was reunified, although post-war guilt still remained, it had finally achieved unity and freedom, thus resolving the ‘German Question.’ Prof. Winkler finishes by revealing his belief in the uniqueness of German history in that while it belonged to the West, it had continually rejected the democratic enlightenment. Prof. Winkler emphasizes his belief that it is time for Germany to understand its history in order to know where ti stands now and how it can contribute to Europe. He argues that the way Germany confronts its history will be “crucial” to Europe as well.
About the speaker
Heinrich August Winkler studied history, philosophy, and public law in Tubingen, Heidelberg, and Munster. He was associate professor at the Freie Universitat in Berlin in 1970-72 and then professor of modern history in Freiburg until 1991. He has been at the Humboldt-Universitat in Berlin since 1992, and has been a visiting scholar in Princeton, at the Wilson Center in Washington, at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, and at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich. He is the author of numerous works including "Germany: The Long Road West," for which he won the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Literature in 2002.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Hermann Simon is a historian and director of the New Synagogue Berlin-Centrum Judaicum Foundation. From 1988 to 1995 he supervised the restoration of the historical building which houses the New Synagogue. He read history and oriental studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and undertook graduate work on oriental numismatics in Prague, receiving his doctorate in 1976. From 1977 to 1988 he was active in this field, working as curator of oriental coins at the Bode Museum and as Director of Public Relations at the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. He has directed numerous exhibitions at the New Synagogue Berlin-Centrum Judaicum Foundation and elsewhere.
Dr. Simon has authored numerous articles on the history of Jews in Germany and numismatics as well as the book Das Berliner Jüdische Museum in der Oranienburger Straße, the third edition of which appeared in 2000. He is editor of the book series, Jewish Memoirs and Jewish Miniatures, and coeditor of the book series Jews in Berlin (with Andreas Nachama and Julius Schoeps).
Dr. Simon's wife, Deborah Simon, will also be at this seminar. Ms. Simon studied translation and interpreting (English and Spanish) at Humboldt University in Berlin. She has spent her working life teaching German-English translation at her alma mater. Besides translating numerous articles, Ms. Simon has created teaching materials for a variety of university courses in translation studies.
Sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, and the German Consulate of San Francisco.
CISAC Conference Room
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in a large family similar to those which he describes in his novels Cevdet Bey and His Sons and The Black Book, in the district of Nisantasi. As he writes in his autobiographical book Istanbul, from his childhood until the age of 22 he devoted himself largely to painting and dreamed of becoming an artist. After graduating from the American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years, but abandoned the course when he gave up his ambition to become an architect and artist. He went on to graduate in journalism from Istanbul University, but never worked as a journalist. At the age of 23 Pamuk decided to become a novelist, and giving up everything else retreated into his flat and began to write.
His first novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons was published seven years later in 1982. The novel is the story of three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family living in Nisantasi, Pamuk's own home district. The novel was awarded both the Orhan Kemal and Milliyet literary prizes. The following year Pamuk published his novel The Silent House, which in French translation won the 1991 Prix de la découverte européene. The White Castle (1985) about the frictions and friendship between a Venetian slave and an Ottoman scholar was published in English and many other languages from 1990 onwards, bringing Pamuk his first international fame. The same year Pamuk went to America, where he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York from 1985 to 1988. It was there that he wrote most of his novel The Black Book, in which the streets, past, chemistry and texture of Istanbul are described through the story of a lawyer seeking his missing wife. This novel was published in Turkey in 1990, and in French translation won the Prix France Culture. The Black Book enlarged Pamuk's fame both in Turkey and internationally as an author at once popular and experimental, and able to write about past and present with the same intensity. In 1991 Pamuk's daughter Rüya was born. That year saw the production of a film Hidden Face, whose script by Pamuk was based on a one-page story in The Black Book.
His novel The New Life, about young university students influenced by a mysterious book, was published in Turkey in 1994 and became one of the most widely read books in Turkish literature. My Name Is Red, about Ottoman and Persian artists and their ways of seeing and portraying the non-western world, told through a love story and family story, was published in 1998. This novel won the French Prix Du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Italian Grinzane Cavour (2002) and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award (2003). Snow, which he describes as 'my first and last political novel,' was published in 2002. In this book set in the small city of Kars in northeastern Turkey he experimented with a new type of 'political novel,' telling the story of violence and tension between political Islamists, soldiers, secularists, and Kurdish and Turkish nationalists. In 1999 a selection of his articles on literature and culture written for newspapers and magazines in Turkey and abroad, together with a selection of writings from his private notebooks, was published under the title Other Colours.
Pamuk's most recent book, Istanbul, is a poetical work, combining the author's early memoirs up to the age of 22, and an essay about the city of Istanbul, illustrated with photographs from his own album, and pictures by western painters and Turkish photographers.
Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. The press release read "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the class and interlacing of cultures."
Sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies' S.T. Lee Lecture, the Division of International Comparative & Area Studies, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.
Memorial Auditorium
Stanford University
551 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94015
Department of French and Italian
Pigott Hall, Rm 106
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2010
Jean-Marie Apostolidès is the William H. Bonsall Professor in French at Stanford University. He has served as chair of the Department of French and Italian and as executive editor of the Stanford French Review and the Stanford Literature Review.
Professor Apostolidès was educated in France, where he received a doctorate in literature and the social sciences. He taught psychology in Canada for seven years and sociology in France for three years. In 1980 he came to the United States, teaching at Harvard and then Stanford, primarily French classical literature (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and drama. He is also a playwright, whose work has been staged in Paris, Montreal, and New York.
His literary criticism focuses on the place of artistic production in the French classical age and in modern society. Whether it be the place of court pageantry during the reign of King Louis XIV (Le Roi-Machine, 1981), or the role of theater under the ancien régime (Le Prince Sacrificié, 1985), or even the importance of mass culture in the 1950s (Les Métamorphoses de Tintin, 1984), in each case Professor Apostolidès analyzes a specific cultural product both in its original context and in the context of the contemporary world. His most recent books are Les Tombeaux de Guy Debord in 1999, L'Audience in 2001, Traces, Revers, Ecarts in 2002, Sade in The Abyss in 2003, Héroïsme et victimisation in 2003, Hergé et le mythe du Surenfant in 2004. The tools required for such analysis are borrowed from literary criticism and from the social sciences, particularly psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology.
In his books, Professor Apostolidès interprets the works of the past as witnesses of our intellectual and emotional life. His examination of the distant or near past seeks to make us more sensitive to the social changes that are taking place now, in order to improve our understanding of the direction in which contemporary society is moving.
