Cosponsored by the Woods Institute for the Environment and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies

Daniel Cohn-Bendit was born in France and spent his childhood in Paris. He moved to Germany in 1958 but later returned to France to study sociology at the University of Nanterre. It was here in 1968 that he first became known as a spokesperson and student leader during the May Revolution in Paris. He was subsequently expelled from France and he settled in Frankfurt where he was an active member of the Sponti scene which exercised a social revolution in the 1970s. Growing from this scene was the alternative urban magazine "Pflasterstrand", of which Cohn-Bendit served as the editor and publisher. It was here that he began taking part in eco-struggles against nuclear energy and the expansion of the Frankfurt airport. The Sponti movement officially accepted parliamentary democracy in 1984 and Cohn-Bendit joined the German Green Party. In 1989, he became deputy mayor of Frankfurt, in charge of multicultural affairs. Since January of 2002, he has served as co-president of the Greens/Free European Alliance Group in the European Parliament. He is a member of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and a member of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs. In addition to his political activities, Cohn-Bendit was the host of the "Literaturclub" show for Swiss TV station DRS for 10 years, and he is an author of several books including the most recent, Quand tu seras président, written with Bernard Kouchner and published in April 2004.

http://www.cohn-bendit.com/

German Studies Colloqium, Co-Sponsored by the Department of German Studies and the European Forum

Professor Dorschel will present the lecture in German and the discussion following the lecture will be in English.

Co-sponsored by the German Studies Department and the German Consulate General, San Francisco

Over the past 25 years, the discussion surrounding the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust has developed into a meaningful topic of discourse in German politics, society and culture. Since the 1990s, there has been talk of a real "remembrance boom", which materialized in a flood of academic literature and autobiographies, television documentaries and feature films, as well as documentation centers, centers for eye witnesses, memorials and monuments. In the year 2005 - 60 years after the end of WWII in Europe - this collective process of commemoration presumably reached a climax: preceded by fifteen years of debate, the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated in Berlin. However, the Memorial is still debated today. The history of its genesis is illustrative of the problematic nature of finding an appropriate form for the commemoration of the Holocaust. Many issues have led to the questioning of the traditional forms and functions of a memorial and the search for alternative strategies of commemoration. Dr. Pottek will introduce examples of contemporary commemorative art in order to demonstrate the breadth of artistic strategies for remembrance in Germany and to inspire a discussion about appropriate and less appropriate forms of commemorative art.

Dr. Marina Pottek studied history of art, German literature and Romanic literature at the University of Bochum and received her Ph.D. from the University of Bonn. Her main topics are modern European and American art, contemporary art, art and memory, conceptual art, and narrative art. Since 1998, Dr. Pottek has held a scientific assignment at the University of Bonn and has worked at the equal opportunity office (public relations manager, curator of an interdisciplinary exhibition on female scientists, coordinator for the mentoring programme for talented female scientists at the University of Bonn).

Co-Sponsored by the Austrian Consulate General, Los Angeles

Leopold Engleitner of Austria is one of the oldest living Holocaust survivors. Born in 1905 in Salzburg, Mr. Engleitner became a Jehovah's Witness in his late twenties. In 1938 when the Anshluss (the inclusion of Austria into "Greater Germany" by the Nazi regime) occurred in Austria, Mr. Engleitner found himself imprisoned a number of times for what the Nazis claimed was a promotion of an unacceptable religious faction. Rather than being released from prison he was placed into Nazi "protective custody" and sent to a concentration camp. Mr. Engleitner spent the next five years in three different concentration camps. He was subjected to severe physical labor and demeaning treatment from both the Schutzstaffel (the Nazi defense squadron) and fellow prisoners. Throughout his internment, Mr. Engleitner was offered freedom in return for signing a declaration renouncing his beliefs. Time and time again, he refused. Finally, in June 1943, he was offered his freedom in exchange for working solely in agriculture for the remainder of his life. On July 15, 1943, he was released from the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Bernhard Rammerstorfer, also of Austria, is an author and film producer. Mr. Rammerstorfer met Leopold Engleitner in 1994 and consequently wrote his biography, Unbroken Will: The Extraordinary Courage of an Ordinary Man. Mr. Rammerstorfer also produced an accompanying film documentary. In 2006, he produced another documentary entitled, "Unbroken Will Captivates the United States".

In recent years, Mr. Rammerstorfer and Mr. Engleitner have traveled the world, holding lectures at various universities, schools and memorial sites in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and the United States. In 2004, they made presentations at Columbia University, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Co-Sponsored with the Department of History and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies

Richard Evans is a Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, with a particular research interest in the social and cultural history of Germany since the mid-nineteenth century. He has worked on movements of emancipation and liberation, on social inequality in the urban environment, and on the social history of death and disease. Most recently, Professor Evans has worked on crime and punishment, especially the death penalty in German history since the seventeenth century, where he has used archival evidence to bring a social and anthropological approach to bear on major theories of punishment and society. Additionally, Professor Evans holds an interest in historiography and the history of the discipline of history. He has been Editor of the Journal of Contemporary History since 1998 and is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and Birkbeck College, London. His most recent publications include Telling Lies About Hitler: History, the Holocaust and the David Irving Trial (London, 2002), and The Coming of the Third Reich (London, 2003).

Between 1870 and 1945, France and Germany fought each other in three bloody wars, each of which left bitter memories and lingering antagonisms in its wake. Bitter memories in turn fed the respective histories of the two neighboring nations, and these became integral features of French and German national identities throughout the first half of the twentieth century. How and when did this begin to change? Siegel will discuss the efforts of twentieth-century French and German historians and teachers to break the intractable cycle of warfare and memory, nationalism and history. Professor Siegel will explore the links between collective memory, scholastic history, and nationalism as well as the complexities of turning history into a tool of international reconciliation. She will explore whether the sequence of events towards reconciliation in France and Germany might be replicable in other environments, notably Asia, in the context of recent events that suggest a rising nationalism in Asia.

Dr. Mona Siegel joined the CSU - Sacramento history faculty in 2003. Her teaching and research interests include modern French history, the history of women and gender, history and memory, peace history, and the history of the world wars. Her current research projects include "The Disarmament of Hatred: History, Truth, and Franco-German Reconciliation from World War I to the Cold War."