"Spaß mit der schönen Jüdin": The Implications of Dance in Karl Emil Franzos' Judith Trachtenberg.
Sonia Gollance, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

“Engineering and philosophy: social, technical, and intellectual elites ininterwar Germany (and the US)"
Professor Heidi Voskuhl, Department of History and Sociology of Science

 

 

THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

 presents

The Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series

"Spaß mit der schönen Jüdin": The Implications of Dance in Karl Emil Franzos' Judith Trachtenberg.

Sonia Gollance, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

 

My talk emerges from a dissertation project exploring depictions of social dance in German-Jewish and Yiddish literature of the mid-19th through early 20th centuries. The trope of dance serves as a crucial space for young women to interact with men they might not have encountered in a more traditional context, where families monitored social interactions and oversaw marriage negotiations. Although one might expect a sheltered, even passive daughter to diffidently follow the customs of her parents, 19th and early 20th century authors instead allow her to undermine tradition. Her romantic entanglement with a young man, facilitated by the seductive energy of a dance floor rather than the sober consideration of a parent or matchmaker, threatens the stable continuity of the (Jewish) family. The colloquium presentation will focus on a close-reading of the dance depictions in Judith Trachtenberg (1891). While Judith's liaison with Count Agenor Baranowski is the driving feature of the novel, the mode of Judith's initial border crossing has been overlooked in the critical literature. Judith's relationship to her family and Jewish tradition, her limited options for social intercourse as a Jewish woman, and the possibility of an interfaith romance are all introduced by Franzos through descriptions of dance. Franzos employs the trope of dance in order to convey his reservations about German-Jewish relations.

and

“Engineering and philosophy: social, technical, and intellectual elites in interwar Germany (and the US)”

Professor Heidi Voskuhl, Department of History and Sociology of Science

My talk is concerned with discussions surrounding the terms technology (Technik) and culture (Kultur) among engineers and philosophers in Germany between the 1890s and the 1930s. Philosophers in this period newly established technology as an object of philosophical inquiry and started to grasp in metaphysical, aesthetic, and phenomenological terms the realities of the so-called Second Industrial Revolution. Some of those philosophers of technology (such as Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger) were members of the “Conservative Revolution” of the Weimar Republic and used the term Technik to formulate their influential reactionary and anti-modern agendas, deploying Technik in particular as a rhetorical tool to wage a massive attack against the entire bourgeois legacy – including the bourgeois citizen and the bourgeois state – of 18th- and 19th-century Germany and Europe. These discussions attracted the attention of philosophically and politically ambitious engineers at the time, who were themselves in a process of cultural and political emancipation and aimed to establish themselves as members of political decision-making elites. This happened in intense competition with the existing, mostly humanistically trained (i. e. bourgeois) political elites that had emerged in the Prussian state during the 19th century. I aim to understand better the historical connections between the emergence of technology as a subject of philosophical thinking and the emergence of engineers as a social group and political elite in this moment of political, military, and philosophical crisis of modern industrial nation-state building.

Breakfast served at 8:45am