Liliane Weissberg (UPenn): "Postcards from the Avant-Garde: Else Lasker-Schüler and Franz Marc in Correspondence"

February 16, 2017
05:30 PM - 06:30 PM
Gamble Room, 3rd Floor, Rush Rhees Library

In the early twentieth century, the postcard exemplified modernity. Many writers and artists chose postcards to bring their work and thoughts into circulation. The present talk will focus on the German poet Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945) and the painter Franz Marc (1880–1916), who chose to correspond via such cards. It will demonstrate how traces of this medium entered their respective literary and artistic oeuvres.

About the Speaker

Liliane Weissberg is Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a member of the Jewish Studies Program, the Art History Graduate Group, the English Graduate Group, the Program in Visual Studies, the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, and the Graduate Group in Religious Studies. Weissberg's interests focus on late eighteenth-century to early twentieth-century German literature and philosophy. Much of her work deals with German-Jewish Studies, but she has also written on the German Enlightenment, European and American Romanticism, German realism, and visual studies. Weissberg is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American ACLS, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Fellowships and the German Alexander von Humboldt Prize for her life's work.

Among her book publications are a critical edition of Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1997), Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (with Dan Ben-Amos, 1999), Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (with J. Gerald Kennedy, 2001), Hannah Arendt, Charlie Chaplin und die verborgene jüdische Tradition (2009), Affinität wider Willen? Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno und die Frankfurter Schule (2011), Über Haschisch und Kabbalah: Gershom Scholem, Siegfried Unseld und das Werk von Walter Benjamin (2012), and Writing with Photography (with Karen Beckman, 2013). Weissberg has also curated and co-curated art exhibitions, and contributed to various exhibition catalogues. Most recently, she curated the exhibition Juden. Geld. Eine Vorstellung (2013) at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, and is the editor of its accompanying catalogue.

Links:
Event flier (PDF)

Category: Lectures