#i remember how closely I followed the Charlie Gard case

[greater-than-the-sword]

I was about to say. This is what, the 3rd time? That Britain has murdered a baby rather than allow them and their parents the right to try and access health care.

I hate to say “go inform yourself on this terrible evil thing” but you really should know what’s happening to Indi Gregory.

(She’s an eight-month-old baby with a mitochondrial issue. Britain’s NHS is ordering that she be removed from care and die. Italy has granted her citizenship and is willing to fly her there for special treatment at no cost to Britain. She is not a ward of the state or anything; her parents want to take her to Italy. NHS and the British court system won’t let her go. At least three other infants and a 19-year-old girl have died this way.)

[deutscheshausnyu]

Interview with DAAD Visiting Scholar at Deutsches Haus at NYU, Susanne Rohr

Susanne Rohr is Chair of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Hamburg. She is currently a DAAD Visiting Scholar at Deutsches Haus at NYU. Her publications include “Die Wahrheit der Täuschung: Wirklichkeitskonstitution im amerikanischen Roman 1889-1989″ (Fink 2004) and with Andrew S. Gross “Pop – Avant-Garde – Scandal: Remembering the Holocaust after the End of History” (Winter 2010). Susanne Rohr has also published numerous essays in the fields of literary and cultural theory, semiotics, American pragmatism, epistemology, and on a broad range of topics in American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. In 2017, Susanne Rohr was awarded an “opus magnum” stipend by the Volkswagen Foundation to finish her current research project on representations of the Holocaust in German and U.S.-American literature in the new millennium.

During her stay here as a DAAD visiting scholar, Deutsches Haus at NYU will present a talk by Susanne Rohr about the desire for continuity, identity, and belonging in one’s own family history and her interpretation of Katja Petrowskaja’s collection of stories, Maybe Esther. We invite you to join us for the talk, On Finding and Fabricating: Memory and Family History in Katja Petrowskaja’s "Maybe Esther" on November 25th, at 6pm, at Deutsches Haus at NYU.

Since 1983, when you studied at Cornell University as a graduate student, you have traveled to the United States on numerous occasions to research and to teach. What motivates you to continue returning to the U.S.? What do you find especially appealing about researching in New York?

Doing research (and staying) in the U.S. is particularly appealing to me for a number of reasons. First of all, the academic institutions and facilities supporting research are just so much more efficient at the American universities that I have visited. Here at NYU, my research profits enormously from the terrific possibilities to get all kinds of materials (journal articles, book chapter, books etc.) extremely fast, most of the time by immediate digital access or via interlibrary loan, from the support of the kind and professional library staff who are always ready to help, or the opening hours of the libraries. This is very different at my home university, where my student assistant usually has to spend hours to hunt down certain materials that I need. Apart from that, the cultural and academic activities of the various departments at NYU – among them the terrific program of Deutsches Haus at NYU – are very inspiring and enjoyable. In short: the academic milieu at American universities is just so very motivating.

A lot of your research throughout your career as an “Amerikanistin” has been centered around American literature – from American literature of the 20th century to American poetry to Jewish-American literature. Why did you choose this subject as the focus of your projects? Is there a commonality among these various subtopics of American literature – something uniquely American?

That is a good question – and not easy to be answered. On the most general level, I would say that literature helps the reader to more profoundly understand their position in the world, and it does so in a playful way. Fiction investigates reality by offering alternative versions of it that the reader can explore in the reading process. More specifically, the beauty of American literature in my view lies in the multitude of voices that partake in expressing the “American experience.” Also, compared to European literatures, American literature is relatively young. It is fascinating to trace the lively process of how it struggled to first declare its cultural independence and find its own national forms of expression and to then endlessly form and revise its corpus of canonical texts – all the while negotiating transnational influences.

What are some works of literature that have influenced your career?

I would say, the works that have influenced my career most are Henry James’ wonderful late novels and Gertrude Stein’s admirable avant-garde experiments. These works – both highly complex in their own right – have taught me to develop and sharpen my close-reading skills. Interacting with them turned me from a lover of literature into a professional literary scholar and opened my career options.

Your talk at Deutsches Haus at NYU on November 25 will focus on the desire for continuity, identity, and connection that are shared across borders and generations that one can find in German and American literature, using your interpretation of Katja Petrowskaja’s Maybe Esther as a basis. Why did you choose this collection of stories to explore this idea?  In what ways, if any, do German and American literature express this desire differently?

Katja Petrowskaja’s Maybe Esther is an example of a literary topic that has become quite popular lately: the search of an individual for their roots and family history. While in American literature – where the immigrant autobiography or life writing has always played an important role – this topic has been present from the beginning, its popularity on the German literary landscape is rather recent. Following the upheavals in the geopolitical landscape after the Second World War and the end of the Cold War, on both sides of the Atlantic, there seems to be a renewed interest among the younger generations in tracing their family history and finding the roots of one’s places of belonging. Maybe Esther now is a peculiar mixture of family novel and memoir, half fictional, half autobiographical, and its attraction lies in its wonderous language. Petrowskaja was born in the Ukraine and belongs to the so called third generation of survivors. She only came to Germany in her mid-twenties and learned German then, yet insists on writing in German, which to her is an act of self-empowerment. Her careful and explorative use of the language and the highly self-reflexive style of writing make this text particularly rewarding for interpretation and analysis.

The talk on Maybe Esther also involves another one of your fields of study: the representations of the Holocaust at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. In your view, how have these representations changed over the years, if at all? Are there any differences in the ways the Holocaust is being represented in German and American literature?

Representations of the Holocaust have changed very much over the course of the last decades. In the immediate post-war era and during the time of the Cold War, realist conventions of representation dominated that were rarely transgressed in order to bear witness to the unfathomable atrocities. In the 1990s, the situation changed, due to the end of the Cold War and generational shifts. More and more, the next generations realized that the Holocaust had become a mediatized event that can only be encountered in indirect ways and thus in certain standardized forms of narrativization. And it was these standardized forms of representation that now became the target of exploration or even attack, as in the form of the provocative “camp comedy.” The 1990s were, in short, the time of taboo breaking experiment, of bringing together the topic of the Holocaust and forms of representation that had hitherto been thought unthinkable and scandalous. While this took place on a transnational scale, in Germany, the land of the perpetrators, the experiment was much more reluctant. If at all, art went against the Nazis and their pompous behavior, following the tradition of Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Great Dictator (1940). Generally, in Germany, the topic is primarily dealt with by exploring intergenerational conflicts and the question of guilt and responsibility.

What project(s) are you currently working on? What do you hope to achieve during your time here as the DAAD Visiting Scholar at Deutsches Haus at NYU?

Right now, I am enjoying the privilege of an “opus magnum”-fellowship, granted me by the VW foundation. This fellowship, by releasing me from my teaching obligations at Hamburg University, supports my writing my “opus magnum,” i.e. that book that is supposed to bring together my research on representations of the Holocaust I have carried out over the last years. The working title is “Of Horror and Glamor: Contemporary Representations of the Holocaust in the US and Germany.” In this book, I examine the artistic experiments indicated above, which can be described as an arc of increasing radicalization. They have now slowly come to their foreseeable end – and the scandal is no longer that scandalous. So what follows, then, the ultimate breach in taboo? It is this question my book addresses, and it does so by closely examining the forms of artistic expression currently visible in German and American artistic practice. The Holocaust is a semiotic universe of image-worlds and discourses, an iconography and a transnational narrative of horror that artistic practice increasingly engages in and borrows from, and the nature of which is characterized by the worldwide influence – and in some cases dominance – of American culture and practices. Contemporary works of art are thus also representations that unfold within the interplay between nationally-specific traditions and Americanized forms. In my book, I hence examine the question of how these relations are specifically commented upon and negotiated within the transatlantic German-American dialogue; that is, I am interested in how they become visible within the American and German cultural landscapes and their cultural productions. As part of assessing the current status of such productions, this book will also examine the ways in which Germany understands and represents the historical event as well as how idiosyncratically American perspectives of the Holocaust are translated into German thought. Via an analysis of the development of German and American literature as well as film and television productions on the Holocaust since the turn of the millennium until today, I will show where and in which ways an ‘Americanized’ form of the Holocaust is circulating in, and sometimes dominating, the German cultural landscape.

[archandbillwiseguys]

Movie Reviews: “Beirut,” “Lean On Pete” and “You Were Never Really Here”

April 11, 2018

Beirut

Bill:I think you’ll like Beirut, Arch — it’s written by Tony Gilroy, who did the Bournemovies and Michael Clayton.  So he knows how to write dialogue, and how to write a movie that’s driven primarily by dialogue. Beirut has the look of a straight-up action movie, but really it’s the interactions among the characters that move it along.

Arch: I like John Hamm ever since Mad Men, of course. And I’ve been waiting for him to get a role that will equate with that.

Bill:That’s hard to top. But he does a nice job here as a haunted, grizzled former diplomat who’s seen terrible things happen and he’s exhausted by the whole process. But they throw him into one last case, where he has to negotiate the release of a friend of his who’s being held captive by one of the dozens of factions that are at war in Lebanon.

Arch:I know Rosamund Pike is in the film, and I like her an awful lot.

Bill:She’s always good, and she’s virtually the only woman in the movie. It’s set in the early 1980s, and I have a feeling that in those days the diplomatic corps, especially in hotbeds like Beirut, was pretty much a men’s club. And it’s interesting how she’s clearly the most brilliant mind in the room, but the guys keep having her go get coffee. The film has to stretch credulity a bit to get her into the center of the action, but it’s never utterly unbelievable. The other characters under-use her, and so does the film, to some extent.

Arch:I’ll have to see this one.

Bill:I like films that take you someplace you haven’t been, and Beirut is set at the moment just before the U.S. Marines barracks were blown up there in 1983, and consequently just before any of us were paying any attention to what was happening over there. So it’s an intriguing historical drama, as well.

Lean on Pete

Arch:I was really, really impressed with this movie. It’s about a teenage boy and a horse named Lean on Pete. And before you see it you think, “Oh, brother, it’s going to be about a boy and his horse and it’s going to be all sentimental.” But it turns out to be very dramatic and sometimes profound.

Bill:That is surprising — horse movies don’t usually have much to say beyond how nice it is to have a horse.

Arch:It stars Charlie Plummer, who played J. Paul Getty III in All the Money in the World. He’s no relation to Christopher Plummer, who played his grandfather, but I’m pretty sure Christopher Plummer would not mind claiming him. He’s very, very good. He’s living with his father, who’s kind of a ne’er-do-well, and the kid gets a job at a race track, working for an odd little character who buys and races horses, and he’s played by Steve Buscemi.

Bill: Who better to play an odd little character?

Arch:Exactly. Well, one day his dad dies, and it becomes clear that Steve Buscemi is going to get rid of Lean on Me, to whom the boy has become very attached. So the kid and the horse take off, and the kid ends up living on the street while he looks for an aunt, but the horse runs off, and the kid goes looking for the horse.  So it’s not about a boy and a horse. It’s about a boy looking for a family, for someone to lean on and for someone to lean on him. Are you following all this?

Bill:Yes! I’m transfixed. It’s like I’m watching the movie!

Arch:Yes, I’m a master of the theater of the mind! Anyway, the kid is compelling. I thought the whole film was quite, quite good.

Bill:I see it was directed by Andrew Haigh, who also did 45 Yearswith Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtney. I remember that he made marvelous use of silences in that film. He’s a very understated filmmaker.

Arch:He manages to tell this sentimental story without sentimentalizing it. Chloe Sevigny plays a jockey, and she might be miscast — she just seems to be physically imposing. But it’s a very good movie and at its center is a terrific performance by Charlie Plummer.

You Were Never Really Here

Arch:May I mention a Joaquin Phoenix movie I saw, You Were Never Really Here?

Bill:I believe you just have.

Arch:I really,reallyhated it! I wished I was never really there! I wanted to leave, and I regretted every minute I stayed. It tries to be avant-garde, lots of close-ups of stuff. Joaquin is a PTSD veteran who hunts down missing children, and as he hunts for this one he’s killing people right and left, and it was just disgusting. It wasTaxi Driverand Taken, done much worse. Phoenix just looks terrible, and I would say it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.

Bill: That’s a ringing endorsement if ever I’ve heard one.

Arch: Did I say I hated it?