Channel Title: American Academy in Berlin Channel Description: The American Academy in Berlin's Youtube channel (AABonline) features a selection of lectures, readings, and discussions at in the arts, humanities, and public policy. To learn more, please visit www.americanacademy.de Berlin Office American Academy in Berlin GmbH Hans Arnhold Center Am Sandwerder 17-19 14109 Berlin New York Office American Academy in Berlin, Inc. 14 East 60th Street, Suite 1104 New York, NY 10022 USA Germany <video> Fellow Spotlight: Zachary Shore Description: Zachary Shore is a professor in the department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and a National Security Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. In his book project “A Wiser World,” he asks what history can teach us about making wise decisions. </video> <video> A Wiser World: The Global Quest for Good Judgement. Description: Many people today think the world is on the wrong track. Insufficient action against climate change, the resurgence of authoritarian regimes, and the lack of guardrails on artificial intelligence are just some of the threats fueling fear and despair. But the world has seen daunting dangers before and has managed to survive them. How? In this lecture, Zachary Shore looks at the personal qualities, group dynamics, and historical conditions that have made wise decisions more or less likely to arise. The world’s current troubles would be more manageable, he contends, if we understood more clearly what produces wisdom and how to apply it. </video> <video> The Art of Fiction Description: Award-winning writer Mona Simpson—author of "Commitment," "Anywhere But Here," and "My Hollywood"—discusses the dramatic and sometimes tumultuous process of beginning a novel. Fresh off turning in her latest project, "Help and Its Sequel," Simpson has arrived in Berlin with no fewer than three potential new novel ideas. One explores a biracial and cross-class relationship, another is a contemporary love story in which two middle-aged women contrive to write a romance novel to escape their jobs, and the third book is based on two historical women prominent in the life of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Simpson talks about how a novelist selects from the many bits of inspiration that present themselves and how sometimes the material itself makes the decision, overriding the writer’s best intentions. </video> <video> Schneepalast: An Emotional History of Snow Description: In the spring of 1927, a Schneepalast—an indoor palace covered in artificial snow—opened in Berlin, followed by another in Vienna. These snow palaces were short-lived entertainments of the Weimar era. From today’s vantage, they gesture at something unsettling: As the climate changes, snowfall and snow cover are diminishing. Amy Waldman intertwines cultural history, ecology, philosophy, and memoir to explore how snow has shaped not just our material circumstances and forms of amusement, but also our interior landscapes. What else do we lose if we lose snow? And how will we remember it? Can one construct a Schneepalast of the mind? </video> <video> Dignity Is a Matter of Design Description: Dignity used to be seen as something you inherited or earned. Today, we believe that every human being deserves respect, no matter their background. In this talk, Peter H. Christensen explores a new perspective on dignity: What does it take for dignity to truly flourish? While we need certain comforts, we also need basic rights like access to work, family, healthcare, education, and safety from violence and persecution. Christensen argues that these needs are fundamentally linked to our physical world. In other words, dignity is deeply connected to how our environments are designed. </video> <video> Germany and the United States Contend with War in Europe Description: A panel of experts from the Richard C. Holbrooke Workshop on December 10 discuss issues stemming from the war in Ukraine, the challenge of mounting an effective and sustainable transatlantic response to the war, and opportunities for rethinking and for preserving a rules-based international order as well as a workable European security architecture. A discussion with Michael Kimmage, Professor of History, The Catholic University of America, and Senior Non-Resident Associate, Center for Strategic and International Studies; Hanna Notte, Director, Eurasia Nonproliferation Program, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), and Senior Non-Resident Associate, Center for Strategic and International Studies; and William Ruger, President, American Institute for Economic Research. Moderated by Daniel Benjamin, President, American Academy in Berlin. </video> <video> Fellow Spotlight: David Grubbs Description: David Grubbs is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His Academy project explores the demands that composers and musicians face when working collaboratively in emerging hybrid practices such as multidisciplinary performance, expanded cinema, video, installation, interactive media, and sound art. </video> <video> Sound in Multidisciplinary Collaboration Description: David Grubbs explores the challenges and demands that composers and musicians encounter when working collaboratively in hybrid practices. Drawing upon his experience of collaborating with figures such as poet Susan Howe and artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch, Grubbs looks back to the electronic music alliance of John Cage, David Tudor, Maryanne Amacher, and other artists of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. As music composition today finds itself operating within a matrix of multidisciplinary performance, video installation, and interactive media, it is compelled to facilitate novel inquiries into co-authorship, improvisation, genre, and distributed creativity. After the talk, David Grubbs is in discussion with artist, electronic music composer, and co-founder of the music group Mouse on Mars, Jan St. Werner. </video> <video> Germany, My Elsewhere Description: Living in Berlin shaped Nell Irvin Painter’s best-known book, The History of White People (2010). Her time in Germany and interest in the country’s public monuments and memorials made European intellectual history more concrete. In recent years, Painter has come to sense ever more meaningful parallels between how Germany and the American South have confronted their pasts. In this talk, she reflects upon her experience of Germany and the ways it has shaped her thinking. </video> <video> Getting the Zeitenwende Right: Military and Society in Modern Germany Description: Germany’s Zeitenwende, the term introduced in a landmark 2022 speech by Chancellor Olaf Scholz to herald a major shift in Germany’s security orientation, was meant to bring a new emphasis on revitalizing national military capabilities and reaffirming Germany’s commitment to collective defense. Two years on, it is time to evaluate the progress of this shift and determine if sufficient progress is being made. What will it take for Germany to adapt its societal attitudes, its military, and its industrial base to address contemporary security challenges and establish itself as a military power? Led by Mara Karlin—former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities and director of the Foreign Policy Institute at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University—panel participants Academy president Daniel Benjamin and Wolfgang Ischinger, Amb.(rtd); President Munich Security Conference Foundation; and Trustee, American Academy in Berlin, discuss the ways in which Germany faces a dramatically changed security landscape and how it is coping with growing external pressure to take on a more assertive military role within Europe and on the global stage. </video> <video> Artificial: A Love Story Description: New Yorker cartoonist Amy Kurzweil reads from and discusses her most recent graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story, a personal story about the future of the past and an investigation into how art and technology can deepen our quest for meaning and connection. After her presentation, Kurzweil is in conversation with Berlin-based American artist and composer Holly Herndon. In Artificial, we meet the Kurzweils, a family of creators who are preserving their history through unusual means. At the center is renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has long been saving the documents of his deceased father, Fredric, an accomplished conductor and pianist from Vienna who fled the Nazis in 1938. Once, Fred’s life was saved by his art: an American benefactor, impressed by Fred’s musical genius, sponsored his emigration to the United States. He escaped just one month before Kristallnacht. Now, Fred has returned. Through AI and salvaged writing, Ray is building a chatbot that writes in Fred’s voice, and he enlists his daughter Amy to help him ensure the immortality of their family’s fraught inheritance. Artificial: A Love Story was a New Yorker Best Book of 2023, an NPR Book We Love, A Powell’s Pick of the Season, a Kirkus Best Nonfiction of 2023 and a Booklist Editors’ Choice Graphic Novel, among other accolades. The German translation was published in October 2024 with Verlaghaus Jacoby & Stuart. </video> <video> Traditional Jewish Literature and Trans Politics Description: Ancient Jewish texts contain a variety of sex and gender categories that profoundly shaped Jewish ideas about law and gender. Eunuchs and androgynes, for example, allow for the possibilities of existence beyond a simple binary. In this talk, Max K. Strassfeld argues that these historical Judaic texts can prompt a radical reassessment of contemporary narratives about the relationship among religion, gender, and law. Such venerable rabbinic sources, they suggest, can help counter the so-called traditional claims of Judeo-Christian ideas of binary gender. </video> <video> The 2024 Presidential Race: A New Turning Point? Description: Since Kamala Harris’s nomination as the Democratic candidate for the 2024 presidential election, polling numbers show a transformed race. Harris has overtaken Donald Trump in most national polls, fueled by rising enthusiasm among younger and non-white voters. But the race remains far from decided, with the outcome hinging on seven pivotal swing states. Despite Democratic momentum, Republicans still benefit from a structural edge in the Electoral College, and Trump’s campaign team has long focused on securing key battlegrounds like Georgia and Pennsylvania. Renowned political strategist Doug Sosnik, former senior advisor to President Bill Clinton and one of Washington’s most sought-after election analysts, breaks down the latest polling data, offering insights into what both campaigns must do to clinch victory in this high-stakes election. </video> <video> Inflections of Belief Description: Writer Ayana Mathis was raised in a Black evangelical church; her young life was circumscribed by the mores, doctrine, and rituals of faith in a God of contradictions: loving and generous on one hand, inscrutable and wrathful on the other. Mathis left the church long ago, but its influence has never fully dissipated: Religious practice opened into an inclination toward the mechanisms and mysteries of belief and a deep interest in the ways in Western morality, aesthetics, and culture—literature in particular—grapple with religious impulse and logic. Even as mainstream culture moves away from religious affiliation, contemporary literature in the United States continues to engage, implicitly and explicitly, with iterations of religious ideas not dissimilar from those of the tradition in which she was raised. In this talk—more exploration than analysis—Mathis discusses the religious inflections, for better and for worse, in the fiction she reads, writes, and critiques. </video> <video> Youth, Politics, and the Downfall of the Brazilian Military Dictatorship Description: The brave generation that challenged the Brazilian military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985 faced defeat in 1968. A decade later, however, a new wave of activists emerged and demanded an end to military rule. James N. Green highlights how the activists of “Generation ’77” not only opposed the regime but also grappled with broader questions about democracy and the rising Black, women’s, and LGBTQ+ movements. Unlike contemporary Marxists, they had different ideas on how to create a more inclusive society after authoritarianism. In this talk, Green delves into this often-overlooked generation to show how it shaped a new, long-term political vision as Brazil slowly moved toward democracy. </video>

Description

The American Academy in Berlin's Youtube channel (AABonline) features a selection of lectures, readings, and discussions at in the arts, humanities, and public policy. To learn more, please visit www.americanacademy.de

Berlin Office
American Academy in Berlin GmbH
Hans Arnhold Center
Am Sandwerder 17-19
14109 Berlin

New York Office
American Academy in Berlin, Inc.
14 East 60th Street, Suite 1104
New York, NY 10022
USA
Germany

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