There is a wealth of problems with Claude Lanzmann’s recent film The Last of the Unjust, on Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Elder of the Jews of Theresienstadt. Yet the most aggravating of them is that it portrays Murmelstein as someone who he was not, namely as a heroic figure. In styling Murmelstein as a tragic hero, Lanzmann projects his own p…[Read more]

Marco Heiles, The Medial Determination of German Edition Philology, in: Hannes Bajohr, Benjamin Dorvel, Vincent Hessling und Tabea Weitz (Hg.), The Future of Philology. Proceedings of the 11th Annual Columbia University German Graduate Student Conference, Newcastle upon Tyne 2014, S. 183-193. Content: 1. Edition philology in the eyes of media…[Read more]

This is a review of Max Beckmann in New York. Written by Sabine Rewald and published by Yale University Press, this catalogue accompanies the eponymous exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Fifth Avenue, 16 October 2016-20 February 2017; 148 pages with color reproductions of all the paintings from the exhibition plus other Beckmann…[Read more]

An upper-level seminar on contemporary negotiations of Germany‘s Cold War and National Socialist pasts, as reflected in literature, film, architecture, visual art, and political discourse from 1989 to the present. (As taught at UCLA, 2013.)

Seminar on conceptions of “race” in classical German thinkers (including Leibniz, Kant, Herder, Hegel, Kleist, A. von Humboldt), and their reception in twentieth-century North American, Francophone African, French, and Caribbean political thought. (As taught at Princeton University, 2013)

A delineation and critique of the posthumous construction Goethe and Kant into rival “antipodes” within German intellectual culture in the early twentieth century.

“Senghor’s Other Europe,” Savannah Review, vol. 1 (November 2012)