ThoughtGallery.org > Angelika Bammer: “Born After. Reckoning With the German Past”

Angelika Bammer: “Born After. Reckoning With the German Past”

Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a reading and talk by Angelika Bammer, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University, on the issues raised in her memoir “Born After: Reckoning with the German Past” (Bloomsbury, 2019). The book grapples with the legacies of German and Nazi history, and reflects on the relationship between history and memory through Angelika Bammer’s personal narrative.

Angelika Bammer will be introduced by Marion Kaplan, Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at NYU, who will also moderate the Q&A.

About the book:

What do we do with pasts we inherit that carry shame? A major and original contribution to thinking about and grappling with the legacies of German and Nazi history, this book reflects on the relationship between history and memory through the personal narrative of a postwar German intellectual. Arguing that the pasts that haunt us are shaped both by the things people did and suffered and the affective traces the past leaves in memory, Born After is a powerful meditation on questions of guilt, complicity, loss, and longing. With bracing honesty and without sentimentality, Bammer draws on her own family story to think anew about a history that we have come to accept as familiar. Inflecting questions about history with questions about ethics, her book speaks to all those concerned with historical pasts that remain unreconciled.

About the author:

Angelika Bammer is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University. She is the author of The Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s (Peter Lang, revised edition, 2015; Routledge, 1st edition, 1991). She is the editor of Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (Indiana University Press, 1994). A multi-media installation of her work on Memory Sites: Destruction, Loss, and Transformation was presented at Emory University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003-4. Bammer’s new work continues to explore the aftermath of unresolved pasts, extending it to a transnational context.

Attendance information:

Events at Deutsches Haus are free of charge. If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to [email protected]. Space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event. Thank you!

“Angelika Bammer: “Born After. Reckoning with the German Past” is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).











When: Mon., Mar. 2, 2020 at 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Where: Deutsches Haus at NYU
42 Washington Mews
212-998-8660
Price: Free
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Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a reading and talk by Angelika Bammer, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University, on the issues raised in her memoir “Born After: Reckoning with the German Past” (Bloomsbury, 2019). The book grapples with the legacies of German and Nazi history, and reflects on the relationship between history and memory through Angelika Bammer’s personal narrative.

Angelika Bammer will be introduced by Marion Kaplan, Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at NYU, who will also moderate the Q&A.

About the book:

What do we do with pasts we inherit that carry shame? A major and original contribution to thinking about and grappling with the legacies of German and Nazi history, this book reflects on the relationship between history and memory through the personal narrative of a postwar German intellectual. Arguing that the pasts that haunt us are shaped both by the things people did and suffered and the affective traces the past leaves in memory, Born After is a powerful meditation on questions of guilt, complicity, loss, and longing. With bracing honesty and without sentimentality, Bammer draws on her own family story to think anew about a history that we have come to accept as familiar. Inflecting questions about history with questions about ethics, her book speaks to all those concerned with historical pasts that remain unreconciled.

About the author:

Angelika Bammer is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University. She is the author of The Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s (Peter Lang, revised edition, 2015; Routledge, 1st edition, 1991). She is the editor of Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (Indiana University Press, 1994). A multi-media installation of her work on Memory Sites: Destruction, Loss, and Transformation was presented at Emory University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003-4. Bammer’s new work continues to explore the aftermath of unresolved pasts, extending it to a transnational context.

Attendance information:

Events at Deutsches Haus are free of charge. If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to [email protected]. Space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event. Thank you!

“Angelika Bammer: “Born After. Reckoning with the German Past” is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).

Buy tickets/get more info now