"To save a stranger, first love your home": a special screening of the indie documentary The Volunteers – im d.a.i. Tübingen

Join American documentary filmmaker, scholar of American studies, and emeritus professor of constitutional law Mark S. Weiner as he screens and answers questions about his new feature-length indie documentary essay The Volunteers: Mountain Rescue Brings Us Home (Hidden Cabinet Films, 105 minutes). The film explores big philosophical and political issues through an unlikely subject: mountain rescue—specifically in the connection between two mountain rescue organizations, one in Seattle, Washington, the other in Tyrol, Austria. This connection ultimately runs through World War II, and Nazism, and their lessons for civic life today. Weiner's underlying premise is that mountain rescue offers a positive, inspiring way of thinking about civic life, especially the relation between local attachment to place and universal human solidarity, that can help transcend political differences.

Short Bio: Mark S. Weiner (A.B., American Studies, Stanford University; Ph.D., American Studies, Yale University; J.D., Yale Law School) is professor emeritus at Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey. A scholar of the public humanities, he co-curated "Law's Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection" for the Grolier Club in New York, whose catalogue was awarded the Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award from the American Association of Law Libraries. He has been a Fulbright Scholar to Akureyri, Iceland and Salzburg, Austria, and he served as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies in Uppsala, Sweden.

"Pushkin in the African-American Imagination"
With Melissa Frazier (Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY)
Date: Tue, 7 May 2023, 02:30 PM 
Ort: Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut Tübingen, d.a.i. hall (d.a.i., Karlstr. 3)

African-Americans have long identified with Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) both as a great poet and as a poet of partly African descent. Mention of Pushkin’s African great-grandfather appeared in the African-American press as early as 1828, and Pushkin himself remained a touchstone for Black artists well into the 20th century. Join us for a combined screening and discussion that will focus on the work of two Black artists in particular. We will talk about the 1990 film To Sleep With Anger by acclaimed AfricanAmerican director Charles Burnett, which tells the story of an enigmatic older gentleman, Harry (played by actor Danny Glover). Harry pays an unexpected visit to old friends, who, like Harry, are originally from the South, but followed the Great Migration to L.A. where they now live a comfortable middle-class life. We will then watch and listen to clips of African-American actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson, blacklisted for his political stance in the 1940s and ‘50s, as he performs in English, Russian, and Yiddish.

Melissa Frazier is a professor of Russian Language and Russian and Comparative Literature. Current projects include Dostoevsky and the detective novel and the intersections of Russian and African American literature. Frazier is a DAAD visiting professor at the Slavic Department in Tübingen during the summer semester 2024. 
 

Download the semester program of the d.a.i. here. 

Admission is free. Please register online www.dai-tuebingen.de/frazier

In collaboration with the d.a.i. and the Slavic Department of the University of Tübingen and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).