Termin

11.11.2026 | College of Fellows

"The Lorelei's Call: Verwandtschaft, Loss, and Return in a Divided Germany"
Prof. John Borneman

CoF Lecture Series

Abstract:
In 1983 I began fieldwork in Germany, asking not how two states diverged after 1949 but how two generations narrated the losses set in motion by 1945. What I found reshaped the question: alongside Mitgliedschaft — membership, the passport one holds — ran Zugehörigkeit, a subjective belonging independent of official status.

I open with my father, dying in a Wisconsin nursing home, unexpectedly singing Heine's "Lorelei" to a German friend, confronting me with an inheritance I had spent my life disclaiming. I track my family's nineteenth-century emigration from Germany, a loss never quite transformational, before turning to Arnim, an East Berlin research subject across four decades, whose friendship taught me that ethnographic knowledge is inseparable from the relationships, and losses, through which it is made.

The talk closes with my decision to make Berlin home — not through membership finally acquired, but through Verwandtschaft: kinship built not from blood or soil, but from a shared working-through of loss.

John Borneman, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, received his Ph.D. from Harvard (1989) and taught at Cornell (1991 – 2001), and Princeton (2001 – 2022). His longterm fieldwork has been in Germany and Syria, and he has written extensively on relation of the state and law to intimacy and practices of care. In 2013 he was awarded the Boyer Prize for contributions to psychoanalytic anthropology. His most recent book is I Was Married to a Horse, and other Tales of an Accidental Anthropology, published in 2026.