DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar in German Studies 2016
About
"Germans, Jews, and the Collapse of the Secular Future"

In his oracular “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written as the storm of World War II was about to break and preserved in the wreckage of that disaster, Walter Benjamin inveighed against Enlightened and socialist views of progress as virtually inevitable, needing but a nudge from humanity to keep moving in the right direction. For Benjamin, that vision of automatic progress toward a better world was so pernicious that to combat it he invoked a putative ancient Jewish ban on auguries of the future. Instead, he famously drew on the memory of “enslaved ancestors” rather than “liberated grandchildren” as the only effective source of true revolutionary passions.

Just a few years after the war ended, Benjamin’s great friend Gershom Scholem came to Germany to declare the vaunted German-Jewish symbiosis “a myth.” Scholem’s judgment here is linked to Benjamin’s repudiation of “hope,” at least as located in the future, and inasmuch as the neo-Kantian identification with the best of what is “German” and what is “Jewish” was tied to Enlightenment progress.

Formations of progressive or revolutionary hope have become increasingly rare, especially in the Euro-American context, since the 1960s. For many working out of the German traditions of dialectic and critique (in which “German-Jews” were central interlocutors), critique of Enlightenment has largely replaced the articulation of visions of that better future. In broader cultural discourse, even the kinds of technotopias on display at the 1964 World’s Fair have disappeared, to be replaced by frustrating debates about the reality of global scorching and the exhaustion of extricable minerals.

This seminar will work to articulate four broad, but tightly linked premises:
  1. What we casually call “modernity” is characterized, inter alia, by a forward-looking ethic that tries to ensure the inevitability and to hasten the arrival of a better, secular future that is in any case somehow promised us;
  2. Through a series of blows largely but not exclusively to the dominance of Europe (World War I, World War II, the collapse of the Soviet Union), the inevitability and perhaps even the possibility of that secular future are no longer readily available to the imagination;
  3. The catastrophe of Germany and of the Jews (related in complex ways to the historical dialectic of Christendom and the Jews) is produced as a central symptom of the collapse of the secular future; and
  4. Critical scholarship has not yet fully attended to that collapse, let alone proposed ethics of temporality and/or history in response.
The seminar is open to scholars with a broad range of competences and research foci – especially historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, those in Jewish studies and German studies, as well as those working in postcolonial and interdisciplinary cultural studies more generally. Readings will vary in genre, but will surely include the work of Benjamin and Scholem, as well as foundational studies in the rhetoric of temporality and progress by scholars such as Blumenberg, Koselleck, Habermas, and Löwith - taken both as sources of insight and as data for a lingering nostalgia for the lost secular future. We will engage participants’ own ongoing research in the seminar, with an eye toward advancing individual projects while working toward a new articulation of this situation that defines our common present.

The seminar will take place June 19-July 29, 2016 at Cornell University.

Seminar Director: Jonathan A. Boyarin
Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies
Hendrix Director of Jewish Studies
Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies
Cornell University

Jonathan Boyarin previously held the Beren Professorship of Modern Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas and the Kaplan Chair in Modern Jewish Thought at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. An anthropologist and lawyer by training, his ethnographies include Polish Jews in Paris: The Ethnography of Memory; Palestine and Jewish History: Criticism at the Borders of Ethnography;and Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul. His essays at the intersection of Jewish identities and critical theory are contained in the collections Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory; Thinking in Jewish; and Jewishness and the Human Dimension. He is the editor or co-editor of The Ethnography of Reading; Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies; and Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace. He is also a Yiddish translator.

Program: The program will combine regular seminar meetings and discussions with presentation of participants’ research and occasional guest lectures. Seminar meetings will be conducted in English; advanced reading knowledge of German required.

Special Notes on Eligibility: Participation is open to faculty members in the Humanities and Social Sciences at colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. Applicants who have received their Ph.D.s within the past two years but do not yet hold faculty appointments are encouraged to apply. Graduate students and Ph.D. candidates are not eligible. Participants are expected to have an active interest in German intellectual and cultural history and must be citizens or permanent residents of the U.S. or Canada.

Eligibility Requirements
Tuition
Terms of Award
Seminar Requirements
Application Guidelines

Download Applications
Eligibility Requirements
  • Postdocs who have received their degrees within the past two years at accredited US and Canadian institutions of higher education are invited to apply.
  • Preference will be given to candidates who have not previously attended one of the summer seminars or received a DAAD grant within the past three years.
  • Applicants must be citizens or permanent residents of the United States or Canada. Permanent residents must have been affiliated with a United States or Canadian institution in full-time employment for at least five consecutive years, German nationals for at least six years.
  • Participants are expected to have an active interest in German intellectual and cultural history.
  • A reading knowledge of German is advisable.
Tuition
There is a $50 course fee; participants are eligible for a stipend.
Terms of Award
DAAD awards a small number of grants to cover tuition, travel and room and board during the seminar. The duration of the seminar is typically four to six weeks.
Seminar Requirements
Participants are required to attend all seminar sessions and to participate actively in the work of the seminar. Work-in-progress of participants and guests will be discussed. A written report is expected within four weeks of the end of the seminar.
Application Guidelines
All parts of the application must be typewritten or computer-generated and submitted in duplicate (original and one copy).

Please do not staple any of the application materials.

A complete application consists of the following parts:
  • DAAD application form entitled "Interdisciplinary Summer Seminar in German Studies.” Please answer all questions on the form, even if you refer to additional material
  • Curriculum vitae
  • Complete list of publications
  • A detailed statement explaining why the applicant wants to attend the seminar
  • One letter of recommendation

All application materials to be sent to Prof. Jonathan A. Boyarin at Cornell University.
Deadline  
The application deadline is March 1, 2016.
Questions?  
All application materials to be addressed to:
Prof. Jonathan A. Boyarin
Department of Anthropology
Cornell University
261 McGraw Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
Tel.: (607) 255-6768
Fax: (607) 255-3747
E-mail: Jonathan A. Boyarin [[email protected]]

For further information about seminar content, please contact:
Prof. Jonathan A. Boyarin
Department of Anthropology
Cornell University
261 McGraw Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
Tel.: (607) 255-6768
Fax: (607) 255-3747
E-mail: Jonathan A. Boyarin [[email protected]]

For other seminar-related questions, please contact Olga Petrova at Cornell University’s Institute for German Cultural Studies.

Olga Petrova, Assistant to the Director
Institute for German Cultural Studies
Cornell University
726 University Avenue
Ithaca, NY 14850
Tel.: (607) 255-8408
Fax: (607) 255-1454
E-mail: Olga Petrova [[email protected]]