Cultural geographer Olaf Kuhlke, Ph.D., will speak on competing representations of nationhood in post-Wall Germany at 6:30 p.m. March 8 in Brown Hall Auditorium.
Kuhlke’s talk for the Kemper Art Museum is titled “The Past is Always With Us: German National Identities in Post-Wall Berlin.” The event is free and open to the public.
The German-born Kuhlke, assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota Duluth, investigates the construction of nationalism and its expression in public spaces. His 2004 study “Representing German Identity in the New Berlin Republic” examines how social and cultural movements have used the human body and metaphors of nature to represent German national identity since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Specifically, the work focuses on two contrasting cultural touchstones of contemporary Berlin — the annual Love Parade and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe — to demonstrate how post-Wall representations of the body fluctuate between the sexualized and demasculinized celebration of multiculturalism and the racist, masculinist and even anti-Semitic reconstruction of German nationhood.
The talk is presented in conjunction with the museum’s exhibition “Reality Bites: Making Avant-garde Art in Post-Wall Germany” on view through April 29.
For more information, call 935-4523 or visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.