Olaf Kuhlke to speak on German national identity in post-Wall Berlin March 8

Cultural geographer Olaf Kuhlke will speak on competing representations of nationhood in post-Wall Germany at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 8, for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

The talk, titled “The Past is Always With Us: German National Identity in Post-Wall Berlin,” is free and open to the public and takes place in Brown Hall Auditorium, located near the intersection of Forsyth Boulevard and Chaplin Drive. For more information, call (314) 935-4523 or visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.

Kuhlke, assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, investigates the construction of nationalism and its expression in public spaces. His recent study Representing German Identity in the New Berlin Republic (2004) examines how various social and cultural movements have utilized the human body and metaphors of nature to represent German national identity since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Specifically, the book 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, demasculinized celebration of multiculturalism and the racist, masculinist and even anti-Semitic reconstruction of German nationhood.

Kuhlke’s lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Reality Bites: Making Avant-garde Art in Post-Wall Germany, on view at the Kemper Art Museum through April 29. The exhibition is the first thematic museum show to examine how contemporary artists have dealt — both directly and indirectly — with the social, economic and political ramifications of German unification.

The Kemper Art Museum is located just east of Brown Hall, near the intersection of Forsyth and Skinker boulevards. Regular hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays; and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. The museum is closed Tuesdays.