Jakob-Fugger-Zentrum
Lecture Daniel Wildmann: "Desire, Excess and Integration. Orientalist fantasies, moral feelings and the question of the place of Jews in German society in films of the Weimar Republic"
16.10.2014
On October 16th 2014, Dr. Daniel Wildmann from the Leo Baeck Institute in London spoke on the topic of "Desire, Excess and Integration. Orientalist fantasies, moral feelings and the question of the place of Jews in German society in films of the Weimar Republic" in the new municipal library of Augsburg. He was invited by the Jakob-Fugger-Zentrum and the Chair of Modern German Literature (Prof. Dr. Bettina Bannasch) .
The films "The Golem: How He Came into the World" (1920) and "The Ancient Law" (1923) negotiate ideas about Jews, Judaism, and their place in German society. In both of them, political drama about the future of the Jews is combined with private drama about love and erotic desires between Jews and Christians. The two films seem to tell stories of the past, but they address the present - German society in the 1920s. However, each film offers completely different answers to the same question: Should Jews live in the midst of German society?
Report in the local press: Augsburger Allgemeine (16.10.2014)
Dr. Daniel Wildmann
is the Director of the Leo Baeck Institute London and a Senior Lecturer for History at the Queen Mary College, University of London. His numerous publications deal with questions of recent German-Jewish history and the history of National Socialism. Daniel Wildmann's current research focuses on the connection between anti-Semitism, visual representations and their associated emotions.