Thursday, October 1, 20264:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383
The Center for European and Russian Studies and UCLA Department of Anthropology invite you to a talk "The Lorelei's Call: Verwandtschaft, Loss, and Return in a Divided Germany" with John Borneman. This talk will be held in Bunche Hall Room 10383 on Thursday, October 1 at 4pm and followed by a light reception. Please register to join us.
About the Talk
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.
About the Speaker
John Borneman is among the most well-known and groundbreaking theorists within the subfields of legal, political and psychological anthropology, having conducted fieldwork in Lebanon and Syria and throughout Central Europe. He came to Princeton in 2001 after teaching at Cornell University for a decade. His early work focused on a divided Berlin, including the first two of his nine books, “After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin” (1991) and “Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation” (1992). His other books on Germany include “Sojourners: The Return of German-Jews and the Question of Identity”(1995), co-authored with Jeffery Peck; “Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Postsocialist Europe” (1997); “Subversions of International Order: Studies in the Political Anthropology of Culture” (1998); and “Cruel Attachments: The Ritual Rehab of Child Molesters in Germany” (2015).
Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Anthropology