News & Events

Grischa Meyer, exhibition co-curator

Grischa Meyer is a graphic designer, author, and lecturer, born in Berlin in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). He has published works on the photographer and theater actress Ruth Berlau, on war photography, and German post-war everyday history. He has been researching Bertolt Brecht’s text-image montages since 2005, the first interim results of which are on display in this exhibition, in collaboration with Holger Teschke, a Berlin-based dramaturg, writer, and lecturer.

In 1982, Grischa received his diploma as a graphic designer at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee, and since 1983, Grischa has worked in Berlin as a freelance designer, stage designer, and author. Grischa Meyer’s first book, Ruth Berlau – Photographer with Brecht, was published in 2003 by Propylaen Publishers. In 2005, Grischa spent a year on a Copeland Fellowship with the German Department at Amherst College. Since 2006, Grischa has taught graphic design at the Ostkreuzschule. From 2013 – 2017 he taught as Lecturer in the history of design and design theory at the Vitruvius University of Applied Science in Leipzig, and in 2014, Grischa was Guest Lecturer at CalArts, at CSULB Long Beach, and at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Holger Teschke, exhibition co-curator

Holger Teschke, born in Bergen on Rügen and raised in Sassnitz, is author of many published books of poetry, drama, radio plays, and prose. He learned the trade of a ship’s engine locksmith and went to sea until 1980. After studying acting direction in Berlin, he was employed as a dramaturg at the Berliner Ensemble from 1987 to 1999. From 1990 to 2010 he worked as a director and visiting professor of directing in the USA, Canada and Southeast Asia. For the Seebühne Hiddensee, Teschke has adapted and directed Shakespeare, Defoe, Goethe, Poe and Kafka. Since 2010, Holger Teschke has been teaching theater history and dramaturgy at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch in Berlin. He writes plays, radio plays, travel books and essays, and was awarded the Critics’ Prize of the Berliner Zeitung in 1989, the Culture Prize of the Rügen Cultural Foundation in 2005 and the Children’s Radio Play Prize of Karlsruhe in 2008. From 2000 until 2009, Holger Teschke was visiting professor at Mount Holyoke College. He is a member of the PEN Center Germany, and since 2019, he has been an honorary member of the Seebühne Hiddensee.

Andrea Simon, filmmaker

Andrea Simon is an independent documentary filmmaker whose work has explored the interaction between politics, culture and religion in a variety of times and places. Her work has been praised as both visually striking and intellectually provocative. Simon earned a BA degree at Sarah Lawrence College, a second BA and a MA at Newnham College (Cambridge Univ, UK), and a MPhil at Yale University. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Vienna in 1975 and, from 1980-81, an Assistant Editor for Austrian National Television. From 2006-09, Simon was Senior Producer on Bloomberg TV’s weekly arts program, Muse, presenting cutting-edge music, art, and ideas to a national and international public.

The director of many films, Simon most recently completed: Zahkor, an exploration of history and memory, with Simon Schama, commissioned by New York’s Center for Jewish History; and Imprisoned Lightening, commissioned for the 125th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, was on view in NYC at the Museum of Jewish Heritage through spring 2013, then toured to Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Her film Angel Wagenstein: Art Is a Weapon premiered at the New York Jewish Film Festival in January 2017.

Jonas Rosenbrück, Assistant Professor

Jonas Rosenbrück is Assistant Professor of German at Amherst College. His publications and research interests span Germanophone (and to a lesser degree Francophone) literatures from 1750 to the present; philosophy and literary theory; theories of nationalism, gender, and racialization; and the history of the senses as well as ecocriticism. His first book, titled A Revolution of the Senses: Odor and Modern Poetry (under review), produces an account of why smell has long been the most neglected of our senses and how deodorization has shaped our understanding of (ocularcentric) modernity. As the book shows in case studies of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Brecht, and Ponge, olfaction—as a modulation of our condition of “being-in-the-air”—constitutes a largely forgotten but highly significant site of contestation for questions of corporeality, mediality, and politics. Rosenbrück's second project, “Toward a Critique of Geschlecht: Masculinities and Germanophone Literature 1945–1989,” investigates the link between nationalism and sexuality/gender, and looks at a wide range of West German and Austrian authors (Koeppen, Schmidt, Bachmann, Fritsch, Hubert Fichte, Jelinek, and others) who attempt to rewrite German masculinities after the catastrophe of fascist-masculinist sexual politics in Nazi Germany. His recently published articles have appeared in Comparative Literature (“Toward an Aesthetics of Obscurity: from Baumgarten to Blanchot”), The Germanic Review (on Walter Benjamin), and CR: The New Centennial Review (on palindromes). 

Karen Remmler (moderator) 

Karen Remmler is the Mary Lyon Professor of Humanities and Chair of German Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Her interdisciplinary publications and teaching in English and German focus on the politics and cultures of transnational memory in the aftermath of atrocity and war with an emphasis on memorialization and mourning in the digital age. Her current book projects include a family memoir focusing on transgenerational memories of trauma and a series of essays on the forensic turn in Holocaust and Refugee Studies entitled “(Im)proper Burial: The Afterlives of the Dead in the Wake of Extreme Violence.”