Events 2023-24
Most CGES Online and hybrid events are recorded. Explore upcoming Fall 2023 events listed below, or browse through the 2022 & Spring 2023 CGES Online Events. Get direct access to a list of all recorded webinars on CGES Online's Archive below.
CGES Online Recordings: Complete List
Sign up for our Newsletter to receive information about all events organized or sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies. We also post event announcements on our Facebook and Instagram accounts and invite you to follow us on social media.
Upcoming Events
December 13, 2023
CGES Online Event
How do you deal with the legacy of a Nazi perpetrator in your own family? How do you confront the silence of relatives, their displacement and denial, their feelings of guilt and shame? Will truth win over family loyalties or complicity prevail? German writer Alexandra Senfft is the granddaughter of Hanns Elard Ludin, the ‘Envoy of the Third Reich’ to Slovakia, executed as war criminal 1947 in Bratislava. In her writings she addresses the intergenerational consequences of the Holocaust in her own and other German families with a Nazi-background.
Past Events
November 30, 2023
CGES Hybrid Event
In these troubled times for democracy, the good news came unexpectedly from Poland. In 2023, by turning out in record numbers, millions of Poles showed that they considered it even more important to exit from national populism than to exit from communism (more than 74% of the electorate cast ballots, compared with 62% in the tide-turning election of June 1989). However, if anyone thinks that returning to liberal democracy is an easy thing to do, they will soon be disillusioned. In many respects, the new Polish democratic government faces a much bigger challenge than its predecessor of 1989. Join us for a conversation with Karolina Wigura, Assistant Professor at Warsaw's Institute for Sociology and Senior Fellow of the Zentrum Liberale Moderne.
November 29, 2023
CGES In-Person Event
As climate change has become the defining crisis of our time, so too have the urgent measures required to address it taken the center stage in public and political debates across the world’s wealthiest democracies. Climate change remains a typical valence issue; the vast majority of citizens agree on the need to protect the environment and tackle climate change. Why, then, do populist radical right parties decide to politicize the issue in the first place, and what are the conditions under which they benefit from doing so? This talk will examine these questions through the lens of local opposition against wind energy in France and Finland.
November 29, 2023
CGES Online Event
Join us for our fifth transatlantic climate conversation (TCC) and our first in cooperation with our third partner- AFAS - the African Climate and Environment Center - Future African Savannas, a cooperation between the Universities of Bonn/Cologne, the University of Nairobi, Kenya and Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Abidjan, Ivory Coast, one of the DAAD's Global Centres for Climate and Environment.
November 20, 2023
CGES Online Event
As climate change has become the defining crisis of our time, so too have the urgent measures required to address it taken the center stage in public and political debates across the world’s wealthiest democracies. Climate change remains a typical valence issue; the vast majority of citizens agree on the need to protect the environment and tackle climate change. Why, then, do populist radical right parties decide to politicize the issue in the first place, and what are the conditions under which they benefit from doing so? This talk will examine these questions through the lens of local opposition against wind energy in France and Finland.
November 9, 2023
CGES Hybrid Event
As early as 1919, Adolf Hitler distinguished between pogrom violence and so-called “rational” anti-Semitism. To achieve a lasting solution to the “Jewish question,” the young Hitler insisted that anti-Jewish laws and state policies had to be adopted. Hitler’s outward commitment to law was in sharp counterpoint to his public speeches and private conversations of the early 1920s, which contemplated extra-legal violence against the Jews. 85 years after the pogrom night of 1938, learn more from Professor Michael S. Bryant and join our students before the event for a commemorative ceremony.
November 9, 2023
CGES In-Person Event
As a child, Doris Edwards escaped Nazi-occupied Europe with her brother. Although they were separated from their parents for two years and three months, their parents got out alive and borrowed money to bring the children to New York in 1941, before the United States formally entered World War II. Joins us while Doris Edwards tells the story of how she and her brother escaped and reunited with their parents in New York. The evening will also include candle lighting.
November 5, 2023
CGES Co-Sponsored Event
Nachtland* is a mordant satire about marriage, legacy, the rise of the new right, and the terrible impulses buried deep. Marius von Mayenburg is one of Germany’s foremost playwrights. His plays include Fireface, Plastic and The Ugly One.
*Nachtland is an invented German word. It suggests a place of eternal darkness.
November 2, 2023
CGES Hybrid Event
What do a 75-year-old Los Angeles based rocket engineer and an eleven-year-old schoolgirl from Austria have in common? Not much at first glance, but Arthur and Lilly influenced each other’s lives in a fateful way.
October 22, 2023
CGES In-Person Event
Oil has been an invisible machine at the core of our economy and society. It now faces an uncertain future as activists and investors demand change. Is this the end of oil?
The film reveals the hidden infrastructure of oil from the offshore rigs and the buried pipelines to its flow through the stock markets of London. As the North Sea industry struggles to meet the need to cut carbon emissions, oil workers see their livelihoods under threat, and investors seek to protect their assets. Meanwhile a younger generation of climate activists are catalysed by the signs of impending chaos, and the very real threat of global sea level rises. THE OIL MACHINE explores the complexities of transitioning away from oil and gas as a society and considers how quickly we can do it.
October 16, 2023
CGES Online Event
In Germany, concerned citizens step forward to save an ancient forest from one of Europe’s biggest coal mines. They form an unlikely alliance with a frustrated community in rural England who are forced into action to protect their homes from a new opencast coal mine. FINITE: The Climate of Change is an insider’s view of the world of direct action; a raw, authentic and emotional insight into the David and Goliath battle between front line communities, activists and fossil fuel corporations.
October 15, 2023
CGES In-Person Event
Join us for a film screening of the environmental documentary FINITE. This will be followed up by a Q&A with the director of FINITE, Rich Felgate, tomorrow, October 16 from 12:00 -1:30 pm ET (on Zoom).
In Germany, concerned citizens step forward to save an ancient forest from one of Europe’s biggest coal mines. They form an unlikely alliance with a frustrated community in rural England who are forced into action to protect their homes from a new opencast coal mine. FINITE: The Climate of Change is an insider’s view of the world of direct action; a raw, authentic and emotional insight into the David and Goliath battle between front line communities, activists and fossil fuel corporations.
October 14, 2023
CGES In-Person Event
As a part of the 75th anniversary celebrations for Brandeis University, join us to celebrate the 25th anniversary of CGES, one of only six Centers for German and European Studies in the US, part of a network of 20 Centers worldwide, and a forum for transatlantic dialogue, research, and interdisciplinary programs. Light refreshments will be served.
October 14, 2023
CGES In-Person Event (Recording coming soon)
October 3, 2023
CGES Hybrid Event
Contrary to public perception, the nuclear power industry continues its slow, decades-long decline. Over the past two centuries, 99 reactors were connected to the grids in the world while 105 were closed. Since 49 of the startups and no closures were located in China, the reactor fleet in the rest of the world declined by 55 units. Did the trend change in recent years? No. In 2022, nuclear power production outside China dropped by 5 percent to its lowest level since the mid-1990s. Since December 2019, all of the 28 reactor construction-starts in the world were implemented either in China (17) or by the Russian nuclear industry (11) in various countries.
September 28, 2023
CGES Online Event
Indigenous and traditional people of the Amazon region have achieved historic influence in the current left-wing government under Lula in Brazil. Moreover, Lula has committed to social policy, deforestation reduction, and climate leadership, including hosting the COP30 2025 in Belem, Brazil. The first months of the government and the regional Amazon Summit this August have highlighted the opportunities and dangers for indigenous and traditional people, which we will discuss in this seminar, including false promises of the bioeconomy and greenwashing of local governments and agribusiness. We will also discuss what the new regional and South-South integration means for European countries like France and Germany, and their geopolitical resource interests.
September 21, 2023
CGES Hybrid Event
On 1 March 2023, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock presented Germany’s first-ever Guidelines for a Feminist Foreign Policy. Safeguarding women’s and marginalized group’s rights, representation and access to resources has thus become a cornerstone of German foreign policy.
Kristina Lunz, author of “The Future of Foreign Policy is Feminist” will read a brief excerpt from the book and explain the concept, and Consul General Sonja Kreibich will share from her experience implementing the Guidelines.
September 20, 2023
CGES Online Event
Join Professor Gerrit Lohmann, Head of the Working Group Paleoclimate Dynamics at the Alfred Wegener Institute and Professor of Physics of the Climate System at the University of Bremen, and a team of students for a sneak preview of their book of interviews with climate scientists from Germany and other countries. Take a look behind the scenes of what motivates, worries, and challenges climate scientists today and learn about causes and consequences of climate change, current problems and possible solutions. Further, gain insight into the political dimension of climate science, including reflections on science communication, societal aspects and feminist perspectives on climate science.
September 13, 2023
CGES Online Event
In this fourth Transatlantic Climate Conversation (TCC) we discuss how experts study the role of food in society - with a special eye towards climate impacts. What questions do health psychologists and cultural sociologists ask to understand why we eat what we eat and how what we eat can or should change for environmental and health reasons?
September 12, 2023
CGES Online Event
Fischer will discuss Maxim Biller's novel “Der falsche Gruß” [English translation: The Bad Salute] which provocatively holds up a mirror to the German cultural industry, forcing readers to dive deep into the mind of the main character, Erck Dessauer, a modern antisemite.