Past Events
The Sunworshippers
Maya Gurantz, Artist and Author
February 26, 2025 | 4pm
Max Kade Center
At its peak, Mazdaznan, an early 20th century sun-worshipping cult, filled dozens of temples with thousands of followers worldwide. It popularized proto-yogic breathing and physical exercises and disseminated vegetarianism with a bestselling cookbook. Mazdaznan forever transformed the Bauhaus School and the emergent radical right in California. Carl Jung and Upton Sinclair wrote about Mazdaznan. It remains a secret prototype for more famous cults that followed—from Scientology to NXIVM. It then vanished into thin air.
Artist and writer Maya Gurantz (Simons Public Humanities Fellow, Hall Center for the Humanities) shares her research on Mazdaznan; its picaresque founder, the Rev. Dr. Otoman Zar Adusht Ha’nish (born Otto Hanisch); and the enticements of its synthesis of health culture, Theosophical spiritualism, and eugenic fantasy. It’s a fable on the long-term impact of con men, who leave surprisingly powerful traces of themselves in unexpected places.
The Body of the Crime: Soviet Rehabilitation and the Rewriting of History
Linda Kinstler, Author and Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows
February 6, 2025 | 4pm
Max Kade Center
Just a few weeks after Stalin's death in March 1953, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree rehabilitating certain categories of Gulag prisoners; later that year, the first posthumous rehabilitations were ordered. These measures did not offer pardon or forgiveness for past crimes, but rather decreed that no crimes had ever been committed: that there was no "corpus delicti," no body of the crime. Thousands of prisoners were allowed to return to their homes, no longer labeled as enemies of the people. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a law ordered the rehabilitation of victims of political repression, paving the way for some 3.5 million individuals to have their criminal files proverbially wiped clean. Today, the force and meaning of these rehabilitation orders are being contested and revised: in September 2024, the Russian Prosecutor General's draft order authorizing the revision of rehabilitation cases was made public, a measure that could reinstate criminal offenses for thousands of individuals, dead and alive. Not only is the order another element of the Kremlin's campaign to rewrite Russian history, but it also reflects the instability of "rehabilitation" itself, and an uncertainty about its relation to similar legal terms of amnesty, oblivion, and pardon. What does it mean for the "body of the crime," once having been lost, to be legally found again? What might the contemporary "reverse rehabilitation" initiative reveal about the manipulation of law and history, and history through law?
Christmas in Germany - Craft Night
December 4, 2024 | 5pm
Max Kade Center
Visit the Max Kade Center and make a paper advent wreath, a typical German tradition. Enjoy refreshments and learn more about Christmas in Germany.
Herbstfest | Fall Festival
October 22, 2024 | 4:30pm
Max Kade Center, Back Lawn
Join us at the Max Kade Center for German-American Studies to celebrate the fall season with Apple Cider, Pretzels, and sweet treats. Play outdoor games like cornhole, ring toss, burlap sack race and just enjoy the serene environment around the Max Kade Center. This festival is open to all, but also a great opportunity to practice speaking German with students and faculty for those who'd like to.
German-Americans in the Revolutionary Midwest: Turner Halls
Devin O'Shea, Journalist
October 10, 2024 | 4pm
Max Kade Center
This talk examines the role of Turner Halls in the leadup to the American Civil War.
Migrating to America after the failures of the 1848 Revolutions, German Turners were on the front lines against the nativist Know Nothings. Turners became vital to abolitionist organizing, since many German immigrants were socialists, and saw the Confederacy as a new kind of monarchical-church rule over a racial caste system; a repeat of the horrors of feudal Europe.
American Turner Halls became community centers that helped organize German-American militia volunteers as the conflict over slavery became more and more intense. Turner Halls withstood nativist riots — like those in Cincinnati in 1855 — and created shooting clubs that ultimately defended the Union against secessionists.
Globalizing German-Speaking Valdivia, Chile
H.Glenn Penny, University of California, Los Angeles
September 26, 2024 | 4pm
Max Kade Center
Much of what we know about being German in Chile from the late 19th century through the interwar period stems from the men who ran successful businesses in cities such as Osorno, Santiago, Valparaiso and Valdivia. Scholars frequently use them, their associations and their institutions to highlight this immigrant community’s economic successes, these men’s professional skills and their contributions to the Chilean state. The family letters circulating around Luise Rudloff in Valdivia during the interwar period, however, tell us much more about how German-speaking Chileans negotiated multiple economic crises and opportunities, national upheavals and geopolitical shifts. Most importantly, they reveal the persistence of shared mental maps among family members, in which Europe, Latin America and North America were intimately intertwined. Families were not simply spread across these continents, they all were living simultaneously on them, tied into each other’s lives by correspondence that was managed and, in some ways, perpetuated by daughters, grandmothers, mothers and their children. That correspondence has the potential to upend our historical narratives of this tumultuous period.
Creating a Digital Archive: The New York Turn Verein Ledgers at the KU Max Kade Center
Hazlett Henderson, MKC Graduate Collections Intern
September 3, 2024 | 4pm
Max Kade Center, Sudler Annex
In 2008 the New York Turn Verein gifted their ledgers to the Max Kade Center for German-American Studies (MKC) at the University of Kansas. The New York Turn Verein was founded in 1850 as the Socialist Turn Verein New York, an organization with a purpose of promoting sound body and mind through gymnastics and “to strongly encourage true freedom, prosperity, and education for all classes”.
The New York Turn Verein ledgers span the years 1850 to 2005 and contain detailed information about organization’s operations and daily activities. As such they provide an insight into the activities of immigrant populations and the evolution of German identities in the US. From 2008 until now, this remarkable collection has been on display in the Sudler Annex of the Max Kade Center but has not been accessible to a broad audience. This past summer, MKC Graduate intern, Hazlett Henderson, worked to create a digital catalog of this invaluable record that will be available to the public.
Dr. Birgit Hebel-Bauridl, University of Regensburg
March 21, 2024 | 4pm
Centennial Room of the Kansas Union
"Memory, Participation, Resistance: The Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial and Museum"
This lecture examines the dynamics of memory, space, and encounter at a former concentration camp in Bavaria. What is now the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial and Museum has been put to multiple uses since its liberation in 1945, initially as a camp for displaced persons immediately post-war, as a memorial site for different populations imprisoned there, and most recently as a venue for workshops geared to young migrants and refugees. Dr. Bauridl unpacks how practices of resistance to an oppressive past and efforts to construct a socially just present take shape in a complex and layered site of public memory.
March 26, 2024 | 5 pm
Max Kade Center
“This sophisticated hell of murder and misery”: My Grandfather’s Journey from National Socialist Camps to Postwar Ostracism and Oblivion”
In an account that is both personal and contextualized within larger questions of memory, transgenerational trauma, and epistemic injustice, Dr. Bauridl will discuss the experience of her grandfather, who was persecuted for treason by the Nazi regime and criminalized in a way that stigmatized him long after 1945.
"Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin"
Roman Utkin, Wesleyan University
February 27th, 2024 | 4pm
Max Kade Center
As many as half a million Russians lived in Germany in the 1920s, most of them in Berlin, clustered in and around the Charlottenburg neighborhood to such a degree that it became known as “Charlottengrad.” Traditionally, the Russian émigré community has been understood as one of exiles aligned with Imperial Russia and hostile to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet government that followed. However, Charlottengrad embodied a full range of personal and political positions vis-à-vis the Soviet project, from enthusiastic loyalty to questioning ambivalence and pessimistic alienation.
In this talk, Roman Utkin will highlight the key findings of his book, Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). He will provide insight into the exile community in Berlin, which, following the collapse of the tsarist government, was one of the earliest to face and collectively process the peculiarly modern problem of statelessness. Utkin’s talk will explore how community members balanced their sense of Russianness with their position in a modern Western city charged with artistic, philosophical, and sexual freedom.
Reading from “The Summers” by Ronya Othmann
Tuesday, Dec. 5th, 2023
6 - 7:30pm
Joseph R. Pearson Building, Room 150
Join us for a reading by Ronya Othmann from the 2023 English translation of her 2020 book The Summers – a novel about cultural differences, issues of gender and sexuality, politics, and identity. Othmann, born in Munich, is an author, poet, and journalist whose work deals with themes of migration, homeland, and war.
The Summers narrates the coming of age of Leyla, who spends the school year in Germany but travels every summer to her father’s Kurdish village in Syria. As Leyla grows older, her sexual awakening takes a back seat to her cultural discoveries. She becomes increasingly disenchanted with her German friends’ indifference when ISIS troops enter the village, threatening the lives of her family.
“On Nature and Need in Theodor Adorno”
Dr. Ari Linden, Associate Professor, Slavic, German, and Eurasian Studies, University of Kansas
Nov. 9th, 2023 | 4:00 pm
Max Kade Center for German-American Studies
In 1942, the exiled philosophers and “critical theorists” of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research held a seminar series in Los Angeles devoted to the development of a theory of needs. Responding both to the Third Reich and to the New Deal—as well as to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World, published a decade earlier—Adorno’s position was the most radical and dialectical of all the members in attendance. This presentation will analyze Adorno’s “Theses on Need” in relation to its historical context, to Marx, and to Adorno’s concept of “natural history.”
Thomas Mann: "Democracy Will Win"
Aug. 14th - Sep. 15th 2023
An exhibition by Literaturhaus München and VATMH in co-operation with the Max Kade Center for German-American Studies, realized with the generous support of the German Federal Foreign Office.
Thomas Mann was a German author who fled to the United States in 1939 when his critiques of Hitler’s regime made Germany unfriendly to him. This exhibition focuses on the remarkable evolution of Thomas Mann’s political biography: from monarchist to powerful opponent of National Socialism and committed champion of democracy.
Opening Reception
August 23rd, 2023 | 4:30pm
Joseph R. Pearson Building, Room 150
"All Are Welcome: Public Libraries and Democracy”
by Brad Allen, Executive Director of the Lawrence Public Library
With remarks by Dr. Ani Kokobobo and Dr. Marike Janzen
Reception and Exhibition Viewing at the Center Afterwards
Namibian Women and their Networks of Support
Wed., April 7th, 2021
12-1 PM
Elene Cloete, PhD, Anthropology, University of Kansas; Director of Research and Advocacy, Outreach International
Martha Ndakalako-Bannikov, PhD candidate, comparative literature, University of Oregon
Mariah C. Stember, PhD candidate, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Kansas
Markus Bierkoch, PhD candidate, History
John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin
Wed., March 31, 2021
12-1 PM CDT (Kansas)
Markus Bierkoch's doctoral research focuses on German-American associations in New York (1890s to 1930s) and their roles as both providers of social and economic benefits and proponents of ethnic politics. He will speak about economic networks formed by these organizations, specifically in the retail and wholesale sectors of the food and alcohol industries.
Culinary Cosmopolitanism in 19th-Century Austria
Mon., March 22, 2021
12-1 PM CDT
Amy Millet, PhD candidate, History
Currently in Vienna on a Fulbright Research Grant, Amy Millet studies cooking, shopping, and dining out in 19th-century Austria.
Civil Rights Activism & German-Jewish Refugees Panel
A virtual event series exploring civil rights in Europe and America
Tuesday, February 23, 4pm CST
From Swastika to Jim Crow features Jewish-German scholars who taught at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the South after emigrating to the U.S., a rich and complex chapter of Black and Jewish relations in American history.
Panelists
Ari Linden, German Studies
Fithawee Tzeggai, Sociology
Shelia Bonner, American Studies, Andrew Mellon Visiting Scholar, Margaret Walker Center, Jackson State University
Wednesday, February 24, 4pm CST
Civil rights activist Joyce Ladner speaks about her mentor, German-Jewish refugee and sociologist Ernst Borinski, whose innovative teaching at Tougaloo College engaged students in the civil rights movement in Mississippi.
Sponsors:
Max Kade Center for German-American Studies, Spencer Museum of Art, German Studies, Peace & Conflict Studies, American Studies, African & African-American Studies, Sociology, Jewish Studies, Margaret Walker Center