German studies

This is, uh-- We're, we're doing double duty tonight, maybe triple duty.

On the one hand, uh, this is the inaugural, uh, event in the Hannah Arendt lecture series, um, that is curated by my colleague Thomas Wild, who is the research director of the Hannah Arendt Center and the head of German Studies here at Bard.

And we will have, uh, two or three lectures every year.

Um, and the, the, the idea of this is to bring people to Bard and to the Arendt Center who have written exciting, interesting new books on Hannah Arendt that, um, we want to learn about and be in conversation with them about.

And today we're asking why is Nietzsche the philosopher that so many different political and cultural movements can identify with, and what does he have to say that can help us to understand our contemporary political moment? Well, my guest is Adrian Daub.

He's professor of comparative literature and German studies and director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.

He's also co-host of the wonderful podcast In Bed with the Right.

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In, in that way, again, Nietzsche sort of can easily transcend tribal identities in the sense that those who most readily identify with him are his least interesting recipients, and those who think they're running quite far away from him often are fairly faithful, uh, to him or at least to the spirit of the work, even if obviously they wouldn't sign on to many of the rebarbative things he says.

Adrian Daub.

He's Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies and Director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.

He's also co-host of the podcast In Bed With the Right, and as I mentioned earlier, Adrian has some books that are well worth checking out, one on the cancel culture panic from a couple of years back and a brand-new book titled What Tech Calls Thinking that presents a lively shaking up of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley.

It comes from our colleague Maria Rocca Lizarazu, who's written a wonderful essay on Austerlitz, and she uses the term subjunctive, um, poetics to describe the way the novel is written.

And as you and I will know as Germanists, um, the subjunctive mode is really important in German so things are very heavily marked in the subjunctive in German.

Um, and it's easier to see when things are not in the indicative mode.

So this idea of subjunctive memory is something that would've, that could have been, or that possibly, um, somebody else has reported as having happening but you can't necessarily testify to.

I would agree with that.

But it also is necessarily political because- Memory is bound up with forms of contestation of the past and forms of contestation of the present.

Um, and again, as Germanists, we need only think about the memory landscape in the center of Berlin, for example, which monuments get visited, which monuments do not, which monuments get an U-Bahn station planned underneath them that's going to disrupt them, which monuments do not.

Um, and to come to the topic of my talk, the ongoing controversies about the kinds of images that are shown in the monument to, um, homosexual prosecution in the Tiergarten show that it is impossible not to discuss memory without discussing politics, and particularly in the present moment, um, queer lives, queer histories, queer, um, experiences have become extremely politicized.

A few years after graduating, I went to Germany and started work at a medium-sized bank called DZ Bank as an equity analyst.

All my peers were German, had studied BWL, or economics, and were completely bemused that someone who had studied Germanistik, or German, could end up in a bank.

They thought I was hopelessly out of my depth and did not try to hide it.

I didn't think I was then, and I do not think I am now.