Hannah Ahlheim, “Die Vermessung des Schlafs und das Zeitregime der Moderne” / “The Measurement of Sleep and the Time Regime of Modernity”
Thursday, 30 November 2023, 19:15 CET
Auditorium of the Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum
Geschwister-Scholl-Str. 1-3
10117 Berlin
GERMANY
With Lothar Müller
Sponsored by:
The Mosse Foundation
Institut für deutsche Literatur
Humboldt University
Mosse Lectures
Humans are sleeping through a third of their lives – and thus spend a large part of their time unproductively and without consciousness. Sleep resists exploitation and control. How does a modern society, in which rationality and efficient use of time play a central role, deal with this unruly phenomenon? How has our relationship to sleep changed through industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, through new sources of light, permanently awake technical devices, and scientific measurement? What do we learn about the functioning of a society by exploring its sleep?
The lecture accompanies soldiers, DJs and pilots, sleep researchers and sleepers through their nights. It shows how the understanding of man’s sleeping and dreaming changed in the course of the “long 20th century” and how sleep became a valuable “resource” in different ways.
Hannah Ahlheim: Historian and professor of contemporary history at Justus Liebig University Giessen; Ahlheim was a research associate at the Center for Contemporary History Research in Potsdam and, from 2017-2018, a fellow of the Institute for the History and Future of Work at the IGK »Arbeit und Lebenslauf in globalgeschichtlicher Perspektive« (re:work) at Humboldt University Berlin; she researches the history of National Socialism, the history of anti-Semitism, the unconscious in 20th-century history and on the history of sleep and time; her study »Der Traum vom Schlaf im 20. Jahrhundert« was published by Wallstein in 2018.
Photo credit: Niels Leiser for the Mosse Lectures