Daniela Danz, “Berichte aus der zentralen Provinz” / “Reports from the Central Province”

Humboldt University Berlin Mosse Lecture
mosselectures.wisc.edu/berlin/

Thursday, 23 January 2024, 19:15 CET

Senatssaal of Humboldt University
Unter den Linden 6
10117 Berlin
GERMANY

Sponsored by:
[mosse] LECTURES an der humboldt-universität zu berlin
The Mosse Foundation
Global Mosse Lecture Series
Institut für deutsche Literatur
Humboldt University

Moderator: Stefan Willer (Humboldt University)

Lecture Description: As the recent elections have shown, the gap between rural and urban spaces has the potential to set political dynamics in motion and will be one of the issues for the future in terms of social transformation. In her texts, Daniela Danz explores how this field of tension can be captured poetically. Her Mosse Lecture raises the question of how the poeticization of the ‘rural’ makes it possible to experience rural spaces not only as geographical places, but also as a characteristic network of references between history and the present.

Lecture Series Theme: Landleben

Lecture Series Description: There is too far afield between idyllic and provincial. On the one hand, rural communities are confronted with severe population decline and ‘dying villages’, on the other hand, the promise of a ›simple‹ life close to nature has unleashed deep longings by an urban view on rural spaces, not just since the artists’ colonies of modernism. Yet the early works of rural sociology and its efforts to achieve a more differentiated analysis of rural societies at the beginning of the 20th century already clearly stated that rural lifeworlds are more complex than the talk of the village community and the persistent (pre-)judgment of its backwardness compared to urban modernity would suggest. In fact, it is precisely the historical transformations of the village – and its stories – that open up a new perspective on the peripheries of modernity. It becomes apparent that ›rurality‹ in its material spatial structure as a (finite) resource, far removed from stereotypical romanticizations, represents a central arena in the history of socio-political conflicts and social differentiation. The ›rural‹ emerges from cultural interpretation schemes and aestheticizations, and rural ways of life also prove to be deeply shaped by social dynamics.

In winter 2024/25, the Mosse Lectures will take discursive excursions into the countryside and consider rural spaces as the subject of cultural imaginations as well as political and economic appropriations: How have rural ways of life changed in modernity, how has the “rural” been described and imagined in the multitude of its concrete forms as a scheme of interpretation (mostly shaped by the urban view)? Is the ›province‹ the venue for an alternative, anti-metropolitan politics? Where is the boundary between city and countryside as a cultural or natural space – and does it even exist considering the functional connections between the spaces? How does literature work on the construction, shifting or dissolution of urban-rural boundaries and what challenges does an increasingly urban society face with regard to the conditions and limits of ecologically sustainable agriculture?

Photo credit: Neils Leiser for the Mosse Lectures

Daniela Danz: Poet, novelist, essayist and editor; Vice President of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz and member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts since 2022. Daniela Danz’s poetry has been translated into various languages, including English, Arabic, French, Spanish, Serbian, Czech, Polish, Armenian and Albanian. The English translation of her 2020 book »Wilderness« (translated by Monika Cassel) was a finalist for the Rhine Translation Prize. She received the German Prize for Nature Writing in 2019 and the Thuringian Literature Prize in 2023. Most recently, the essay collection »Nichts ersetzt den Blick ins Gelände« was published by Wallstein Verlag.

Stefan Willer has occupied the position of Professor for modern German literature at Humboldt University, Berlin, since 2018. From 2014-2018 he was Professor for Cultural Research at Humboldt. His specialties include literary history, cultural history, and the intersection between music and literature. He has served as visiting professor or lecturer at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the Technische Universität Berlin, Stanford University, Columbia University, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, among others. He is the author of Poetik der Etymologie. Texturen sprachlichen Wissens in der Romantik (2003) and Erbfälle. Theorie und Praxis kultureller Übertragung in der Moderne 2014), as well as editor of several volumes.

In the Media:

This lecture series was covered by Torsten Flüh for night Night Out @ Berlin: Transformationen der Landwirtschaft zwischen Zeilensaat und Reallaboren