A world without borders persists to be a dream for many people. The reality albeit looks different. In a series of public lectures accompanying the 15th Berlin Roundtables on Transnationality, we want to investigate how borders influenced and influence personal lives and everyday politics, how they came into existence as odd “lines in spaces” in various parts of the world and how they have to be managed in an age of technological and environmental hazards.
Drawing on his personal experience as scientist and civil rights activist, Jens Reich will delineate four decades of European history shaped by the Berlin Wall. After its erection many East Germans had to cope with the deep intellectual melancholy of the first decade of “living in a cage” and being cut of from “the rest” of the world. In the 1970s and 1980s a coming-out of the snail shell of intellectual self-isolation took place, influenced by the Eastern European Perestroika that opened up new perspectives. As a result, East Germans became strongly “easternized” – culturally, intellectually, and in political terms – and joined the peaceful revolutionary movement that toppled an entire empire.
Jens Reich is professor for molecular medicine and member of the German Ethics Council. As son of a medical doctor in Halberstadt, he studied medicine at Humboldt University of Berlin and soon turned to research. In the 1970s, he co-founded a private opposition group on which the Stasi soon spied. Shortly after his appointment as head of the department at the Central Institute of Molecular Biology, he lost this post and was further sanctioned with a ban to travel to Western countries. In the course of the ‘89 events Jens Reich became one of the leading dissidents and political activists. In 1994, he was nominated by the Green Party as Federal President.
Lectures will be followed by a discussion and reception.
Information on participating / attending:
Anmeldung erbeten: info@irmgard-coninx-stiftung.de
Date:
03/28/2012 18:00 - 03/28/2012 20:00
Event venue:
Reichpietschufer 50, Raum A 300
10785 Berlin
Berlin
Germany
Target group:
Journalists, Scientists and scholars
Email address:
Relevance:
transregional, national
Subject areas:
Politics, Social studies
Types of events:
Presentation / colloquium / lecture
Entry:
02/29/2012
Sender/author:
Dr. Paul Stoop
Department:
Informations- und Kommunikationsreferat
Event is free:
yes
Language of the text:
English
URL of this event: http://idw-online.de/en/event38773
You can combine search terms with and, or and/or not, e.g. Philo not logy.
You can use brackets to separate combinations from each other, e.g. (Philo not logy) or (Psycho and logy).
Coherent groups of words will be located as complete phrases if you put them into quotation marks, e.g. “Federal Republic of Germany”.
You can also use the advanced search without entering search terms. It will then follow the criteria you have selected (e.g. country or subject area).
If you have not selected any criteria in a given category, the entire category will be searched (e.g. all subject areas or all countries).