UCL Festival of Culture
Violence Elsewhere: Imagining Violence Outside Germany After 1945
6:00 pm to 7:00 pm, 03 June 2019
As part of the fourth annual UCL Festival of Culture project members Dr Mererid Puw Davies (UCL), Dr Clare Bielby (University of York) and Dr Elizabeth Stewart (King's College London) presented on ways in which recent German culture has conceptualised violence taking place in distant or imagined times and places, in words, images and other media.
Dr Clare Bielby (University of York)
Dr Bielby’s presentation focused on German left-wing terrorist Inge Viett, who was a member of Movement 2nd of June and then of the Red Army Faction in the 1970s. Her introduction to the phenomenon of left-wing terrorism in West Germany during the 1970s and the role of women within that was followed by an in-depth look at Viett’s autobiographical text, Nie war ich furchtloser: Autobiographie (Never was I more fearless: An Autobiography), first published in 1996.
Dr Bielby discussed the importance of imagining violence and violent agents elsewhere for Viett’s narration, in particular its potential to enable the performance of violence and of one’s violent subjectivity at the time. Her presentation considered ‘violence elsewhere’ as an inherently gendered phenomenon that requires gendering.
Dr Mererid Puw Davies (University College London)
Dr Davies’ paper focused on the extraordinary case of Louis Malle's romantic-comedy-musical-action film Viva Maria! (1965), a lighthearted film which became an unlikely political beacon for some 1960s New Left activists in West Germany. This film is a fantasy about cabaret performers joining forces with a revolutionary movement in early 20th century Latin America, bringing down dictatorship and oppression with circus skills.
Dr Davies showed how, despite its apparently frivolous looks, this film seemed to encapsulate many ideals of those movements, for example the importance of art and culture as political battlegrounds, and the inseparability of the personal and the political. Beyond that, her paper also contrasted the enthusiastic readings of the 1960s with more recent perspectives on the film, which emerge as more critical, highlighting the limits of its vision of the decolonising and post-colonial worlds.
Dr Elizabeth Stewart (King's College London)
Dr Stewart discussed the short film November (2004) by video artist Hito Steyerl. Steyerl’s film, which locates the legacy of ’68 in the early 21st century, traces images of her teenage friend Andrea Wolf. Wolf was an activist in the West German autonomous movement, who was wanted in potential connection with the RAF and joined the Kurdish PKK. Wolf’s death, the result of an apparent extrajudicial killing by the Turkish army, prompted Steyerl’s filmic investigation of the intersections between legacies of West German violent struggle and 'violence elsewhere'.
Dr Stewart examined the connections drawn by Steyerl’s film between disparate spaces of violence through its use of montage of archival, found footage, and newly shot documentation. She also drew attention to the material connections between German legacies of violence and 'violence elsewhere', exemplified for instance by the Kurdish village by which Wolf died, which acts as storehouse or archive of a disavowed German past, while German space is revealed as a holder of Kurdish exiles and memories, so that ‘“Kurdistan“ was not only “there,” but also “here”’ (November).
More information and to book visit: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/festival-of-culture/events/2019/jun/violence-elsewhere-imagining-violence-outside-germany-after-1945
Full festival programme: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/festival-of-culture/festival-programme?collection=drupal-arts-and-humanities-events&meta_UclOrgUnit=%22Faculty+of+Arts+%26+Humanities%22&&ge_DateFilter=20190511
Event Details
Open to all
Free
Organised by Festival of Culture Team: ah-shs.communications@ucl.ac.uk
Location
G08 Sir David Davies Lecture Theatre
Roberts Engineering Building
Malet Place
London
WC1E 7JE
