Events 2024-25
Most CGES Online and hybrid events are recorded. Explore upcoming Spring 2025 events listed below, or browse through the 2023 & Spring 2024 CGES Online Events. Get direct access to a list of all recorded webinars on CGES Online's Archive below.
CGES Online Recordings: Complete List
Sign up for our Newsletter to receive information about all events organized or sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies. We also post event announcements on our Facebook and Instagram accounts and invite you to follow us on social media.
Spring 2025 Events
April 29, 2025
CGES Hybrid Event
Discover a powerful, untold chapter of Holocaust history and a daughter's enduring quest to know the story that began a generation before her birth. From childhood, Julie Brill struggled to understand how her father survived as a young Jewish boy in Belgrade, where Nazis murdered 90 percent of the Jewish population without gas chambers or cattle cars. Through exacting research, a bit of luck, and three emotional trips to Serbia, she pieces together her family's lost past, unearths secrets, and returns to her father a small part of what the Nazis stole: his own family history.
Other Events of Interest
April 27, 2025
Temple Beth Israel is pleased to invite you to our upcoming concert, "Treasured Melodies: Preserving Eastern European Heritage." This concert honors the musical and spiritual legacy of Morris Hollender (1925-2014), our long-time lay religious leader and Torah reader on what would have been his 100th birthday. This special event will take place on April 27, 2025, at 3:00 PM.
Past Events
April 23, 2025
CGES In Person Event
Join us for a special screening of “Uferfrauen - Lesbian life and love in the GDR," followed by a Q&A with the film's director, Barbara Wallbraun.
April 23, 2025
CGES Online Event
Join Professor John Michalczyk, Ph.D. for a discussion regarding his forthcoming book entitled "Julius Streicher - Tainted Images, Stolen Lives". Julius Streicher, the rabid anti-Semitic publisher of a Nazi tabloid and three children’s readers, used dehumanized and at times semi-pornographic images to foster a hatred of Jews.
April 22, 2025
CGES Online Event
As more and more people are beginning to feel the effects of climate change, the arts - and that includes theater and performance arts - have a particular role to play to help us learn to survive and imagine new futures in a climate changed world. Join our webinar to learn more about climate theater and performances in Germany and the US, and the role of (performance) arts in articulating what it means when humans undermine the very foundation of life on planet earth.
April 9, 2025
CGES Online Event
In this compelling webinar, Dr. Cynthia D. Porter (The Ohio State University) and Dr. Anjeana K. Hans (Wellesley College) discussed two examples of the impact émigré filmmakers had on Hollywood film.
March 20, 2025
CGES Online Event
On March 5, CGES hosted a webinar with Arnd Henze and Ruggero Tappeser-Schleicher: "Bonhoeffer and the German Resistance to Fascism: Lessons for Today". Join us for a follow-up conversation with the speakers. This will be a Zoom meeting, not a webinar, and it will not be recorded.
March 10, 2025
CGES Hybrid Event
In this lecture, Professor Ivan Kurilla will explore the roots of a newfound obsession with history, linking it to the crisis facing large nation-states striving to maintain control over their historical narratives. Once vital for nation-building, these narratives are now being challenged by new actors seeking to reclaim their history and agency.
March 5, 2025
CGES Online Event
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), a German theologian and opponent of the Nazi regime was executed by the Nazis shortly before the end of WWII. A brilliant thinker and writer, he became famous after his death. In this webinar, experts and family members discuss what Bonhoeffer’s work and his historical role in a collective endeavour, and its current appropriations and distortions can teach us – about authoritarian strategies and human images, and about the concept of resistance.
March 2, 2025
CGES In-Person Event
Join us for “Persona Non Grata,” a film on how a Japanese diplomat saved thousands of Jews during World War II. Special pre-screening presentation by Dr. Sheva Zucker, whose father received a visa signed by Sugihara and escaped to Kobe, Japan, then Shanghai.
February 26, 2025
CGES Hybrid Event
Germany's "traffic light" coalition government collapsed in November 2024, triggering early federal elections that were originally planned for September 2025. Join a panel of Brandeis faculty who will discuss the results of the election that were held on Sunday, February 23rd.
February 13, 2025
CGES Online Event
Join Sascha Müller-Kraenner from the Deutsche Umwelthilfe for a discussion of the status of Germany’s Energiewende project and Climate Policy to date, and what's at stake in the German federal election in February.
February 6, 2025
CGES In-Person Event
A touching love story that challenges stereotypes about the courage it takes to face the stranger, to take risks and to accept challenges.
Film followed by Q&A with director Ilker Çatak.
February 6, 2025
CGES Hybrid Event
Join award-winning German filmmaker Ilker Çatak, known for the Oscar-nominated feature The Teacher's Lounge (2023), for a conversation about what it means to choose a career in the (cinematic) arts today. We'll discuss all the "how to's": From practical tips on getting started—such as breaking the news to your parents—to how to avoid the typical pitfalls...all the way to how to discover your very own voice, and even how to find the right outfit for the Oscars. Most importantly, we’ll explore the courage it takes to embrace freedom and make art the centerpiece of your life.
January 30, 2025
CGES In-Person Event
Welcome (back) to the Spring semester! CGES invites all students to join us for a fun evening of German board games and yummy treats.
Photo Credit: Anna Logue Photography/Brandeis University Press
December 18, 2024
In-Person Event
In The Green Ages, historian Annette Kehnel explores sustainability initiatives from the Middle Ages, highlighting communities that operated a barter trade system on the Monte Subiaco in Italy, sustainable fishing at Lake Constance, common lands in the United Kingdom, transient grazing among Alpine shepherds in the south of France, and bridges built by crowdfunding in Avignon. Kehnel takes these medieval examples and applies their practical lessons to the modern world to prove that we can live sustainably—we’ve done it before!
December 10, 2024
The Tauber Institute Hybrid Event
Rebecca Wittmann of the University of Toronto will present the paper "Haunted and Hallowed Grounds: Confronting the German Past in the First Person" at the Jewish Studies Colloquium.
November 25, 2024
CGES In-Person Event
Join us for the following panel discussions with 3 guest speakers:
Indeterminate Roots: Learning to Teach with Kafka (Evan Parks)
Turn, turn, turn: Kafka’s parables and the history of the mashal (Abigail Gillman)
Description of a Struggle: Kafka’s Prague Novella Revisited (Veronika Tuckerová)
November 20, 2024
CGES Online Event
Although women have held elected office in many countries around the world in recent decades, the United States still clearly lags behind, despite having witnessed three Secretaries of State (but no female Secretaries of Defense). Despite women’s demonstrated political leadership around the globe, sexism is alive and well, especially when it comes to formulating foreign, defense and security policies. In this webinar we bring together two scholars who are studying women’s role in politics, to discuss what a feminist foreign policy could and should look like.
November 18, 2024
CGES In-Person Event
In 1942, a Jewish mother, Hella Zacharias, and her five-year-old daughter went into hiding in the Berlin underground. Through Hella's own resourcefulness and the help of others, both mother and daughter survived through the war. In My Illegal Life (Germany, 2024), writer Esther Dischereit, Hella's second-born daughter, follows the traces of her mother's and half-sister's experiences in hiding.
November 18, 2024
CGES In-Person Event
Über Ein Haufen Dollarscheine. Eine Mutter, eine Tante und ein Neffe. Superlative des Jüdisch-Seins: eine Familie von Shoa-Überlebenden und deren Nachkommen, in Deutschland, Italien und schließlich in den USA. Zeitreisen in auch absurden jüdischen Zuständen und in einer postnationalsozialistischen Gegenwart. Unerwartet beginnt ein Festessen an Thanksgiving in Chicago mit einem Schwarzen und einem weißen Amen. …
November 13, 2024
CGES Online Event
Join three German experts to learn more about what may have led to the recent electoral successes of the right-wing extremist AfD (Alternative for Germany) in the German states of Thüringia, Saxony, Brandenburg, and the European Parliament, as well as similar developments in other European countries.
October 30, 2024
CGES In-Person Event
Goebbels and the Führer tells the story of the dynamic interaction of Adolf Hitler and Goebbels from the eve of Kristallnacht to their suicides in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. The film depicts how Hitler and Goebbels wielded demagoguery, disinformation, and manipulation as weapons to devastating effect. The first serious feature film on Hitler in twenty years, Goebbels and the Führer was written and written and directed by German filmmaker Joachim A. Lang, with the support of Thomas Weber, who served as a consultant on the film.
October 25, 2024
CGES In-Person Event
Aydemir’s award-winning novel is a fast-paced, character-driven family saga set in Germany and Türkiye at the end of the 20th century. In the novel, the Turkish-born protagonist, Hüseyin, has spent the past 30 years working in Germany, and his dream of buying his very own flat in Istanbul has finally come true. But he dies of a heart attack the day he moves in. His family in Germany travel to Türkiye for the funeral. In chapters narrated from the perspectives of the individual family members, we learn about each character’s personal djinns (supernatural spirits from Arabic mythology).
The complexity of migration, family, relationships, and life choices is at the center of Djinns. The book invites readers to develop empathy for all the characters.
October 22, 2024
CGES Online Event
Join us for a conversation with two experts who have created "pop-up" climate museums in The Netherlands and the US to learn more about developing new ways to communicate the climate crisis on both sides of the Atlantic.
October 15, 2024
CGES Hybrid Event
Romani people have been discriminated against and persecuted ever since their first documented appearance in Europe in the 15th century. Join Alexandra Senfft as she talks about her research into the persecution and discrimination of the Sinti and Roma and also highlights their resistance and resilience as well as their self-empowerment based on the family history of the German Sinto Romeo Franz.
September 24, 2024
CGES Hybrid Event
September 13, 2024
CGES In-Person Event
Join Luisa Neubauer from Fridays for Future Germany and the Lydian String Quartet for a journey into the universe and back, and a conversation about climate justice on Friday, September 13, 12-1:00pm in Usdan International Lounge on the Brandeis campus.
September 10, 2024
Mandel Center for Humanities Atrium5:00 - 7:00 pm
CGES welcomes all students (back) to campus! Come join us for a reception to learn about upcoming Fall 2024 event programming, German courses, and try out some tasty German treats such as Berliners and Pretzels. The CGES team will be there to answer any questions you have about our Center and German at Brandeis and refreshments will be provided. We look forward to seeing you!