ARCHIVED EVENT
Na'ama Rokem
Associate Professor, Comparative Literature
The University of Chicago
Born in Aachen in 1892, Ludwig Strauss had a lively career as a poet, translator, and scholar in Weimar Germany. He participated in different (and seemingly disparate) cultural and intellectual circles. On the one hand, he became close to Martin Buber (who would become his father-in-law when he married Eva Buber in 1926), participated avidly in the Jewish cultural Renaissance in inter-war Germany, and contributed to the discourse of Cultural Zionism.
Professor Rokem’s talk will focus on two poems written during the intensely bilingual phase of Strauss’s career in the years preceding his death in 1953: a poem written in celebration of the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference which took place in Beijing in 1952, which was published in both German and Hebrew during Strauss’s life, and a poem denouncing the rape and murder of a young Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers in the immediate aftermath of the war of 1948, which was published in Hebrew a few weeks after his death.
Professor Rokem will map the connections between Strauss’s political vision and his interest in solidarity (from trans-Asia to Palestine), on the one hand, and his practices of bilingual writing and self-translation, on the other.
This program is free.
Convenient parking at the Neil Avenue garage, 1801 Neil Ave.
Presented by the department of Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University
