Colloquium: Building Democracy – Emotions, Politics, and Architecture in Postwar Germany

  • Date: Jul 2, 2019
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Philipp Nielsen
  • Location: Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin
  • Room: Small Conference Room
  • Host: Center for the History of Emotions
  • Contact: sekfrevert@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2019 colloquium:

Philipp Nielsen, Sarah Lawrence College, New York

Building Democracy: Emotions, Politics, and Architecture in Postwar Germany

This talk investigates the connection between emotions, politics, and architecture in postwar Germany. It focuses on the Bundeshaus, the new seat of the West German parliament in Bonn. The discourse surrounding the building demonstrates how politicians and public alike conceived of democracy as embodied, and as a practice that was full of emotions. Scrutinizing their anxieties about modest yet sufficiently modern architecture, the practices of speech, and the importance accorded to communal eating in the Bundeshaus cafeteria enriches our understanding of these early years of the Federal Republic and offers a way to see ‘the rational republic’ with the power of the better argument as the emotionally invested practice that it was.

Philipp Nielsen is an Assistant Professor for Modern European History at Sarah Lawrence College, and currently a Visiting Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2012. His publications include Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871-1935 (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Architecture, Democracy and Emotions: The Politics of Feeling after 1945 with Till Großmann (Routledge, 2018).

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