WERNER GRILK ANNUAL LECTURE

[This leture is rescheduled from March 7] Barbara Hahn, German &amp; Slavic [Vanderbilt], The History of Dreams Remains to Be Written: Dreams in the Twentieth Century <a href="/content/dam/UMICH/german/Home/Events/GrilkFlier.pdf">View Flier</a>

The 20th century could be seen as THE century of dreams. But not in the way Freud had imagined when he published his "Interpretation of Dreams" in 1900. Dreams without any interpretation pepper letters and diaries, memoirs and novels. They prove to be archives of the most frightening experiences people had to endure through the past and extremely violent century. People who had survived the Nazi concentration camps wrote down their dreams, as did those who managed to flee the killing fields in Cambodia. We find dreams written down or memorized in Stalinist Russia; when Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in the streets of Cairo by an Islamist terrorist, he engaged himself with filling thick notebooks with dreams during the long, long months he had to spend in a hospital bed. "The History of Dreams Remains to be Written", so Walter Benjamin in 1927. But how to conceive of such a history? ------------------------------ Sponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Department of the History of Art, Department of History, Department of English Language & Literature, Department of Political Science, Department of Psychology, Department of Comparative Literature, the Institute for the Humanities, and the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures