Community Lecture: Sunday 10th May 2009 : 'Albert Einstein's Violin: Jews, Music and Modern Life'

Sander L. Gilman will explore why Jews were so prominent in the world of high music a hundred years ago and how high culture became a tool for integrating into European society. The question about what 'Jewish music' could be was hotly debated, even shaping early Zionist thought and notions about the future State of Israel. Gilman's illustrated talk will connect the passionate violin performances of one of the most legendary Jewish exiles, Albert Einstein, with the role of minorities in our contemporary classical music scene.

1. Monday 11th May 2009 :'Freuds: Sigmund and Anna Confront the Present in the Past'

Looking at Sigmund Freud's celebrity arrival in London, we can begin to sense the contours of an exile response to British society in the 1930s, with its complexity distorted by the sense of refuge given to the exiles.  Anna's response is quite different than her father's - as it mirrors her experience of the war.

2. Tuesday 12th April 2009: 'Anti-Freud: Elias Canetti and the Jews'

Elias Canetti's seeing the Past in the Present is mirrored in the reception that his novel Auto-de-Fe, published in Vienna, has in the UK and Canetti's own struggle with the culture of England, including that of the exiles, and what it came to mean to be a Jew in a London seemingly obsessed with Sigmund Freud.  

3. Wednesday 13th April 2009:'Learning to See: Ernst Kris, E. H. Gombrich and Edgar Wind Confront the Present in the Past'

Ernst Kris and E. H. Gombrich come to England and create a new art history that sees the past in the present in its attempt to provide an overarching theory of art and politics.  Humor plays a major role in their initial use of psychoanalysis to provide a theory of seeing.

4. Thursday 14th April 2009: 'After the Shoah: H. G. Adler - From Terezin to London'

After 1945 the new exiles such as H.G. Adler arrive in London from their experiences in the concentration and death camps.  They react to the exiles already present in British culture.  Their experiences come to be absorbed in the creative life of the child exiles who had come much earlier and whose creative lives extend into the present.