"Metropolis in Ruins. Berlin's Interval of Time, 1943-1947"
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
Associate Professor of History
Tuesday, October 30, 12-1:30pm
Wurster 170
Part of the Global Urban Humanities Colloquium The City and Its People, Rhetoric 198-3 / ARCH 198-2, Rhetoric 244A / ARCH 298-2
With the modern metropolis emerges also the anticipation of urban ruination. However, what if the unimaginable (yet incessantly imagined) occurs and a metropolis falls apart? What happens after the deportations of Jews, delusions of imperial domination, and ravages of urban warfare create, in a shockingly short time, a deserted ruin landscape where there was once a world city?
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Associate Professor of Late Modern European History at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2017-2018 he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg/Institute for Advanced Studies Berlin and a Guggenheim Fellow. His most recent publications include (as co-editor) Seeking Peace in the Wake of War. Europe 1943-1947 (2015), The Ethics of Seeing. Photography and Twentieth Century German History (2017), and Sediments of Time. On Possible Histories (2018), a new translation of Reinhart Koselleck’s essays on historical theory. Currently, he is completing a conceptual history of human rights as well as Metropolis in Ruins, a history of everyday life in Berlin in the 1940s.
See the full Fall 2018 Global Urban Humanities Colloquium schedule.