Lonely Oaks

Join us for a screening of the documentary Lonely Oaks, or, in the orignal title Vergiss Meyn Nicht, which follows young protesters in the Hambacher Forst. In 2018, Steffen Meyn died from a fall during the protests in Hambach Forest. This film combines the footage he shot on a 360-degree helmet camera with interviews with environmentalists and asks how far activism must go. Before the film, Katrin Sieg (Professor of German, Georgetown University) will give an introduction, discussing how German environmental films, TV shows, and performances help us to understand the reality of climate change and mobilize public action. She’ll talk about how these media show the long-term effects of climate change, connect local events to distant places, and reveal the hidden impacts on our bodies.

From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster The Day after Tomorrow (2004) to the literary oeuvres of Barbara Kingsolver, T.C. Boyle, and Kim Stanley Robinson, fiction and cinema has mastered the balance to shake up audiences with dystopian tales and inspire them with hope for a more sustainable future. In the last few years we have seen many theater and film festivals on the topic of climate change sprout up all over Germany and give dramatic form to the issue of global warming and the quest for decarbonization. At the same time, climate activism has become more performative, generating public attention through traffic blockades and museum interventions. What do climate actions and environemntal filmmaking have in common, besides the urgent call for a more sustainable future? And how do they impact how we look at the global crisis we are facing?

The introduction will be held in English and the documentary will be shown in German with english subtitles.

Katrin Sieg is Professor of German jointly affiliated with the BMW Center for German and European Studies and the German department. She holds a Ph.D. in Drama from the University of Washington, Seattle, and taught at UC San Diego and Indiana University, Bloomington, before joining Georgetown University in 2002. Her research focuses on German and European culture, postcolonial and critical race studies, and feminist studies. The author of three scholarly monographs on German and European theater, performance, and cinema, she has received several awards and grants, among them a Humboldt Fellowship, and two awards for her second book, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (2002). Her fourth book, Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum, was published in 2021. In addition, she has written about postmigrant theater and Afro German culture. From 2009-2012, she was a member of an international, interdisciplinary research group examining the Eurovision Song Contest as a site where the "New Europe" is imagined and performed, and becomes available for identification and refashioning. She has organized a number of symposia, film series, and conferences on topics relating to contemporary German and European culture, including "Queer European Cinema"; "Shadows and Sojourners: Images of Jews and Antifascism in East German Cinema," “Performing Race in the Transatlantic World,” and Decolonizing the Museum: Transnational Comparisons”. Professor Sieg teaches the MAGES core course on Theorizing Culture, and courses on GDR cinema, colonial/postcolonial German culture, and popular culture and media studies. For several years, she served as Field Chair of the Culture and Politics program.

This event is a collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Niederlande and the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam.

Host or Publisher Goethe-Institut Niederlande