1989 - Global Histories: Opening

With Nobel Laureate in Literature Wole Soyinka, Nigeria, and historian Timothy Garton Ash, United Kingdom.

Greeting: Bernd M. Scherer, Director
Introduction and Moderation: Susanne Stemmler, Literary Scholar

Opening of the exhibitions " 1989 in Bildern ", " Brotherland is Broke ", and of the soundinstallation " Are we the people, too? "

22:00 h: Videograms of a Revolution a film by Harun Farocki and Andrej Ujica

The participants

Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of History, Oxford. Director of the European Studies Center at the University of Oxford, he is currently the Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow. Ash has received numerous awards, including the David Watt Memorial Prize, the Premio Napoli, the George Orwell Award, the Imre Nagy Memorial Plaque, the Hoffmann von Fallersleben Prize, the German Federal Cross of Merit, the merit crosses of Poland and the Czech Republic as well as the British CMG. In 2005, he was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine. His works include: “The Magic Lantern" (1990), "In Europe’s Name" (1993) and "Free World" (2004).

To the biography of Wole Soyinka

Susanne Stemmler, Romance Studies, Literary Scholar and Cultural Theorist, Berlin, got her PhD with a thesis on Orientalism in French literature. From 1997 to 2004 she was a lecturer at the University of Düsseldorf in Romance and Media Studies; from 2005 to 2007 she was Fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Center for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin/New York. She was a visiting fellow at Columbia University, amongst others. Since 2008 she is head of the department for literature and humanities at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Her publications include “Hip-Hop und Rap in romanischen Sprachwelten”, “Stationen einer globalen Musikkultur” (2007), “New York – Berlin. Kulturen in der Stadt” (2008), and author of numerous essays on migration, transcultural processes, colonialism/postcolonialism and urban cultures.