[spectre] McDeutsch Symposium

[Geert Lovink]

McDeutsch Symposium

Museum für Kommunikation
Leipziger Strasse 16, Berlin
15 December 2006, 8 p.m.

“We have Lufthansa, Telekom, and n-tv——but we still lack a global 
perspective on our national issues.”(Krystian Woznicki, Artistic 
Director of the McDeutschProject)

“Save the German Language!” said the cover of Der Spiegel’s issue 
commemorating German Reunification Day. Demands for “more German” are 
on the rise in Germany. After “Quotas for German Music on Radio!” came 
the call for “Obligatory German in Gyms, Bars, and Schools!” Ensuing 
debates have even carried over to the popular Sabine Christiansen talk 
show, Germany’s so-called “ersatz parliament.”

Yet, what role does the German language really play today in propping 
up German national identity? Hasn’t this supposedly German cultural 
property long become common property worldwide? The Berliner Gazette 
Symposium McDeutschasks cultural mediators from Lomé, Accra/Heidelberg, 
New York, and Urbana-Champaign to reflect upon these questions.

Beginning from the assumption that we can learn something from 
perspectives inflected by Africa and America, the symposium opens up an 
unusual view of the German language: from a bird’s-eye perspective, 
cultural imports and exports—as well as cultural self-determination and 
determination by the other—will be reconsidered in a different way.    

Invited speakers are Rainer Ganahl (artist), Herwig Josef Kempf 
(culture consultant), Kofi Yakpo alias Linguist (rap 
musician/activist/researcher), and Yasemin Yildiz (cultural studies 
scholar).

The McDeutschSymposium is part of a larger project of the same name, in 
which we have surveyed fifty cultural workers from all continents 
(except Antarctica!) on the German language. All of the resulting 
protocols are being published under www.berlinergazette.de (through 31 
December 2006). A selected number of the protocols will be collected in 
a bilingual publication (English/German), to be published by 
Kulturverlag Kadmos in December 2006.

McDeutsch is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.
 
For more information, please contact: Krystian Woznicki

Berliner Gazette e.V.
Schönhauser Allee 141a
D – 10437 Berlin
kw at berlinergazette.de
www.berlinergazette.de

--

Symposium Participants

Rainer Ganahl, born in 1966, is an artist. He was born in Bludenz, 
Austria, and studied philosophy and history at the University of 
Innsbruck, as well as art at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst in 
Vienna (under Peter Weibel) and at the Akademie Düsseldorf (under Nam 
June Paik). Between 1990 and 1991, he was a member of the Independent 
Study Program at the Whitney Museum in New York. Since the early 1990s, 
his main interest has been in deconstructing languages in a political, 
identitarian context. As part of his artistic practice he has learned 
Japanese, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Russian, and 
Italian. In 1999, he had a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 
Vienna and represented Austria at the 48th Venice Biennial. In 2005, a 
retrospective of his work was shown at Columbia University Museum in 
New York. He has been living and working in New York for sixteen years. 
(www.ganahl.info)

Herwig Kempf, born in 1943, is a cultural mediator. Born in Karlsbad, 
Germany, he attended a humanist secondary school in Metten and 
graduated from the University of Munich and the Sorbonne in Paris in 
the 1960s, with majors in German, Philosophy, and Music. His 
international career began as an editor for the DAAD at the University 
of Hokkaido in Japan. In 1978, he started working for the Goethe 
Institute, with stations in Japan, China, Ethiopia, Yugoslavia, and 
Italy. He has been the director of the Goethe Institute in Lomé, Togo, 
since 2005, working for the first time in his career in a former German 
colony. Upon arrival in his new position, he was confronted with the 
tense situation. He experienced the consequences of unrest that 
occurred shortly after the presidential elections in 2005: an attack on 
the Goethe Institute—something that had never before occurred in the 
history of the institution. (www.goethe.de/ins/tg)

Kofi Yakpo, aka Linguist, born in 1970, is a linguist and political 
scientist. He studied linguistics, social anthropology, and political 
science in Cologne, Vanuatu, and Nijmegen, and law and management in 
London and Geneva. As a co-founder of the legendary hip-hop band 
Advanced Chemistry and under the artist name "Linguist,” he has 
recorded several albums, including 1992’s “Fremd im eigenen Land.” He 
is also the author of several short stories, essays, and a play, 
Schichtwechsel(Change of shift), which premiered at the Neukölln Oper 
in Berlin. In 2004, he was awarded the May Ayim Prize for Black 
Literature. He now heads the Africa desk of FIAN, an international 
human rights organization. As a linguist, he teaches and is involved in 
academic research; he is currently working on a descriptive grammar of 
Pichi, a Creole language of Equatorial Guinea. (www.der-linguist.de)

Yasemin Yildiz, born in 1969, is a literary and cultural studies 
scholar. She was born in Söke, Aydin, and grew up in Bremen, Germany. 
Her study of German literature led her from Germany to the US, where 
she received her Ph.D. from Cornell University. Since moving to the 
United States in the 1990s, she has been active in academia. Currently 
she is Assistant Professor of German at the Department of Germanic 
Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, 
Urbana-Champaign. Among her interests are modern and contemporary 
German literature, literary multilingualism, minority literatures and 
cultures, migration, globalization, feminist theory, and transnational 
studies. Her publications include “Critically ‘Kanak’: A Reimagination 
of German Culture” in Globalization and the Future of German, edited by 
Andreas Gardt and Bernd Hüppauf, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, pp. 
319-340. (www.germanic.uiuc.edu)