Private Places, Public Power

Friday, April 8, 2011

Speakers:

Debina Stratigakos, Rice HRC External Fellow:  "The Decorator and the Dictator: Gerdy Troost and Hitler's Domestic Makeover"

Leora Auslander, University of Chicago: "What Made a Home Jewish? Ruminations on Material Culture and Embodiment in Interwar Paris and Berlin" 

Michael Jennings, Princeton University: "The Architectural Apparatus: Empire, Republic, and the Exile in Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around 1900"

Paul Jaskot, DePaul University: "The Power of Space at Auschwitz: An Archival and Geographical Analysis of the Built Environment"

Private space is premised on the ability to exclude, whereas public space embodies an ideal of access to all members. The territoriality of public and private is seen most clearly when those boundaries are transgressed or challenged, transgressions which may come either from marginal groups or from those in power. Through the lens of four unusual case studies—Jewish homes in interwar Paris and Berlin, Walter Benjamin’s childhood memories, Adolf Hitler’s private homes, and maps of Auschwitz—this symposium explored the physical and imagined connections between the private individual and public power as expressed through objects, housing, site plans, and other embodied spatial forms.