Filmscreening and Discussion
with Dr. Jeff Peck
21 June 2023
7 pm
Alte Synagoge Literaturhaus Görlitz
(as part of the Jewish Remembrance Week Görlitz 2023)
The documentary (1993) by John Borneman and Jeff Peck is about identity: German, Jewish, Communist. It tells the complex story of two generations of German Jews from Berlin who left during the Nazi regime. Some went West to the United States and others East to the Soviet Union. Those of the second generation were born in their parents’ countries of exile. After the war and considerable hardship, they purposefully returned to what they hoped would be a »new Germany,« represented by the German Democratic Republic. This period in the GDR is a large portion of their story: their hopes and dreams, as well as disappointments. Then in 1989/90 they found themselves again displaced, this time in the newly unified Federal Republic of Germany. The film documents through interviews before and after their long struggle to find a home.
John Borneman, an associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University, is author of Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation and After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin.
Jeff Peck, was Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences and Vice Provost for Global Strategies at Baruch College/City University of New York until 2015. Thereafter, he moved to Berlin to assume a Mercator Senior Fellowship to study the relationship between diversity and internationalization at three types of Berlin Hochschulen.
