Meanings of Modernity in Central Europe: The Tramp Abroad: Charlie Chaplin's Modernity

Presenter: Liliane Weissberg, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences, and professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania. This two-day symposium addresses the framework for modernism in the region covered by the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and their successor states, from roughly 1890 to 1945. The state of affairs summed up under the term "modernity," and the cultural responses to it designated "modernism" or, more radically, "avantgarde," are commonly understood to derive from historical developments in the nation-states of western Europe and North America.