Michael Bryant

I’ve been living in the Kalamazoo, Michigan, area off and on for the last twenty years, and when the COVID-19 pandemic forced us all to examine our priorities, I decided to move back to Kalamazoo full-time until my son was done with high school. Some of you remember my son as a young boy, and it might make you feel your age (it makes me feel mine, at least…) to know that he’s now a senior in high school. This past spring, I saw that Kalamazoo College was looking for a Visiting Assistant Professor to cover a sabbatical year, and I was fortunate to be selected to fill that role for this academic year. Not only do I get to stay in town during my son’s last year of school, but I get to teach German language and content courses at a liberal arts college that, while offering a very different experience from the one I had while teaching at Indiana, has already been unbelievably fulfilling. As I teach my courses this fall term, I’m already drawing on the excellent Ausbildung I had at Indiana. The well-rounded undergraduate and graduate curricula prepared me to create a broad range of materials for my daily instruction, and our pedagogical training as associate instructors helped me engage in reflective teaching that results in more meaningful learning experiences for my students. We’ll see what the future brings, but for this academic year, I draw on my invaluable time in Germanic Studies at Indiana with fondness and gratitude. Every day, I try to embody the tradition of excellence in thought and instruction that shaped me during my time in what I will always view as my home department.

I wanted to share both my updates/developments, as well as offer a thank you towards the department for playing a key role in aiding me to achieve this long-time goal of mine/ours.

Hildegard Keller

Life has been good to us. I am happy to share a few impressions that make me ever so grateful for the ten years I spent at the Department of Germanic Studies. When I returned to Switzerland from Bloomington, I took up my life as a freelance writer of films, novels, performances, and self-invented city tours. I am a storyteller now, under the label “Maulhelden” (a name minted by Christof). “Kriminelles Zürich” has become sort of a cult: at crime scenes I tell stories about crimes, their effect on society, empathy, paradigm shifts in justice, conflict management and much more. – My second documentary, “Brunngasse 8”, also focused on darker sides of life: the violence against the Jewish population in late medieval Zurich. The film, which premiered in January 2022, tells the story of a house and its owners. It enjoyed its weeks in theaters, aired on Swiss television, and is now available with English subtitles, thanks to our highly esteemed Julie Lawson.

And finally, my novel, in which the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a so-called trial of the century, and Hannah Arendt’s book “Eichmann in Jerusalem” play an important role. Hannah Arendt is the main character of “What we seem”; in reading we travel through her life, her work, her century. I have often been able to introduce the novel (it was published by Eichborn in 2021, then the paperback edition in 2022, and Italian and Croatian translations in 2023). People often ask me what brought me personally to Hannah Arendt. I could say: “Reading ‘The Human Condition’ during my studies.” But I think there is something much more important and true, and that has to do with my ten years in Bloomington: Hannah and me, we found each other in the USA, in the Midwest. The historical Hannah Arendt worked in Chicago from the early 1960s; I worked in Bloomington from 2008 to 2017. There I got to know the oldest generation of émigrés still alive, most of them from Jewish families from Germany or Austria, roughly the age of my parents. My parents too, though without Jewish roots, had been German war children before emigrating to Switzerland. I immersed myself in the fates of these émigrés as if they were my own family history, shaped by the hand of time, and made my first documentary “Whatever Comes Next,” produced in Bloomington. I could never have experienced anything like that in Switzerland. So, that’s what brought me personally to a novel with (not about) Hannah Arendt. It all begins in the middle of life. The historical Hannah felt shyness in the public sphere, as she once confessed, but when I offered her the role in my novel, she slipped in freely and feistily. I did a lot of research, also in the Library of Congress, and came across unexpected things: a fairy tale of hers, an unknown letter from her mother, and her own poems. They are the key to empathy with the main character, to a very personal, well-guarded inner world of a woman, her happy and painful experiences, her poetic thinking. It was a long, thrilling and deeply fulfilling journey with Hannah. I am deeply grateful, also to Bloomington.

Radiofeature (a making-of to the novel Was wir scheinen)

E-mail info@hildegardkeller.ch or visit brunngasse8.com for more information.

Nina Morais

This has been a fast-paced year, it really flew by! In January, I accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor of German position at Rhodes College, in Memphis TN – which means, we all packed up in a hurry and moved to the Home of Blues and Birthplace of Rock ‘n’ Roll! We have been adjusting very well, have met great new colleagues, made new friends, and are growing to love the city a lot. Also, both Ricardo and I have been able to successfully defend our dissertations (yay!) and now our kids must deal with two annoying doctors in the house, bossing them around. Marcelo has turned 16 and is starting to think about college (help!) and Diana has turned 2, is extremely cute, and has a strong personality – I don’t know who she got that one from… All in all, a very good year!