The funding line Open Humboldt Freiräume is now hosted by the HZK. The focus of this funding line is on the idea that researchers need enough time to engage in dialogue with society and to develop projects in the field of knowledge exchange, transfer and science communication.
The funded scientists will each receive a teaching reduction to 0 SWS for the 2024 summer semester or the 2024/25 winter semester. The Berlin University Alliance provides the institute at which the scientists are employed with personnel funds to finance the replacement position.
Professors, postdocs and doctoral students at HU Berlin are eligible to apply. The applicants’ positions must have a teaching load and be fully financed by HU funds.
Application deadline is 27th October 2023, 12 a.m.
In preparation for the Master’s programme on the cultural technique of curating, Vice-Director Daniel Tyradellis will be teaching weekly in the winter semester 2023/24 in the mechanical arena in the foyer of the Humboldt Forum. Together with HU students, staff and all interested visitors, the potentials of the topic “Family – a social construct” for the Humboldt Forum will be discussed and curatorial ideas developed.
Only a few insiders would immediately recognise the object of October. The model of a Hyperboloid of two sheets is located in Adlershof, more precisely in the Institute of Mathematics and belongs to the Mathematical Model Collection there. However, the connection to the university goes much deeper. The template for the model arose from the institute’s teaching and research activities. Even though the model is not complete, it demonstrates very well the basic idea of a teaching collection, which is to be seen in its use in academic as well as school teaching. That’s why the objects show signs of usage over the course of time, or sometimes even break. Although they are usually very robustly constructed for touching. But one thing after the other.
Specimen of the Hyperboloid of two sheets of Stoll in the mathematical model collection in Adlershof. The upper sheet is missing, indicating the frequent use of the object (Photo: Robert Pässler, TU Dresden).
The Hyperboloid of two sheets, a geometric shape in mathematics, is a second-order surface. In order to think of it as a body, one rotates a hyperbola around its main axis. This creates two separate surface pieces (in the model as a body), whereby in the case of the Berlin model the upper surface piece (the upper body) is missing. The sketch in Figure 2 from Meyer’s Großes Konversations-Lexikon of 1905 shows a Hyperboloid of two sheets with the axes, whereby the vertical axis shown in the picture is the main axis.
Meyer's Großes Konversations-Lexikon of 1905 shows a Hyperboloid of two sheets with imaginary axes.
The origin of this model is interesting. It was manufactured by the company Rudolf Stoll K.G. Berlin. It was located at Oderbruchstraße 8-14, i.e. in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin. The company not only took over the production, but also the distribution of the teaching models.
The teaching aids were developed at the Second Mathematical Institute of the Humboldt University in Berlin under the direction of Professor Dr. Kurt Schröder (1909-1978). He held the professorship of Applied Mathematics and was also Director of the Institute. In the first half of the 1960s, he was also Rector of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Stoll’s models can be seen in a line of development with the mathematical models produced by Brill, Schilling and Wiener since the 1880s. They appeared at a time when their use in mathematical teaching was already taking place through other media. Nevertheless, they were produced and distributed, and moreover, they were used regularly.
The model described in the catalogue "Lehrmodelle für Mathematik" of Rudolf Stoll K.G. Berlin No. 18 (Source: SLUB Dresden).
Only a few traces of the Stoll company can be found today. Apart from the models found in some mathematical collections of other universities (e.g. TU Dresden or University of Marburg), the catalogue “Lehrmodelle für Mathematik” (Teaching Models for Mathematics) by Rudolf Stoll K.G. Berlin No. 18, published in three languages (German, English and French), still exists. The models shown there are divided into teaching aids for elementary mathematics, for geometry and for analysis. Our model is found under the number “Modell 224/114” with the note that “a Hyperboloid of two sheets ” is shown. The weight is 2 kilograms. The dimensions are 20 x 16 x 30 cm.
In this context, it is still worth mentioning that such sales catalogues are not classic library collectors’ items. They are therefore very rare and often only preserved by chance. The price list for the Stoll catalogue cannot be found digitally. We do not know whether a copy has been preserved somewhere.
Gesa Grimme and Sarah Elena Link, both Coordination Centre for Scientific University Collections in Germany (HZK), discuss academic collections in general and their sometimes problematic, imperial contexts of origin. The panel discussion with art historian Jo Vickery (Princeton/Berlin) and literary scholar Birgit Neumann (Düsseldorf) will take place within the framework of the research project “Afterlives of Empire – Encounters of Art and Academia”, initiated by Gesa Stedman (HU).
Art students from Oxford and Berlin habe been invited to work at Lichthof Ost, turning the room into a temporary studio, before transforming it back into an exhibition space. The students show how their interaction with several scientific collections at HU as well as with Berlin museums, among them the sound archive, the geographical collections, and the Winckelmann collection, have led to a new understanding of some of the colonial legacies at HU and in Berlin.
The panel discussion will take place on 10 September at 6:30 pm in the Lichthof Ost of the HU main building.
Alia Rayyan: Practice of Fissures – a trans- and interdisciplinary investigation of socially engaged art interventions in East Jerusalem in the anthology “Double bind postcolonial. Critical Perspectives on Art and Cultural Education”, edited by María do Mar Castro Varela and Leila Haghighat.
Alia Rayyan addresses in this paper questions about the adoption of socially engaged and participatory art as an emancipatory art form in public space reflecting specific local conditions. Based on her trans- and interdisciplinary investigation to translate experiences as a curator of socially engaged art interventions in East Jerusalem into a theoretical discussion, collected challenges and alternative approaches are contrasted with applied, canonised theories of participatory art practice and their terminologies. The result is a discussion that combines sociological approaches, considerations from art studies, memory studies, political history of ideas as well as postcolonial studies, without losing sight of the double bind of the author.
Double bind postcolonial. Postcolonial perspectives in the art world and in cultural education – anthology – edited by María do Mar Castro Varela and Leila Haghighat.
Double bind postcolonial. Postcolonial perspectives in the art world and in cultural education - anthology -
edited by María do Mar Castro Varela and Leila Haghighat. transcript Postcolonial Studies
The contributions to this volume illuminate the responsibility of art and art education from an explicitly postcolonial perspective. The focus is on the “double bind” that pervades the field and manifests itself in a dilemmatic position between subversion and affirmation. In doing so, discriminatory practices in the field are exposed and an (auto-)critical theory development is advanced.
With contributions by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Nikita Dhawan, Ruth Sonderegger, Hayat Erdoğan, Aicha Kaleko, Sandra Babli, Joy Kristin Kalu, Anja Quickert, Thu Hoài Tran, Sruti Bala, Sab Naq, Tasnim Baghdhadi, Alia Rayyan, Carla Bobadilla, Carmen Mörsch, Mai-Anh Boger, Nina Simon, Nicole Suzuki, Rajkamal Kahlon
On the occasion of the publication of The Resonant Museum, the Gropius Bau invites you to a reading followed by a conversation.
How can the museum become a socially relevant place? How can museums contribute to the production of knowledge about mental health?
The editors Diana Mammana and Margareta von Oswald will introduce the evening and present their curatorial work and approaches with regard to these questions. The subsequent reading gives an insight into discussions and practices around mental health between the years 2021 and 2022 in Berlin. Various people who contributed to the book will read passages from their texts. The reading will be followed by an exchange and a conversation with the audience.
The book is published in the context of the exhibition YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal, which took place at the Gropius Bau from September 2022 to January 2023. The Resonant Museum brings people from science, culture, politics and activist contexts into dialogue about mental health. The publication was produced as part of a cooperation between the Gropius Bau and Mindscapes, the international programme on mental health of the British Wellcome Trust.
The Resonant Museum: Berlin Conversations on Mental Health. Ed. by Diana Mammana & Margareta von Oswald. Contributions by Beatrice von Bismarck, Priya Basil, Diana Mammana & Margareta von Oswald, Stephanie Rosenthal, Christine Wong Yap i.a. Cologne 2023. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König.
Accusing, shocking, melancholic – the large-format painting by Annemirl Bauer is expressive. From the eyes of a centrally placed female figure, crouching on a box in prisoner’s clothing, rays emanate to both sides of the picture. On the left, a row of naked women in high-heeled shoes stand in line, the one in front holding out her armed hand. Behind her are other figures, some with oversized phalluses. The pistol points to the right side of the picture with a female figure crucified by crutches, from whose womb blood is flowing. A male army, indicated in heads at the lower right edge of the picture is described with the invocation of the Trinity. The dark, violent and sexualised scenes are only counteracted on the far right by a mother and child standing in the golden light, standing upright and calm despite all hostility. The title “Männliche Herrlichkeit Gottes”, present in the picture through characters in the sky or on a rocket, refers to the horrors of war and violence (perpetrated by men) as well as to the roles of women – as victims, as perpetrators, as mothers.
Annemirl Bauer, Männliche Herrlichkeit Gottes, oil/ carpet, 208 x 246 cm, 1988
Since 2018, the painting has been hanging in the Humboldt University as one of the few works by Annemirl Bauer still present in public. The valiant paintress, herself under surveillance by the Stasi, expelled from the GDR artists’ association (VBK) and subsequently banned from working, repeatedly explored feminist themes. The “Male Glory of God” can also be linked very specifically to the conscription law for women in the GDR, the “Women for Peace” (Frauen für den Frieden), but also to the feminist Ingrid Strobl, who was imprisoned in the Federal Republic.
In 1982, a new law on military service was passed that would also have called on women to serve in national defence in the event of mobilisation. Against this, 150 women protested in a joint plea to Erich Honecker: “We women want to break the cycle of violence and withdraw our participation from all forms of violence as a means of conflict resolution. […] We women understand the readiness for military service as a threatening gesture which opposes the striving for moral and military disarmament and allows the voice of human reason to be drowned in military obedience.” (Petition to the Chairman of the Council of State, Erich Honecker, 12 October 1982) This pacifist criticism was followed by a wave of interrogations by the state security, intimidation and arrests – for example, of the politically active paintress and main signatory Bärbel Bohley, who, like Annemirl Bauer, was organised in the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR (VBK), from whose district executive committee she was expelled in 1983.
Ingrid Strobl, in turn, an Austrian journalist who was editor of the magazine Emma in Cologne from 1979 to 1986, was taken into remand or solitary confinement as a terrorism suspect in 1987. She had been filmed buying an alarm clock that had been prepared by the BKA (Federal Criminal Police Office) and identified in the remains of a bomb in the 1986 attack on the Lufthansa administration building. The attack against Lufthansa, perpetrated by the organisation “Revolutionary Cells” (Revolutionäre Zellen), also had a feminist background and targeted sex tourism (“state racism, sexism and the patriarchy”, as the Revolutionary Cells themselves stated, cf. Ingrid Strobl: Vermessene Zeit. Der Wecker, der Knast und ich, Hamburg 2020). Strobl received public solidarity after her arrest. Even without knowledge of this historical background, Annemirl Bauer’s work has an effect through its offensive pictorial language, which also plays with religious motif quotations. Despite all the criticism – especially against the rejection of Annemirl Bauer’s repeated calls for travel “with return” – the artist was not a dissident and did not want to leave the GDR. Changing the social and political structures, that was her struggle throughout her life, which she lost through her early death shortly before the fall of the Wall in the summer of 1989. Since 2010, a square named after her in Friedrichshain at Ostkreuz station has commemorated the pugnacious artist.
Particularly significant is the fact that these three records were previously considered lost in Berlin; no digital copies existed until now. In Oslo, digital copies were made and also transferred to the Lautarchiv. The shellac records had been lent to the Norwegian Iranologist Georg Morgenstierne (1892-1978) by the founder of the Lautarchiv Wilhelm Doegen (1877-1967) or by the Göttingen Iranologist Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846-1930). Through Morgenstierne’s estate, they made their way into the Norwegian Nasjionalbiblioteket.
On the records, the voices of Ábdil Kadír Khan, Beidullah Khan and Shahdad Khan (Afghan and Baluchi) can be heard.
The shellac records were brought to Berlin with official permission from the Norwegian Ministry and a written statement from the Nasjionalbibliotekek.
In particular, the Lautarchiv would like to thank Johanne Ostad, Bente Granrud and Włodek Witek from the Oslo Nasjionalbiblioteket.
For the object of the month August, we have chosen the diagram of the precipitation in Berlin-Dahlem for the year 2022 (Fig. 4), which is a piece of the daily weather observation. Morever it also reflects the diversity of research at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as well as allowing the connection to current debates such as climate change and questions of future food security. It is therefore about the one topic where everyone surely always wants to form an opinion: the weather.
The terms weather and climate should be kept apart. Weather describes the measurable instantaneous state of the atmosphere, whereas climate is defined more as a typical recurring annual pattern of weather, usually based on 30-year averages.
Weather is usually associated with sunshine, wind, rain or temperature. These are variables that can be measured or counted and play a central role, especially for agriculture and thus for food. And in order to be able to measure or count them professionally, there are fixed weather stations, which are also located at Humboldt-Universität.
The agro-climatological weather station at the agricultural experimental site in Berlin-Dahlem was established in 1931. The weather data measured since then is used on the one hand for the evaluation of the permanent agricultural experiments at the site (investigation of the relationships between weather patterns and growth, development and yield formation of agricultural crops) and on the other hand for the evaluation of the most diverse field experiments, which are designed to be more short-term. The data is available to all students and staff for the evaluation of their field trials.
In addition, the long-term weather records provide an insight into the climatic changes in Berlin.
Figure 1: Weather station on the grounds of the permanent field experiments of the Department of Crop and Animal Sciences of the Thaer Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences in Dahlem. (Photo: O. Zauzig 2023)
Figure 2: Course of the annual mean air temperature (Ta) since the beginning of weather recording in Dahlem.
Figure 3: Annual precipitation (Pa) over the same period.
The two graphs show the course of the annual mean air temperature and the annual precipitation depth (both y-axis) from 1931 to 2022. The air temperature in Berlin-Dahlem increased significantly by 1.8°C between 1931 and 2022 (1.78 Kelvin in 92 years). Annual precipitation shows no significant trend, with the lowest annual precipitation to date of only 338 mm (equivalent to 338 litres per square metre) measured throughout the year in 2022.
Figure 4: Course of precipitation depth in 2022, measured at the Dahlem site.
Figure 4 shows that only 3 months of the year (February, April, December) had precipitation levels above the long-term average. This led to an annual precipitation deficit of 40 percent and thus to the lowest annual total of 337.8 litres per square metre since observations began in 1931. With only 0.6 l/m² precipitation, March 2022 also set a record, which was due to the highest sunshine duration of 245.3 hours measured to date.
This means that four records were set at once in 2022: highest sunshine duration and lowest precipitation level in March, lowest annual precipitation level since 1931, highest number of “desert days”.
Observing the weather remains our task.
Authors: Prof. Dr. Frank-M. Chmielewski and Dr. Oliver Zauzig
As the interdisciplinary Central Institute of Humboldt-Universität, the HZK has the task of establishing the Third Mission as a new core competence within the university, alongside research and teaching. This includes the transdisciplinarily oriented competence field of “knowledge exchange with society”, which orients Humboldt-Universität as a whole more strongly towards a bi-directional understanding of imparting knowledge. Scientific results should not only be brought into society, but a direct exchange of diversely understood knowledge should be tested in concrete forms of encounter.
In order to bundle the research, teaching and application results gained by the HZK since the turn of the millennium and to become the central point of contact in the area of knowledge exchange with society for the members of the university as a whole, the Central Institute will dedicate itself to the multi-year theme “The Elements” – a fuzzy term from the perspective of the natural sciences, but a historical one from the perspective of the humanities – starting in summer 2023.
Elements such as earth, fire, water or air play a self-evident role in everyday concepts – and in this they represent not least a bridge between the most diverse disciplines and knowledge traditions. Thus, “earth” can be understood from a geopolitical perspective, as a biological breeding ground (“topsoil”) or as a historically damaged habitat (“scorched” earth), as well as in terms of the technical-innovative potential of “rare earths” or the increase in yields through fertilisation and profound interventions in the landscape, be it through buildings, earth eruptions or erosion.
Various research and outreach formats will test the inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations involved. The Humboldt Labor located in the Humboldt Forum, part of the HZK and one of the central stages of the Humboldt-Universität, will start with a teaser for the overall series “The Elements” before devoting itself to the individual elements in the following years and presenting the results of the research on an ongoing basis.
