Faculty Book Talk: Anke Pinkert

Part of the Story & Place event series. In the fall of 1989, citizens of East Germany took to the streets and, for a few electric months, built something rare: a genuine experiment in radical democracy.

Then the West moved in — and that experiment was erased from national and global memory. Remembering 1989 asks why this “time out of joint” was buried, and how the unresolved legacies of post-Cold War transformations are driving the rise of right-wing movements across Europe and beyond today.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER Anke Pinkert is professor of German and Cinema & Media Studies, the head of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and a Director’s Fellow at Humanities Research Institute (HRI) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

She also co-founded the Initiative for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) on campus. Her research explores historical violence and trauma, visual culture, transnational and post-communist memory, as well as community-based public humanities, and mass incarceration in the United States.

She is the author of Remembering 1989: Future Archives of Public Protest (University of Chicago, 2024) and Film and Memory in East Germany (Indiana University Press, 2008). Her current book project, Memory Ecologies, examines seawater as medium and archive in contexts of forced migration.

Anke taught with the Education Justice Project at Danville Correctional Center and co-directed the campus-wide, multidisciplinary Initiative on “Learning Publics” at Illinois. She grew up in East Berlin directly at the Berlin Wall.