News from Berlin

News from Berlin - On May 27^th, the Ibero-American institute organizes a conference called “European Avant-Garde Crisis and the Post-War Culture according to José Carlos Mariátegui’s perspective”, together with the Latin-American Institute of Berlin Free University and the Einstein Foundation Berlin. Dr. Friedhelm Schmidt-Welle, a specialist of literature and cultural studies for Latin-America in particular, will hold it on the premises of the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. The talk is part of a series of conferences called “World War I from the Latin-American perspective”, and aims at focusing on the impact of the First World War on European literature and European arts in general. Indeed, the end of the war and the 1920s as well as the 1930s saw the rise of an artistic Avant-Garde movement in various fields, which wanted to exteriorize the horror of the war.

As a political philosopher, José Carlos Mariátegui went to Europe from 1920 to 1923 and travelled through France, Germany, Austria and Italy, trying to catch the general artistic atmosphere inspired by the political situation, as well as to get an overview of the European situation after the war. When he came back to Peru, he gave lectures on fascism in Europe and on the way Marxism should get rid of it. He also worked on the influence of the political context on arts and vice versa. A good example of how culture can be a real soft power.

News from Berlin – Berlin Global