Goethe-Institut Chicago

TICKETS HERE!

Dir. Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 1978, 137m
DCP
A group of bored and oppressed women join a lesbian pirate ship, the Orlando (named, of course, after Woolf’s novel), looking for a life of seafaring adventure. However, they end up trading one repressive lifestyle for another as the sailors soon face Captain Madame X’s sadistic ways. MADAME X is a fantastic, highly-stylized sapphic exploration of ritual, with dialogue consisting mostly of animal noises and nonsense.

REGISTER HERE

The white German graphic novelist Birgit Weyhe teaches at a US college through an academic exchange programme. At a conference of American Germanists in the Midwest, she is accused of cultural expropriation. Is she exploiting her privileges as a white writer when she tells stories about Black people?

She meets Priscilla Layne, an African American professor of German studies with Caribbean roots. Growing up, Priscilla is labelled an ‘Oreo’: too white for her Black classmates, and too Black for the white kids. Rebelling against everything and everyone all at once, she joins the skinhead movement and becomes a 'rude girl,' discovering a community where she feels valued. Music, clothes, hair, food, class, race, gender, education – her life and identity are a complex composite.

But how should Birgit Weyhe tell a life story like Priscilla’s? What mistakes does she need to avoid? The act of storytelling itself becomes its own narrative layer in this unique graphic biography.

###

About the Author
Birgit Weyhe was born in Munich in 1969. She spent her childhood in East Africa and studied literature and history in Konstanz and Hamburg (MA). After graduating from art school (HAW), Birgit Weyhe has been working as a comic artist in Hamburg. Her graphic novels have been nominated for several prizes in Germany, France and Japan, and her album Madgermanes received the Bertholt Leibinger Stiftung Comic Book Prize in 2015 and in 2016 the Max-und-Moritz-Preis as best German-language comic. In 2022 she was awarded the Lessing Scholarship of the City of Hamburg.

Purchase Options
Please ensure you purchase the German version, as an English version is also available.
Dussmann - Das Kulturkaufhaus
AbeBooks

Or borrow a copy from us!
Several copies are available to borrow for free from the Goethe-Institut Chicago. If you are interested, please contact us at: Lukas.Deicke.extern@goethe.de or AliHaydar.Agrali.extern@goethe.de.

Upcoming book*ish Events
Wednesday, July 9, 2025, 6pm: 'Scheiblettenkind,' by Eva Müller

TICKETS HERE

Dir. Ulrike Ottinger
Germany, 1984, 150m
DCP

Cinema icon Delphine Seyrig stars as Frau Dr. Mabuse, the head of a media conglomerate who seeks to control and ultimately destroy the handsome Dorian Gray (played by Veruschka von Lehndorff in drag). One of Ottinger’s most narrative (and comedic) works, Dorian Gray is saturated with camp, withering satire, and extravagant set designs. The film’s extended opera scenes and Seyrig’s villainous performance are also delightful to behold.

TICKETS HERE!

'Lawscapes: Theater and the Anthropocene' is a collaborative two-day workshop in which participants will focus on entanglements between humans and nonhuman entities. How can theater help us think through and reimagine interspecies relationships -- as well as those between activists, artists and lawmakers? Imagine a court case with whales speaking on their own behalf. Which lawscapes are yet to come? We’d like to invite all participants to co-create theater that speaks to these and related questions.
In this performance lecture, Kevin Rittberger will introduce how he approaches these subjects through his work as a playwright and director. It will be followed by a conversation with Mateusz Borowski, Celeste Hammond, Oliver Sann, and Heidi Schlipphacke on creative, scientific, and legal approaches to environmental crisis.

The following day, Friday, April 18th, will be an all-day workshop focused on co-creating theater.

Free and open to the public; please register for each day separately to help us plan accordingly.

This workshop is organized by the Anthropocene Lab, Germanic Studies (UIC), the Goethe-Institut Chicago, Prof. Mateusz Borowski, Prof. Oliver Sann (SAIC) and Kevin Rittberger.

Photo: Ute Hannig in „Shredding Laws“ by Kevin Rittberger, SchauSpielhaus Hamburg, 2024. © Maris Eufinger.

BIOS
Kevin Rittberger was born in 1977 in Stuttgart, Germany, and is a playwright, director, and curator based in Berlin. Rittberger's more than 20 plays have been staged at theaters such as the Deutsches Theater Berlin, Schauspielhaus Vienna, Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Residenztheater Munich, and the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin. Notable works include Kassandra or The World as the end of the representation. In 2013 he directed his play „Mulian Rescues Mother Earth“ at the Taipei Arts Festival. As a performer he showed „UNL€ARNING WHITE NOISE“ together with Stefan Schneider at the Berliner Festspiele. In 2022 he co-organized the conference „Diffractive Word-Making: Theatre and Science Beyond the Capitalocene“ at the Indiana University Bloomington. His most recent shows were „Black Block“ (2020), „The Entrepreneur“ (2022), „Two Suns and a Setting“ (2023), „The Great Grey Shrike“ (Vom Zeugenschutz des Raubwürgers) and „Shredding Laws“ (2024).