Pasolini in Weimar, 1942

Robert Gordon will discuss  with Karen Pinkus a little-known journey that a young Pier Paolo Pasolini made in the Summer of 1942 to Weimar, in the heart of Nazi Germany, where a major cultural festival of European Nazi and Fascist youth gathered thousands of delegates from 14 countries across Axis and occupied Europe.
What was Pasolini doing in Weimar? And what can his journey tell us about his formation as a poet and intellectual, his generation, and his later, complicated relationship with Fascism and ideology? Pasolini went on to become a writer, poet, filmmaker and later one of the most contrarian voices of the Marxist left.

Robert Gordon (University of Cambridge) works on 20th-century Italian literature, cinema and cultural history, and on Holocaust studies. His work on cinema includes Pasolini. Forms of Subjectivity (Oxford University Press, 1996) and the BFI FIlm Classics book on De Sica / Zavattini’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) (2008). He has also published on early cinema and literature, Holocaust cinema, Hollywood and European art cinema (Fellini, Antonioni), and censorship. His DVD commentary on Pasolini’s Theorem (1968) appeared in 2007 (BFI) and his Blu-ray/DVD commentary on Bicycle Thieves in 2011 (Arrow). His book on narratives of luck in cinema and literature, Modern Luck, appeared in 2023. CPL Editions published his book on Primo Levi Outrageous Fortune–Luck and the Holocaust.

Karen Pinkus is Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is author of numerous works on Italian culture, film, architecture, and literary theory. Beginning in 2005, she has been one of the pioneers in the field of environmental humanities/climate change. Among her publications are Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (2016), “Crystalline Basement,” (e-flux, with artist Hans Baumann), and the forthcoming book Subsurface. For the Mellon Design Justice Workshop, she is especially interested in guiding students to think critically and speculatively about the right to the city, the politics of the archive, and the scale of climate justice. Pinkus has been a mentor to students of literature, cinema and media, architecture, studio art, anthropology, and environmental studies.

Image: Hitler’s Youth Festival, Weimar 1942