the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar
Anne Nelson & Stefan Roloff
The Art of Resistance in Nazi Germany
This lecture took place on April 1st, 2011 at 6:30 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union
Lecture introduction
This joint lecture, presented by writer Anne Nelson and filmmaker Stefan Roloff, puts art and resistance into a new context through the example of the Red Orchestra. The Red Orchestra was a resistance group that fought against the Third Reich within Germany from 1933 to 1942. The Gestapo labeled them as Communists and traitors for their efforts to put an end to Hitler, a theory that was upheld by Allied Secret Services until recently. Historians now officially recognize their work as that of one of the largest and most efficient anti-Nazi resistance groups. The participants held a variety of political and religious beliefs. Forty percent of the members were women. Together, the resisters represented a broad range of German society. Many artists were among them. Putting an end to the Third Reich was their common goal.
About Anne Nelson & Stefan Roloff
Anne Nelson is an author and lecturer specializing in media, human rights and international affairs. She won a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship towards the research on her book Red Orchestra, which was published in the U.S. in 2009 and Germany in 2010. Nelson teaches “New Media and Development Communication” at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and contributes to PBS MediaShift: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/anne-nelson. Nelson is a graduate of Yale University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Stefan Roloff is an independent artist and filmmaker working in Berlin and New York. In 1984, he was invited to experiment on prototypes of digital video and imaging computers at the New York Institute of Technology where he produced videos with Peter Gabriel and Suicide. He received a 1989 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts for his pioneering digital work, which has been shown world-wide in museums and galleries. In 1997 he began work on his second documentary film “The Red Orchestra,” a portrait of his late father, Helmut Roloff, a resistance fighter against the Nazis, which was nominated best foreign film 2005 by the Women Critics Circle. Currently, Roloff is collaborating with a former East German dissident on “Cafe Holland,” the script for his first feature film.