# Events
**Source**: https://german.princeton.edu/whats-on/events/upcoming
**Parent**: https://german.princeton.edu/
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Spring 2026 Lecture Series
Reconstructing ‘Bioanalysis’: Freud, Ferenczi and the Discomfort with Heredity
Professor Dr. Jenny Willner
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich
March 23, 2026
Monday
4:30 – 6:00 pm
205 East Pyne
[Add to Calendar +](#)
[Add to Google](https://www.google.com/calendar/r/eventedit?text=Reconstructing ‘Bioanalysis’: Freud, Ferenczi and the Discomfort with Heredity
&dates=20260323T203000Z/20260323T220000Z&details=In their correspondence during the First World War, Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi engaged with biological speculation. Together they imagined a new science, which they called “bioanalysis,” asking whether evolutionary processes might be read like neuroses or hysterical symptoms: as regressive reactions to trauma, displaced across generations. The fragments of this endeavor oscillate between grandiosity and doubt. Ferenczi stated that the idea had come to him as a “bad joke, but I forced myself to take it seriously, though I am ready for the whole thing to turn out to be nonsense.” And yet the pair continued to develop this idea for more than a decade, leaving notable traces in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Ferenczi’s Thalassa.
My talk discusses this unrealized project as a critical intervention into the scientific language of the long nineteenth century. Bioanalysis, I suggest, constitutes a covert counter-discourse, half in jest, half in earnest: both a playful and a desperate attempt to wrest the language of biology away from theories of degeneration that persisted in eugenicist thought long into the twentieth century. Precisely where it appears most biologically naïve, psychoanalysis intervenes in the entanglements of science, politics, and the cultural imaginary.
Jenny Willner is a professor of Comparative Literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. She has published on authors such as Victor Klemperer, Franz Kafka, Peter Weiss, and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt. Her recent focus lies on the intersection between the history of science, literature, and critical theory: “Hans Castorp jenseits des Lustprinzips. Einsamkeit, Sozialität und Biologie in Thomas Manns Der Zauberberg” (2025), the co-edited anthology Towards the Limits of Freudian Thinking: Critical Edition and Readings of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2024), and the co-authored book Ferenczi Dialogues. On Trauma and Catastrophe (2023). Currently, she is finishing the monograph Unbehagen am Erbe. Die Politik der Psychoanalyse im Zeitalter der Eugenik.
&location=205 East Pyne)
[Download .ics](data:text/calendar;charset=utf8,BEGIN:VCALENDAR%0AVERSION:2.0%0ABEGIN:VEVENT%0ADTSTART:20260323T203000Z%0ADTEND:20260323T220000Z%0ASUMMARY:Reconstructing ‘Bioanalysis’: Freud, Ferenczi and the Discomfort with Heredity
%0ADESCRIPTION:In their correspondence during the First World War, Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi engaged with biological speculation. Together they imagined a new science, which they called “bioanalysis,” asking whether evolutionary processes might be read like neuroses or hysterical symptoms: as regressive reactions to trauma, displaced across generations. The fragments of this endeavor oscillate between grandiosity and doubt. Ferenczi stated that the idea had come to him as a “bad joke, but I forced myself to take it seriously, though I am ready for the whole thing to turn out to be nonsense.” And yet the pair continued to develop this idea for more than a decade, leaving notable traces in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Ferenczi’s Thalassa.
My talk discusses this unrealized project as a critical intervention into the scientific language of the long nineteenth century. Bioanalysis, I suggest, constitutes a covert counter-discourse, half in jest, half in earnest: both a playful and a desperate attempt to wrest the language of biology away from theories of degeneration that persisted in eugenicist thought long into the twentieth century. Precisely where it appears most biologically naïve, psychoanalysis intervenes in the entanglements of science, politics, and the cultural imaginary.
Jenny Willner is a professor of Comparative Literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. She has published on authors such as Victor Klemperer, Franz Kafka, Peter Weiss, and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt. Her recent focus lies on the intersection between the history of science, literature, and critical theory: “Hans Castorp jenseits des Lustprinzips. Einsamkeit, Sozialität und Biologie in Thomas Manns Der Zauberberg” (2025), the co-edited anthology Towards the Limits of Freudian Thinking: Critical Edition and Readings of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2024), and the co-authored book Ferenczi Dialogues. On Trauma and Catastrophe (2023). Currently, she is finishing the monograph Unbehagen am Erbe. Die Politik der Psychoanalyse im Zeitalter der Eugenik.
%0ALOCATION:205 East Pyne%0AEND:VEVENT%0AEND:VCALENDAR)
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Film Screening
Good Bye Lenin! (2003)
Wolfgang Becker; 121 minutes
March 25, 2026
Wednesday
6:30 – 8:30 pm
205 East Pyne
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[Add to Google](https://www.google.com/calendar/r/eventedit?text=Good Bye Lenin! (2003)
&dates=20260325T223000Z/20260326T003000Z&details=Movie + Dinner = Perfect Wednesday!
Come watch Good Bye Lenin! with us on March 25 at 6:30 pm in East Pyne 205.
We’ll have Tacoria catering, so bring your appetite and your friends for a relaxed evening of food, film, and fun.
Synopsis: In 1990, to protect his fragile mother from a fatal shock after a long coma, a young man must keep her from learning that her beloved nation of East Germany as she knew it has disappeared. In German with English subtitles.
&location=205 East Pyne)
[Download .ics](data:text/calendar;charset=utf8,BEGIN:VCALENDAR%0AVERSION:2.0%0ABEGIN:VEVENT%0ADTSTART:20260325T223000Z%0ADTEND:20260326T003000Z%0ASUMMARY:Good Bye Lenin! (2003)
%0ADESCRIPTION:Movie + Dinner = Perfect Wednesday!
Come watch Good Bye Lenin! with us on March 25 at 6:30 pm in East Pyne 205.
We’ll have Tacoria catering, so bring your appetite and your friends for a relaxed evening of food, film, and fun.
Synopsis: In 1990, to protect his fragile mother from a fatal shock after a long coma, a young man must keep her from learning that her beloved nation of East Germany as she knew it has disappeared. In German with English subtitles.
%0ALOCATION:205 East Pyne%0AEND:VEVENT%0AEND:VCALENDAR)
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Film Screening
Hitlerjunge Quex (1933)
Hans Steinhoff, 87 min.
April 7, 2026
Tuesday
7:00 – 8:30 pm
010 East Pyne
[Add to Calendar +](#)
[Add to Google](https://www.google.com/calendar/r/eventedit?text=Hitlerjunge Quex (1933)
&dates=20260407T230000Z/20260408T003000Z&details=The year is 1931, and young Heini Volker has a problem. His unemployed father demands he join Berlin's young communists. But his heart belongs to the Hitler Youth. How Heini resolves this quandry is the story of Hitlerjunge Quex, a movie that became central to the moral instruction of young Germans throughout the Nazi years.
In conjunction with the April 13 lecture in the German Department about this classic of Nazi film propaganda by Ian Fleischmann, there will be a screening of the Hans Steinhoff’s Hitlerjunge Quex (Germany, 1933, B&W, 87 Minutes, German dialogue with English subtitles) at 7pm on Monday, April 6th in East Pyne 010.
Free and open to the public
&location=010 East Pyne)
[Download .ics](data:text/calendar;charset=utf8,BEGIN:VCALENDAR%0AVERSION:2.0%0ABEGIN:VEVENT%0ADTSTART:20260407T230000Z%0ADTEND:20260408T003000Z%0ASUMMARY:Hitlerjunge Quex (1933)
%0ADESCRIPTION:The year is 1931, and young Heini Volker has a problem. His unemployed father demands he join Berlin's young communists. But his heart belongs to the Hitler Youth. How Heini resolves this quandry is the story of Hitlerjunge Quex, a movie that became central to the moral instruction of young Germans throughout the Nazi years.
In conjunction with the April 13 lecture in the German Department about this classic of Nazi film propaganda by Ian Fleischmann, there will be a screening of the Hans Steinhoff’s Hitlerjunge Quex (Germany, 1933, B&W, 87 Minutes, German dialogue with English subtitles) at 7pm on Monday, April 6th in East Pyne 010.
Free and open to the public
%0ALOCATION:010 East Pyne%0AEND:VEVENT%0AEND:VCALENDAR)
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Spring 2026 Lecture Series
Political Leanings: The Queer Contrapposto of *Hitler Youth Quex*
Ian Fleishman
University of Pennsylvania
April 13, 2026
Monday
4:30 – 6:00 pm
205 East Pyne
[Add to Calendar +](#)
[Add to Google](https://www.google.com/calendar/r/eventedit?text=Political Leanings: The Queer Contrapposto of Hitler Youth Quex
&dates=20260413T203000Z/20260413T220000Z&details=Even a cursory glance at the available imagery of actor Jürgen Ohlsen, who played the titular protagonist of Hans Steinhoff’s Hitlerjunge Quex (1933), is striking for how often the young man is depicted leaning. Placards, magazine covers, postcards, print advertisements, radio handbills and theatrical spectacle come together to constitute a collage of reclining Quexes, whose dynamic stance is often emphasized by a dizzying kaleidoscope of urban background imagery and attention-grabbing, tilted text. Attending to such montage, in the sense of an assembly of images, this talk will offer a contextualized close reading of the markedly contrapposto pose Ohlsen strikes in the promotional film poster for the original release of Quex—the first feature officially produced by the Nazi party after they came to power and brought the Weimar film studio Ufa under state control. Situating the figure within a long tradition, historically coded homosexual, of attractive ephebes at an incline, the lecture will probe the uncomfortable imbrications of queer, homosocial and fascist iconographies.
Ian Fleishman is Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies and Associate Professor of Francophone, Italian & Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published widely on subjects ranging from the Baroque to video pornography. He is the author two monographs—An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino (Northwestern, 2018) and Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing (Northwestern, 2025)—and coeditor, alongside Iggy Cortez, of a volume on Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh, 2023).
&location=205 East Pyne)
[Download .ics](data:text/calendar;charset=utf8,BEGIN:VCALENDAR%0AVERSION:2.0%0ABEGIN:VEVENT%0ADTSTART:20260413T203000Z%0ADTEND:20260413T220000Z%0ASUMMARY:Political Leanings: The Queer Contrapposto of Hitler Youth Quex
%0ADESCRIPTION:Even a cursory glance at the available imagery of actor Jürgen Ohlsen, who played the titular protagonist of Hans Steinhoff’s Hitlerjunge Quex (1933), is striking for how often the young man is depicted leaning. Placards, magazine covers, postcards, print advertisements, radio handbills and theatrical spectacle come together to constitute a collage of reclining Quexes, whose dynamic stance is often emphasized by a dizzying kaleidoscope of urban background imagery and attention-grabbing, tilted text. Attending to such montage, in the sense of an assembly of images, this talk will offer a contextualized close reading of the markedly contrapposto pose Ohlsen strikes in the promotional film poster for the original release of Quex—the first feature officially produced by the Nazi party after they came to power and brought the Weimar film studio Ufa under state control. Situating the figure within a long tradition, historically coded homosexual, of attractive ephebes at an incline, the lecture will probe the uncomfortable imbrications of queer, homosocial and fascist iconographies.
Ian Fleishman is Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies and Associate Professor of Francophone, Italian & Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published widely on subjects ranging from the Baroque to video pornography. He is the author two monographs—An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino (Northwestern, 2018) and Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing (Northwestern, 2025)—and coeditor, alongside Iggy Cortez, of a volume on Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh, 2023).
%0ALOCATION:205 East Pyne%0AEND:VEVENT%0AEND:VCALENDAR)