German Conference Begins

A weekend-long conference on German culture and politics will open today at the Sackler Auditorium in the Sackler Museum.

The conference, which is sponsored by six Boston-based organizations, is expected to attract over 200 professors, college students and professionals from around the world, organizers said.

The event will offer panel discussions and speeches from scholars in German studies, Daniel P. Reynolds, coordinator of the conference and a Harvard teaching fellow in German, said yesterday.

The conference was "born out of the recent events in Germany," said Reynolds. "But it will concentrate on the interplay between culture and politics and the artist's position in German society [from the Weimar Republic to the present]," he said.

The conference is a unique gathering of the major minds in the academic and artistic fields associated with German studies, said William Donahue, a conference coordinator and Harvard teaching fellow.

"We've tried to create a forum in which those involved in politics and the arts can talk back to the intellectuals that study them," he said yesterday.

Some of the panelists will include German authors and political activists like Jens Reich, co-founder of Neues Forum, an East German reformist organization. Organizers said they would have liked greater German representation, but they lacked adequate funding.

This will be the first time such a conference will be held. The event was funded in part by the Center for European Studies, the Goethe Institute of Boston and the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies.