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Carlotta von Maltzan, president of the German Association of Southern Africa, spoke on “Stronger than the Storm: Youth Culture and HIV/AIDS in South Africa” 8 p.m. Thursday in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights auditorium.
Stronger than the Storm is a novel by Lutz von Dijk about HIV/AIDS in South Africa that has been adopted into the curriculum of South African public schools. Taking the novel as a reference point, the lecture explored contemporary South African township life and the legacy of apartheid.
Von Maltzan is the Humanities Fellow in Lafayette’s department of foreign languages and literatures this semester, teaching a First-Year Seminar and an upper-level German class that examines the African image in German literature. She is a German professor at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, where she teaches a language course and 18th to 20th century German literature. She is coauthor with Rita Wilson of Spaces and Crossings: Essays on Literature and Culture in Africa and Beyond, published by Peter Lang Publishing in 2001.
Von Maltzan has been very active in the German program on campus this semester, says Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, associate professor and assistant head of foreign languages and literatures, attending weekly German discussions, a social on the German floor in Keefe Hall, and McKelvy House Scholars discussions by two students in her advanced German class. In addition to participating in a panel discussion with playwright Wole Soyinka, she has given lectures on South Africa in courses taught by John McCartney, associate professor of government and law; Katalin Fabian, assistant professor of government and law; and Rado Pribic, Edwin Oliver Williams Professor of Languages and chair of the international affairs program.
She spent a week at Lafayette in September 1999 and attended the sixth Annual Conference of Austrian Literature and Culture hosted by the College. She submitted an article for publication in Literature, Film, and Culture Industry in Contemporary Austria, edited by Lamb-Faffelberger, which was published last year.
Her academic interests include East German literature, especially Heiner Müller; drama and dramatic theory (Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Brecht); women’s writing and gender issues (Christa Wolf, Irmtraud Morgner, Sarah Kirsch); German exile literature 1933-1945; German Jewish writers and Holocaust literature (Jurek Becker, Edgar Hilsenrath); and masochism in literature (Klaus Mann).