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Ambassador Hans Winkler, head of Austria’s Human Rights Office at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will give a public lecture and meet with students and faculty during a residency sponsored by Lafayette’s Max Kade Center for German Studies today and tomorrow.
He will attend a faculty forum on “Reconciliation after Major Conflicts and Mass Violations of Human Rights — the Austrian Experience” at the Max Kade Center, Pardee Hall room 429, noon today.
Later that day, Winkler will give a lecture titled “Never Again! The Responsibility of the International Community to Prevent Genocide and Massive Violations of Human Rights” at 8 p.m. in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights auditorium. The talk is free and open to the public.
He also will attend the weekly German-language lunch discussion noon Friday at the Max Kade Center, joining German students and German-speaking faculty.
Winkler’s many accomplishments include the successful negotiations of reparation payments for slave labor during the Nazi regime between the U.S. and Austria in 2002. In the late 1970s, he served as cultural attaché at the Austrian Embassy in Washington D.C. and the Middle East. He also was Austria’s European Community (now European Union) representative in Strasbourg in the 1980s.
Lafayette dedicated its new technologically advanced headquarters for the study of German last year. Based in Pardee Hall room 429, the Max Kade Center for German Studies was established through a $65,000 grant from the Max Kade Foundation, which also awarded $5,000 for a German library and a visiting scholar, Herbert Herzmann, professor and head of German at University College Dublin in Ireland.
Last semester, Carlotta von Maltzan, president of the German Association of Southern Africa, served as the Humanities Fellow in the department of foreign languages and literatures, teaching a First-Year Seminar and an upper-level German class that examined the African image in German literature. She attended weekly German discussions, a social on the German floor in Keefe Hall, and McKelvy House Scholars discussions by two advanced German students. In addition to participating in a panel discussion with playwright Wole Soyinka, she gave 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.