Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Living in the shadow of the Wall as a child and coming to age in a united Berlin, Dr. Götze’s career as an environmental journalist seems to have brought her full circle. Her reporting has taken her around the world and engaged a wide range of human struggles with the effects of climate change. She finds increasingly that different kind of walls and barriers are emerging everywhere today. However different they may be from each other and those of the past, these new walls remind her in significant ways of the Wall around her childhood city. This public lecture will address the experiences of individuals on different continents whose stories she has tried to tell, and raise broader questions concerning the vested interests that continue to prevent or impede global action on climate change.

Susanne Götze (PhD, Universität Potsdam/Université Lorraine) is a freelance environmental journalist residing in Berlin. She is author of Land Unter im Paradies. Reportagen aus dem Menschenzeitalter (Underwater in Paradise. Reports from the Anthropocene, 2018; awarded the ITB Book Award) and a regular online contributor on environmental issues to German publications such as Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, and many others.

This event is organized by the UF Mellon Intersections Group on Imagineering and the Technosphere with additional support from The Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany (Washington, D.C.), the Imagining Climate Change Initiative, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the UF International Center, the Center for European Studies, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and the Waldo W. Neikirk Fund.