"University - creative - solid"

Marking the 20th anniversary fanniversary of the founding of the degree programme “Culture and Management Görlitz” at Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences, the Litterata on November 25, 2017, the following photo and text report on the commemorative ceremony and the November conference organized by the university and the Saxon Institute for Cultural Infrastructure.

On the evening of November 16, 2017, the 20th anniversary of the founding of the “Culture and Management Görlitz” degree programme at Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences was celebrated with a ceremony at the Kreativhaus Klingewalde.

With obvious delight, the program’s founder, Prof. Dr. Matthias Theodor Vogt, welcomed students and alumni, entrepreneurs, cultural professionals, politicians, and scholars from near and far.

Ulf Großmann, president of the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony, who served as Görlitz’s mayor for cultural affairs 20 years ago, outlined the circumstances surrounding the program’s founding. At that time, the Institute for Cultural Infrastructure in Saxony allocated 1.5 million DM to create an intellectual forum for navigating the transformation processes—one capable of opening a gateway to Central Europe.

You can find Ulf Großmann’s welcoming remarks here.

In his welcoming remarks, Prof. Dr. Friedrich Albrecht, Rector of Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences, praised the degree programme’s contribution as a significant enhancement to the university’s educational profile and outlined (although not yet finalized and without wishing to preempt faculty decisions) “interculturality” and “creative industries” as possible new directions for the degree programme.

You can find the Rector’s welcome address here.

Following the Rector’s speech, representatives from the Hungarian partner university in Pécs stepped forward to present the agreement for the cross-border Pécs/Görlitz Master's degree programme.

Former Rector Prof. Dr. Peter Dierich, who had taught the course “Mathematics for Business” in the degree programme, expressed his recognition for the highly motivated students. He summed them up with the compelling phrase: “academic—creative—solid.”

You can find Prof. Dr. Peter Dierich’s remarks here.

The keynote address was delivered by the renowned sociologist Prof. Dr. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, editor of the Arnold Gehlen Collected Works published by Vittorio Klostermann. He himself noted that his topic was not exactly what one would expect from a keynote address. He titled his speech “Renunciation of Politics as a Sign of the Times?” By addressing “the West” as a refuge from a lost sense of home, he touched on a topic that has attracted considerable attention in recent years but has also, under the banner of “populism,” led to a West-East controversy. In the background, images from Dresden depicted “the West” as a refuge from a lost sense of home. Professor Rehberg brought a wide range of perspectives to the examination of this issue and sparked a lively discussion.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Garsztecki, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at Chemnitz University of Technology and, together with Professor Vogt, the doctoral advisor to several alumni of the degree programme, combined his welcoming remarks with a transition to the culinary portion of the event in the ground-floor hall. The guests continued chatting with one another for quite some time over Polish Maultaschen and Hungarian wine.

On the morning of November 17, the academic conference began with a presentation by Professor Vogt. We asked him to summarize the arguments of his presentation in an essay titled “When Angry Citizens Show Their Bare Bottoms in Berlin.”

The moderator for the first part of the conference, “Visibility in Public and Semi-Public Spaces,” was SPIEGEL editor Alexander Smoltczyk.

This was followed by presentations from renowned scholars from Germany and abroad, as well as from two doctoral candidates from Tbilisi and Nantes and a master’s student from the “Culture and Management Görlitz” degree programme in Hanover.

The conference concluded on the afternoon of November 17 with two regional forums, which offered citizens of the region the opportunity to engage in dialogue with scholars and to contribute many thought-provoking arguments.

Report by Clara Schwarzenwald, which you can also find here.

The organizers would like to thank Mironde Publishing for their kind permission to reprint this article!