Reflections on the centenary of the end of that “War to End All Wars” – Nationalism; the sober reality; heroism; “Peace in Our Time”…

Organ Music includes Edward Elgar’s Imperial March (composed 1897 for the Silver Jubilee of Queen Victoria, grandmother of Kaiser Wilhelm II), Max Reger’s Lament for the Fallen (on all sides) 1914-1915 and César Franck’s Pièce Heroïque. 

Short choir pieces by Bach, Schütz, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Reger and Distler. Several of these are settings of texts by Goethe.

Directed and played by Bruce Cash (as part of the series run by St. James Church Lower Hutt and the Wellington Organists’ Association).

Entry by Koha

How did an East German end up teaching physics in the South Pacific? The speaker will use his own personal experience as a starting point for generalising about some of the life-shaping contradictions encountered by those who grew up in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) and came of age at the time of German reunification.

Uli Zuelicke had just turned 21 when the Berlin Wall fell. He continued his physics studies in Leipzig, graduating with a Diplomphysiker degree in 1993, and spent the next five years in the USA. After obtaining his PhD in Physics from Indiana University, Uli returned to Germany to undertake a postdoc at the University of Karlsruhe. In 2003, he and his American wife, Kris, came to New Zealand where he started his academic career at Massey University in Palmerston North. Since 2011, he has been a Professor of Physics at Victoria University of Wellington. Find out more »

Marx was a complicated thinker. German philosopher, Victorian polemicist, Prophet of the coming Communist revolution, he was not a systematic writer, and his ideas remain difficult to reconstruct, despite the immense body of “Marxist” work that claims him as a key inspiration and source. He was a man of his time whose views were developed through now-obscure quarrels with long forgotten figures, but whose insights about the nature of modern social and economic life still remain useful and relevant today.

In this lecture, Simon Keller and Xavier Marquez present Marx as a distinctly German philosopher whose disparate and conflicting ideas made him both an inspiring figure for socialist movements since the 19th century and an acute analyst of contemporary capitalism. Find out more »

Prizewinning organist Thomas Gaynor will be back in his home town to play in recital on the Maxwell Fernie Organ in St Mary’s, with a programme including works by Bach and Mendelssohn, as well as Widor’s Sixth Organ Symphony.  

In 2017, Thomas was the first organist since Gillian Weir to win first and audience prizes in the St Albans International Organ Competition.  He is also a laureate of the Tokyo-Musashino Organ competition, the Bach-Liszt Organ Competition in Erfurt/Weimar, and the Sydney International Organ Competition. 

Thomas recently became the first organist in thirty years to be awarded the coveted Artist’s Certificate at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he is studying. 

The concert begins at 7.30pm.  Please note that Thomas will also be giving a pre-concert talk at 6.45pm about his experiences competing in Germany on Bach’s organs and other historic instruments of the time.

This fundraising concert is to assist Thomas to complete the final year of his doctorate in Organ Performance and Literature at Eastman.  Entry is by koha at the door ($20 suggested). Find out more »

June 2018

Filmabend #3: Der geteilte Himmel – The Divided Heaven

Wednesday, 20 June 2018 at 5.30pm in VZ 606, Von Zedlitz Building, Victoria University of Wellington (Kelburn Parade).

Regie/Director: Konrad Wolf (1963/64)

1961 in der DDR, kurz vor dem Bau der Mauer. Rita Seidel ist nach ihrem Zusammenbruch aus der Stadt Halle in ihr Dorf zurückgekehrt, um Ruhe zu finden. Sie erinnert sich an die vergangenen Jahre, an ihre Liebe zum Chemiker Manfred Herrfurth, an ihre Arbeit in einer Waggonfabrik und an ihr Studium fürs Lehramt. In der Fabrik und an der Uni gab es Probleme mit politischen Opportunisten und ideologischen Hardlinern; Ritas Liebesbeziehung fand ein Ende, nachdem Manfred, verbittert über die Betonköpfe, die sein neues chemisches Verfahren abgelehnt hatten, nach Westberlin gegangen war und Rita nicht mitkommen wollte. Der geteilte Himmel, entstanden nur wenige Jahre nach dem Mauerbau, ist einer der mutigsten Spielfilme, die je in der DDR gedreht wurden, nicht nur wegen seiner ungewöhnlichen Dramaturgie, sondern weil er die Verantwortung für die Konflikte im eigenen Land und nicht beim „Klassenfeind“ sucht. 

East Germany in 1961, just before the construction of the Berlin Wall. After suffering a nervous breakdown, Rita Seidel returns to her village from the city of Halle to find peace and quiet. She recalls the past years, her love for chemist Manfred Herrfurth, her work in a railway car factory and her studies to become a teacher. There were problems with political opportunists and ideological hardliners in the factory and at university. Rita’s love affair came to an end after Manfred, bitter that uncompromising supervisors had rejected his new chemical process, fled the city for West Berlin without Rita, who chose not to join him. The Divided Heaven, created just a few years after the Wall was constructed, is one of the bravest movies ever to be made in the GDR – not only because of its unusual dramaturgy, but also because it seeks responsibility for conflicts in one’s own country and not with the “class enemy”. Find out more »