A Conversation with: Doris Berger, Hans Vaget, and Alex Ross. 

Moderated by Lily E. Hirsch. With music by Inna Faliks. 

UCLA Faculty Club, Los Angeles

7:00 PM,  May 8, 2025 

Please RSVP here.

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This event is organized by the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, the UCLA Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, the UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, and the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles. This event is part of “Mann 2025: 150 Years of Thomas Mann”.

This event is made possible by the Lowell Milken Center for Music of the American Jewish Experience at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

Participants:

Doris Berger is the Vice President of Curatorial Affairs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. She was previously a Getty Postdoc Fellow, a Curator at the Skirball Cultural Center, and the Director of the Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany. Berger curated the touring exhibition Light & Noir: Exiles and Emigres in Hollywood, 1933-1950 at the Skirball (2014–15). At the Academy Museum, she co-curated the inaugural exhibitions Stories of Cinemaand Backdrop: An Invisible Art (2021), the touring exhibition Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971 (2022-23), and curated Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema (2024). She wrote the book Projected Art History: Biopics, Celebrity Culture, and the Popularizing of American Art (Bloomsbury, 2014) among numerous essays on art and film, gender and exile studies.

Lily E. Hirsch is a musicologist, with a Ph.D. from Duke University, and Writer-in-Residence at California State University, Bakersfield. She is the author of the books A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League (University of Michigan Press in 2010),  Anneliese Landau’s Life in Music: Nazi Germany to Émigré California (Eastman Studies in Music in 2019), Can’t Stop the Grrrls: Confronting Sexist Labels in Music from Ariana Grande to Yoko Ono (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and Taking Funny Music Seriously (Indiana University Press, 2024), among others.

Hans Rudolf Vaget is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts). He received his academic training at the universities of Munich and Tübingen, the University of Wales at Cardiff and at Columbia University in New York. His research focuses on Goethe, Wagner and Thomas Mann, on which he has published extensively. Recently he published Wehvolles Erbe: Richard Wagner in Deutschland. Hitler, Knappertsbusch, Mann (S. Fischer Publishing House, 2017). He is the author of the seminal book Thomas Mann, der Amerikaner: Leben und Werk im amerikanischen Exil, 1938-1952 and one of the general editors of GKFA(Mann’s works, letters, and diaries), published by S. Fischer Verlage.

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His second book, Listen to This, is a collection of essays. His latest book is Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, an account of Wagner’s vast cultural impact. He has written often about Thomas Mann and the émigré community in L.A. for The New Yorker. He was awarded with a MacArthur Fellowship and the Belmont Prize.

Inna Faliks “Adventurous and passionate” (The New Yorker) Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks has established herself as one of the most communicative, and poetic artists of her generation. She has made a name for herself through commanding performances of standard piano repertoire, as well genre-bending, interdisciplinary projects, and inquisitive work with contemporary composers. Her new memoir, Weight in the Fingertips, A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage, was published by Globe Pequot Press in October 2023. She holds the posts of Professor of Piano and Head of Piano at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.