Media has undergone radical change in the twenty-first century. At the end of the eighteenth century, the situation was similar: The emergence of numerous new media such as newspapers and magazines influenced the social and political life of the time. Beyond the courts of princes, a new public sphere emerged in cafés and scholars’ clubs. A veritable wave of publications made the ideas of the Enlightenment much more visible. This was entirely new and turned the protagonists into “celebrities.” First and foremost was Moses Mendelssohn: the Berlin philosopher from Dessau attracted attention far beyond the borders of his homeland with countless publications in journals that were popular at the time, such as Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend (Letters Concerning the Latest Literature). From reproductions of the first miniature in 1767 to the famous portrait by Anton Graff, images of Moses Mendelssohn were unusually widespread throughout Europe – in the same way that Albert Einstein’s image has become part of present-day popular culture.
Caspar Battegay (University of Basel) and Shmuel Feiner (Bar Ilan University) talk with curator Inka Bertz (Jewish Museum Berlin) and Frederek Musall (Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies) about the media revolution, how images create and serve our projections, and how the public sphere is constituted.

Panelists:

Caspar Battegay is a literary and cultural scholar. He researches German-Jewish literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as Jewish identity in pop culture, from Leonard Cohen to “Transparent.” His recent publications include the volume Connected Jews: Expressions of Community in Analogue and Digital Culture with Simon Bronner, and Geschichte der Möglichkeit. Utopie, Diaspora und die jüdische Frage (History of Possibility. Utopia, Diaspora and the Jewish Question).
Shmuel Feiner is Professor of Modern Jewish History at Bar Ilan University, Israel, chairman of the Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Germany, chairman of The Historical Society of Israel and editor of Zion. His publications include The Jewish Enlightenment; Moses Mendelssohn; The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth Century Europe; The Jewish Eighteenth Century; A European Biography, Volume 1, 1700–1750 and Volume 2, 1750–1800.