Slought and the Department of German at Princeton University are pleased to announce "Straying: The Drift of History in Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary," a roundtable at Princeton University in New Jersey on Thursday, November 19, 2015 in Robertson Bowl 2 from 4:30-7pm. The event will explore the interplay of history and memory in Benjamin's work, and will feature presentations by scholars Devin Fore, Gerhard Richter, and Christina Kiaer, followed by a conversation moderated by Michael Jennings and Eduardo Cadava.

The symposium will build upon Walter Benjamin's own experiences in Moscow in December 1926, as recorded in Moscow Diary, his personal diary. The urban landscape of Moscow becomes for Benjamin a prism that enables continuously shifting interpretations about a matrix of issues ranging from the interpersonal to the spatial and the political. Our project seeks to retrace his winter movements through an unfamiliar language, culture, community and territory. In so doing, we seek to turn Benjamin's diary into a manual, in effect, one that decodes the concept of "straying" in relation to both local and global considerations.