Ei, du schöne Schnitzelbank!:
A Never-Ending Story in American Popular Culture
11:00 a.m., Friday, Nov. 14, 2008
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission: free

Considered by most to be an American creation, the Schnitzelbank song found great popularity in the U.S. after being introduced in Vaudeville in the 1890s. From Groucho Marx to Billy Wilder to Stephen Spielberg, the song in a variety of forms continues to this day in American popular culture. But it does have German roots and is directly connected to the Fasnacht customs in Basel, Switzerland, leading back into medieval German songs. Professor William Keel will trace the history of this song in both Germany and the U.S. and show the development from folksong in Germany to a ubiquitous popular ditty in the U.S.

William Keel, chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas, has a Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics from Indiana University. His primary teaching and research interests are in German dialectology, Germanic philology, the structure of Modern German, and German-American studies. He is internationally recognized as an expert on German settlement dialects (Sprachinseln) in the American Midwest and has lectured on that subject at several German universities and the Institut für deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Since 1981, he has served as editor of the Yearbook of German-American Studies and, since 1986, as a member of the executive committee of the Society for German-American Studies.