German

The seminar examines selected areas of development in early childhood. The focus is on emotional development in infancy and toddlerhood, supplemented by important milestones in early social and social-cognitive development.

Since the middle of the 19th century, realistic movements in the visual arts have claimed to show 'real life'. However, this is not about the deceptive illusion of a particularly natural representation, so that one could confuse the image with the model. Rather, a new understanding of the objects worthy of images and the political functions of art is emerging, which not only aims to provide information about reality, but also actively participates in it. The representation of 'real people' and social reality can coincide with the stylistic devices of factual documentaryism as well as with the melodrama and drastic nature of the description, the use of fantastic-magical elements or the artistic processing of everyday objects. The seminar examines and questions various varieties of this understanding of art (e.g. European realism in the 19th century, New Objectivity, Magical Realism, American Realism, Socialist Realism, Nouveau Réalisme, Capitalist Realism, New Leipzig School, Neo-Realism in China). with regard to continuities and changes in demands and means in the respective representation of 'reality'.

This course offers a study of terrorism from ancient times to the present. The course examines the changing understanding and definitions of political violence from ancient times to the September 11th attack in 2001. The course reviews research methods and approaches by examining relevant studies of terrorism definitions and concepts. Terrorism is discussed in relation with freedom, human rights, and security.

While potential urban green space accessibility is being discussed widely, specific barriers that affect accessibility are often under-estimated. They are not equal to limited or uneven accessibility nor are they exclusively related to physical settings. Rather, the variety of barriers and their complex interactions including people’s perception, personal conditions, and institutional frames make this subject fuzzy and difficult to operationalize for planning purposes. Given the importance of barriers for decision-making of people, this class will conceptualize different barriers on realizing recreational benefits of urban green spaces within the frame of environmental justice. Studying multidimensional barriers allows for a more comprehensive understanding of individuals’ decisions in terms of accessing recreational benefits and a discussion of planning responses. Based on theoretical insights and local examples, the focus will be on qualitative and quantitative assessments methods for studying barriers, as well as on potential planning pathways for mitigating or minimizing barriers.

This course offers a systematic introduction to the central themes of the philosophy of mind. It is divided into three parts. The first part deals with fundamental problems. In addition to more traditional distinctions such as that between dualism and monism, newer empirical theories of consciousness and the conflicts that exist between them are also discussed. The second deals with methodological questions and central concepts such as emergence or supervenience. The third part deals with particularly important individual problems. This includes the problem of free will, theories of embodied and extended cognition, and questions of self-confidence. The lecture will fundamentally also take empirical findings from psychology and neuroscience into account.

Personal dedications in book copies from this author's library are examined as documents of literary history. The form, content and dating of each individual dedication must be contextualized through extensive research in order to find out to what extent they are documents of East-West German, transnational or GDR-internal relationship networks. In the first step, we explore the bibliophilic form and variety of dedications in the “turning library” comprising several shelves from the basement of Christa and Gerhard Wolf's Pankow apartment, which, after being donated and moved, is now located at the Christa and Gerhard Wolf private library work and research center. The second step is documentation and the third is an attempt at contemporary and literary-historical contextualization.

In this course, students practice writing simple texts and train grammar topics that are important for both casual and formal writing. The focus is on writing occasions from everyday private and student life (e.g. creative writing, notes, emails). Students also prepare a short essay at the end of the course. The grammar topics that are covered are based on the students' texts. Students' willingness to write short texts on a regular basis is therefore important.

This course for foreign students is designed to improve students’ language skills and vocabulary. Areas of focus include grammar, conversation, writing exercises, and listening and reading exercises. In addition, excursions are planned to introduce students to German culture. Students work with cultural and historical topics on an academic level and broaden their intercultural knowledge. They are introduced to independent learning methods and familiarize themselves with typical learning situations at German universities. In this class at the A1 level according to the CEFR, students learn basic vocabulary and grammatical structures as well as corresponding competencies in university-specific situations. The class takes intercultural and methodological aspects of foreign language learning into consideration, and students are introduced to German culture and society. The A1 level is split into two courses, the A1.1 course covers the first half of the level and the A1.2 course covers the second half of the level.

In literary uchronies, fictional scenarios are created that are based on an alternative course of history. They can therefore be understood as thought experiments that seek an answer to the question of what would have happened if history had taken a different path at one point: What if the Second World War had taken a different course? What if the turning point hadn't happened? What if the First World War had never ended or had never happened at all? The lecture approaches this phenomenon from different perspectives, tracing the history of concepts and genres as well as identifying thematic focuses of concrete literary uchronies. The distinction from Uchronia in historical science will also play an important role. In this way the course shows that literary uchronia is not just a (sometimes quite amusing) game of the imagination, but in most cases also a challenging and intensive examination of the past as well as the present.

The following topics are covered in this course: computer arithmetic, number formats (place value systems, fixed- and floating-point numbers); basics of digital design ((combinatorial logic, gates, truth tables, storage elements, finite state machines); basic technologies and components of a (secure) computer architecture; assembly programming (MIPS): assembly language, control flow, addressing; structure and operation of a multi-cycle data path (MIPS), structure and operation of a multi-cycle implementation; measuring and evaluating performance (SPEC benchmarks, Amdahl's law); structure and operation of a simple Von Neumann model; introduction to pipelining: concepts, hazards, forwarding, solutions; memory hierarchy, caches, virtual memory; input/output techniques (addressing, synchronization, direct memory access).