Germany

This course focuses on the problems that have arisen since the development of the Euro and the various explanations that have been offered as the root of such problems. The explanations range from excessive government spending in select member states over institutional weaknesses of the currency to contradictions inherent to market-based societies. Each explanation differs in terms of the underlying premises, identification of relevant factors, and proposed solutions to the observed problems. The goal of this seminar is to understand these issues, disentangle the varied approaches, and assess merits and flaws of the different perspectives. To this end, it addresses the origins and consequences of the Euro and the Eurozone crisis. The first part of the seminar reviews the run-up to the creation of the Euro. Step-by-step, the course assesses the status quo in post-war Europe and considers the political and economic rationales for creating first a common market and then a common currency. The second part engages with the established Eurozone, its supposedly successful first ten years, and the turbulent times thereafter. Students consider the onset of the Eurozone crisis, the policy responses at domestic and European level, as well as the remaining shortcomings in the institutional and economic governance of the Euro. The seminar assesses and explains the historical, political, and economic aspects underlying the creation and the trajectory of the European Economic and Monetary Union. Prior knowledge of European integration or economic theory is helpful, but the seminar is open to all students willing to engage with the subject.

This course in labor economics requires principles in microeconomic theory and econometrics as prerequisites. The course discusses topics including theories of labor market behavior, and summarizing empirical evidence and illustrating the usefulness of the theory for public policy analysis. The first part of the course examines demand and supply in the labor market. The second part of the course explores topics including compensating wage differentials, investment in human capital, and the relationship between productivity and pay.

This lecture serves as an introduction to historical urban studies and its rich spectrum of topics. Using a wide array of questions as our starting point, the course investigates major themes and concepts in interdisciplinary metropolitan studies such as space and place, temporality and history, nature and the urban environment, urban typologies, urban development and ideology, infrastructures and networks. Each session is devoted to a specific question in order to examine primarily the historical but also the contemporary implications of distinct urban developments.

Geography is a space-based science, whose overriding cognitive interest is dedicated to the collection, analysis, and explanation of complex spatial relationships that relate to the natural and anthropogenically created environment. Since the 1960s, leisure and tourism research has become an important sub-discipline of geography. Tourism geography deals with spatial structures of tourism in destinations of the supply and demand side on different geographic scale levels as well as with tourist-related processes and functions that produce them. In addition to phenomena of tourism, the course also covers leisure activities. The course deals with theories and concepts of tourism organization and development. It explains and analyzes the fundamentals as well as current trends, products, and problems in the tourism sector. The main focus is on three groups of topics: conceptual themes (e.g. tourism as a system, community based tourism, sustainable tourism, tourism and climate change, moral/cultural/ethical); topics that analyze relationships between globalization and tourism (e.g. regionalization trends, tourism and security); topics that explain various trends in tourism (e.g. demographic change, lifestyle tourism, dark tourism, world heritage tourism).

This interdisciplinary course crosses and connects the academic fields of migration studies, film studies, and cultural studies. The first part of the course explores how the socio-political and socio-cultural phenomenon of Turkish immigration into Germany, immigrants, and diasporas are represented in German and Turkish cinema from the 1960s until the present. The second part of the course then gets more specific and approaches the representation of Berlin in these migration movies. In this course, students gain knowledge about film analysis, German immigration history, and theoretical concepts dealing with migration, diaspora, stereotype, culture, and identity. The labor migration from Turkey to Germany, which started in the mid-1960s, had an important socio-economic and socio-cultural impact on both countries' societies and influenced their film culture. German filmmakers began to feature the first guest workers' difficult lives in films such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder's KATZELMACHER (1969) and ANGST ESSEN SEELE AUF/FEAR EATS SOUL (1974). Later, German cinema began to cinematically capture the entire migrant family like in SHIRINS HOCHZEIT/SHIRIN'S WEDDING (1975, Helma Sanders-Brahms) and YASEMIN (1988, Hark Bohm). In the 1990s, second- and third-generation Turkish German directors such as Fatih Akin, Thomas Arslan, Ayse Polat, Yüksel Yavuz, and Aysun Bademsoy marked the end of the so-called guest worker cinema (Gastarbeiterkino) of the 1970s and 1980s and started to create a transnational and diasporic cinema featuring a culturally hybrid Germany. Turkish cinema dealt with this migration phenomenon even in more than 60 films alone between 1960s and 1990s. Berlin (especially Kreuzberg) has always been one of the favorite settings in all of these migration movies. The transformation of Berlin's first guest worker ghettos to culturally hybrid urban districts over the course of 60 years is very well reflected in all of these cinema cultures.

This course offers students the opportunity to envision future applications of biotechnology. The course covers various interaction and design techniques for working with living media. Five of the most used design techniques are explored in the context of bioluminescent bacteria and algae. Moreover, students learn, in a practical manner, how to culture these micro-organisms, and how to build tools that allow them to engage with the living organisms. Each week begins with theory (lectures), followed by a hands-on workshop and a creative session. The course concludes with a publication of the future pieces designed by the students. The lectures introduce the biological aspects of the target organisms (e.g., nutrients, metabolism, growth and reproduction), as well as various design techniques that enable interaction with the organisms through all five senses: visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, tactile. During the workshops, the students practice how to successfully grow living organisms and how to build bio-reactors and measuring tools for maintaining a living culture. The creative sessions engage the students in designing and conceptualizing based on living media. Throughout the course, students have the opportunity to visit biodesign project spaces and studios in Berlin for inspiration.

This course takes a close look at city life from the beginning of the twentieth century to the First World War, the post-war years, the so-called “Roaring Twenties” until the Great Depression. The course introduces to students to what life was like in Berlin and London. It covers the lifestyles of people in different social classes and discusses the experiences of metropolitan everyday life. Also considered are the effects that urbanization and the boom in urban popular culture, leisure, and consumption had on their lives. By adopting a comparative approach, the course traces and examines similarities and differences in the social history of these two big cities over a time span of thirty years and thereby critically assess an important aspect of European history. Students are expected to discuss and analyze aspects of social and cultural history.