Free University of Berlin

The course provides a general overview of the U.S. legal system. It introduces students to the concept of common law and covers constitutional law (incl. the legislative process and its political implications), the U.S. court system as well as selected areas of substantive and procedural U.S. law, such as contracts, torts, criminal, and corporate law. The course is taught through a combination of lectures and in-class discussions and encourages active participation in order to acquire and practice legal terminology.

This course focuses on important moments and crucial cultural texts and performances from roughly the 1920s through the 1990s and thus aspires to come to terms with the changes and continuities of the last century in U.S. pop-cultural production. The performers, artifacts, or performances the course considers here were often popular and unpopular at the same time – not only, but often, depending on the kind of audiences they spoke to or were discussed by. Consider, for example, the 1990s boyband phenomenon, but also performers like Madonna, who are adored by some, but hated by others. It is thus the question of (un)popularity that serves as a guiding light for the seminar at hand to make sense of U.S. cultural production in the 20th century and across media.

This course is intended for students who already have some prior knowledge of German. In this class on the A1 level according to CEFR, students learn and solidify basic grammatical structures and systematically build their vocabulary. They train the four skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing in everyday situations and do simple exercises to practice and improve their verbal and written skills. Students are introduced to independent forms of learning and studying. The class covers and reflects on civilization and culture in Germany, Berlin, and at the university as related to everyday life. Topics include personal information, living situation, institutions, traffic, traveling, health, weather, and festivities.

This course gives an overview of the development of public and private architecture in Berlin during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Following an introduction to the urban development and architectural history of the Modern era, the Neo-Classical period is surveyed with special reference to the works of Schinkel. This is followed by classes on architecture of the German Reich after 1871, which was characterized by both modern and conservative tendencies and the manifold activities during the time of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s such as the Housing Revolution. The architecture of the Nazi period is examined, followed by the developments in East and West Berlin after the Second World War. The course concludes with a detailed review of the city's more recent and current architectural profiles, including an analysis of the conflicts concerning the re-design of Berlin after the Cold War and the German reunification. Seven walking tours to historically significant buildings and sites are included (Unter den Linden, Gendarmenmarkt, Potsdam, Chancellory, Potsdamer Platz, Holocaust Memorial, etc.). The course offers a deeper understanding of the interdependence of Berlin's architecture and the city's social and political structures. It considers Berlin as a model for the highways and by-ways of a European capital in modern times.

This course explores theoretical and historical perspectives on the intersection of law, society, and politics, and fosters discussion of contemporary issues among students from different cultures and disciplines. After an introduction to comparative law and legal culture, several classical social theorists are covered (Durkheim, Marx, and Weber) and their relevance to contemporary debates about morality, (dis)obedience, conflict, and property are considered. The course examines the role of totalitarian law in Nazi and Communist Germany, and considers the difficulties such legacies pose for fostering the rule of law in post-totalitarian societies. In this context, the course also examines the need for “transitional justice”, as well as the relationship between law, the market, and economic development (e.g. Weber). Finally, the appropriate limits on the exercise of free speech and the right of association are explored. Overall, the course develops skills at using theory and history to inform debates on contemporary challenges, such as multiculturalism, punishment, (illegal) downloading/streaming/ file-sharing, and economic development. In addition to gaining substantive expertise in various socio- and politico-legal fields, students develop communicative competence through participatory exercises, and intercultural competence through discussion with other students.

In her first book, published in 1997, Saidiya Hartman unfolds a theory of the subject based on the effects of colonialism. She studies the relation between white supremacy and the oppression of Black people through modes of self-constitution and performance. Hartman’s work is one of the canonical readings within Black studies and Black feminism and methodologically situated between history, philosophy, and performance studies. The course engages in a semester of close reading in order to get familiar with some fundamental theoretical motives in Black Studies, such as the notion of antiblackness, slave agency, the aftermath of slavery and its counterparts: the possessive individuality of the bourgeois subject and the liberal notion of freedom.