Free University of Berlin

This lecture analyzes the three basic factors that have influenced modern Jewish identity: enlightenement, anti-Semitism, and Zionism. It examines the changes of how Jewish identity is understood. A special focus is placed on the differentiation of cultural or national and religious identity with an emphasis on feminism and queerness. Gender relations are examined within their respective religious, cultural, and social contexts. Social history and the history of the common man is discussed and a special focus is placed on the active participation of Jewish women in society as well as the intellectual and artistic life within European nation states.

Modern nation-states rely on borders to govern mobility as “migration.” In the context of globalization, migration governance and the public debates and societal contestations around it have become increasingly salient. This interdisciplinary course addresses different phenomena of migration and borders, paying attention to the historical contexts and the complex and contested nature of migration governance. Drawing on social, legal, cultural, historical, and political perspectives, and engaging grassroots movements and audio-visual works, the course focuses on European and German policies, institutions, practices, and debates over migration and borders. Also the Berlin level is discussed, particularly by guests and in relation to local contestations. The course takes distance from the nation-state and borders as normative frames, introducing critiques of methodological nationalism and critical perspectives emerging from (everyday) practices of migration and antiracist movements. Borders are explored as complex, contested practices / relations at the intersection of race, law, gender, control of labor, international relations, and other factors, creating (global) social hierarchies and unequal access to mobility and other rights / resources.

This course examines the emergence of mainly youth-led resistance and protest movements in post-World War II Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and attempts to understand their origins, their meaning and their effect on the societies in which they occurred. American counterculture in the 1960s is often associated with rock’n’roll music, drug-taking, dropping out, and the Anti-Vietnam protest movement. In Europe the associations are more complex and include revitalization of European feminist movements as well as countercultures in places like West Germany and Italy that are remembered for planting bombs and joining underground terror cells in the name of the New Left, or more extreme iterations of the New Left. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, in places like Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, anti-government protesters faced a very different, more dangerous existential struggle against authoritarian regimes that utilized torture and detention without trial to mute or prevent social uprisings. This course accounts for the nature and intensity of post-war European protest movements by examining the historical context of the traumatic impact of recently defeated fascism on the continent, and the division of Europe into spheres of interest reflecting the Cold War world. It examines the post-war socio-economic developments that led to the massive expansion of higher education in Western Europe, promoting a generational divide which saw a radicalized younger generation turn on their parents and other members of the older (Nazi) generation or the so called system, sometimes in rage and violence, as in the examples of the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy. This is compared to examples in Eastern Europe, where resistance movements against Communist regimes, such as in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, were met with deadly force and violent oppression. The course keeps as its particular focus East Germany (GDR) and West Germany (FRG), but the course also encounters the student-led uprisings against Sovietized Communism in Hungary in 1956 and during the 1968 Prague Spring, as well as the curious case of the Soviet Hippies. Throughout the course, the city of Berlin serves as a backdrop: as a place of often very radical anti-government movements in West Berlin, compared with the muted and hidden resistance to authority over the Berlin Wall in East Berlin. The course also examines how resistance in Western Europe often meant solidarity with anti-colonial movements in the Middle East, Africa, and South America. It also discusses the rise of new political movements as the Green Party.

Even if Friedrich Nietzsche liked to see himself as a "flame" leaping out of nothing and leaving only "ashes" behind him, his writings are integrated into philological and philosophical traditions. The list of his declared friends and enemies is long, as is the list of books he acquired or borrowed. Nietzsche's work cannot be thought of without antiquity, without Schopenhauer and without the confrontation with contemporary aesthetic and philosophical positions. In this respect, his work has a prehistory, but not only this: it has also experienced a turbulent reception history from turn-of-the-century aesthetics through the world wars and fascism to postmodernism, which often has little to do with Nietzsche's actual texts. In this lecture, selected passages from Nietzsche's work are subjected to a reading and examined for their influences in order to confront them with their history of impact. From the point of view of literary studies and aesthetics, the focus is on the early aesthetic writings around the BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, DIE FRÖHLICHE WISSENSCHAFT, ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA, as well as Nietzsche's own poetry.

In this class on the B1 level according to CEFR, students learn to understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. They deal with most situations likely to arise while travelling to an area where German is spoken. Students learn to produce simple connected texts on topics that are familiar or of personal interest. They acquire skills to describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes and ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans. The B1 level is split into two courses, the B1.1 course covers the first half of the level and the B1.2 course covers the second half of the level.

Regarding transnational migration, the EU promotes a political reasoning between processes of consolidation and necessary conflict, between sovereignty and shared responsibility, between the right to define and delimit and the duty to negotiate. As the visibility of migration increases in various ways, migrants are often represented and imagined as a homogenous mass of “the other." This leads to a problematic understanding of migration as something to be controlled and governed from a top-down perspective alone. But the respective processes of negotiation on migration policy, within and across the outer borders of the Union, take place not only between the official institutions of nation-states, but on all scales of European populations. They also take place from a bottom-up perspective in the centers and at the margins of societies alike. This course departs from concepts of the anthropology of the state and of migration and students first gain an overview of EU-level migration polity. Diving deeper down we will start to change perspective: How do local activists develop and implement their own ways of welcoming migrants? Where do migrants work and how are they represented in trade unions? Finally, focusing on the history of migrant struggles in Berlin, the course encounters migrants’ viewpoints, which reach beyond the usual framings of ‘the poor migrant’ as ‘passive victim,' as a threat or as the ‘(anti-)hero’ of globalization. The course encounters viewpoints on the conflicts, compromises, resistances, solidarity, and social transformation shaping and shaped by recent migration movement to Europe.