Humboldt University Berlin

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 in everyday situations 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 CEFR, students are introduced to basic grammar points and learn basic vocabulary. All four skills are developed and applied to everyday situations and some study-related situations. 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.

What does it mean to live in a surveillance society? How does the digital age challenge questions regarding privacy, individuality, and freedom? When does surveillance as care tip over into surveillance as control? And how does the Stasi system of vigilance prefigure contemporary surveillance culture? This course on the one hand examines the impact of surveillance on society by looking at the multifaceted ways technologies, societies, and the arts interact; and on the other hand, reflects on surveillance in a totalitarian context while comparing observation techniques in the GDR with contemporary surveillance methods. The course also explores how surveillance is represented in contemporary literature, film, and popular culture. The course maps out important themes with regards to surveillance and its repercussions (e.g., visibility, identity, privacy, and control). The course provides an overview of the interdisciplinary field of surveillance and covers the latest research in the following major areas: 1. Relationship between surveillance, power, and social control; 2. Histories of Surveillance: GDR and the Stasi (especially in the context of Berlin) 3. The concept of privacy; 4. Surveillance in the arts and popular culture.

Over thirty years after German reunification, this course revisits the period in which two German states existed, examining the fraught and complicated, but nonetheless deeply symbiotic, relationship they had with each other. How did two German states come into being in the first place? How did they develop, both separately and in parallel, and how did they determine each other’s history? Some of the debates the course engages with include: to what extent did the Federal Republic inherit the political, social, economic, and cultural mantle of Hitler’s Third Reich? Was there any choice but to reintegrate former Nazis into West German public life? Was the GDR a totalitarian state, exercising complete control over its citizens’ lives? Did the Berlin Wall have any advantages? How were immigrants and foreigners treated in the two German states? Finally, from the vantage point of the 2020s, the course considers whether one can now speak of a unified German nation, in which the historical divisions between east and west have been overcome.

According to a dominant historiography, philosophy is a Western endeavor. Its roots are to be found in Europe, more precisely in Ancient Greece, and its most significant developments are due to Western thinkers. In recent years, however, this narrative has been challenged by scholars and criticized from various sides. The narrative, it is argued, has itself a history: it was born at the end of the eighteenth century and came together with a marginalization of non-Western contributions to the origins and developments of the discipline. The process of appropriation of philosophy by Western historians, it is further argued, was not independent of racist prejudices and theories. This seminar is devoted to the recent literature on these topics. It aims to see how issues about race and racism have shaped current historiography of philosophy and explores alternative narratives that have been suggested to change this historiography.

This course introduces anthropological approaches to time, temporality, and history. Ideas about time have been part of anthropology ever since anthropologists began theorizing human development, and analyzing the ways in which people conceive of time can illuminate fundamental questions about how humans make sense of their world and act within it. This course focuses on the relationship between cultural conceptions of time and power, and examines a few theoretical concepts that help to analyze this relationship The course studies ways in which time was built into core anthropological concepts of difference (particularly between the West and the rest) and then explores the relationship between time and political possibility, or how politics must make historical sense in order to be effective. In addition to the study of such uses of the past, the course examines nostalgia, identifies its cultural foundations, and shows its politics as well as its limits as a way of thinking about history.