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.

Encounters and exchanges among world cultures have been the main driving force behind the extraordinary social, political, cultural, intellectual, scientific, and technological transformations of recent centuries. This course examines the rise of Europe (and then the United States) to global preeminence, which is the central question of world history. Europe was far behind China, India, and the Islamic world, yet dominates the modern world. The course suggests that Western Civilization was uniquely open to innovation, imitating other cultures, and fostering human self-realization. 

The opening of secret-police archives in Eastern Europe over the past three decades has constituted an archival revolution for historians. The newly-available materials have provided additional insight not only into the social and political history of communism, but also into the tools, methods, and tactics of repression employed by modern dictatorships. This course examines the English-language historical scholarship about the Soviet and Soviet-bloc state security services, including works about their role and place in East European politics and society. The opening of the records after 1989, their availability to researchers, their relative usefulness as sources, and the impact of their opening on politics and society is also discussed, along with the legacies of the communist secret police themselves. Can one speak of an emerging international or transnational historiography on the communist-era secret police, or does the scholarship about them remain largely national (or even nationalistic)?

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.