CIEE, Berlin

Students practice and improve all four main language skills—speaking, listening, reading, and writing—in a highly communicative classroom setting. Students’ knowledge of grammar and vocabulary is systematically reviewed and expanded through an emphasis on speaking and communicating in German.

This course examines how individuals and groups shape local-global dynamics of international environmental politics, how economic, political, and social processes at multiple domains shape global environmental changes, including climate change, and how challenges of international environmental politics and policy formulations shape solutions to global environmental changes. This course discusses five areas crucial to comprehending the nature and dynamics of global environmental issues and effective policies to deal with them: international political order, international environmental law, human-environment interactions in the context of market and politics, political and societal challenges of sustainability, and dynamics of human values and rules.

The course focuses on Berlin as a case study of urban governance for sustainability. It compares local policy challenges in national and international contexts, developing a more nuanced view on the top down and bottom up strategies of building sustainable cities. The course combines a comparative policy analysis approach with concepts of international relations studies. The objective is to unravel the concept of sustainability and study its translation into politics and policies in multi-level governance structures.

Tracing the history of beer from China in 7000 BCE, through to the impact of US federal law and European Union regulations, this course explores the determinants and drivers of the economics of beer. It includes an examination of the labor market and brewing, technology and innovation, national beer market trends, media and marketing of beer, new and emerging beer markets, cultural and political factors impacting the beer market, and the decline and rise of local, import, and craft beers.

This course addresses Jewish migration as a part of Germany's past and present, explores integration issues from the perspective of Jewish immigrants and the non-Jewish majority, and makes relevant comparisons with the current population of refugees in Germany. Topics include the trend of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe to Germany as early as the late 19th century and with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, how Jewish migration from the former Soviet Union fundamentally changed Jewish life in Germany. Students also examine the increase in migration from Israel.

This course introduces the history of German cinema, with a special focus on the crucial role of Berlin as both production site and film set. Students engage with important milestones in the history of German cinema, many of which are set in Berlin, and learn about their historical, political and aesthetic contexts. Special emphasis is placed on the so-called “Berlin School” of filmmaking, a New Wave emerging in the late 1990s, and continuing to be highly relevant today. CIEE offers the course in German and English, and this version of the course is taught in German.

This course explores the different ways in which Germany has confronted, and continues to address, the historical legacy of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on sites of remembrance in Berlin related to the National Socialist era and the Holocaust. Individual historical and commemorative sites will be considered within the broader context of German history after 1945—and how those sites provide valuable insights into the successes and controversial failures of coming to terms with a complex and burdensome past. From the general silence and continuities of the Adenauer years, as well as the first criminal trials of the 1960s, to the citizens' initiatives of the 1970s and the institutional memorials of the 1990s, students will familiarize themselves with different approaches to confronting the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) and the German culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur).

This course is designed for students who can understand the main ideas of complex texts on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in their fields of specialization. The goals of the course are to enable students to interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers possible without strain for either party; to produce clear, detailed texts on a range of subjects; and to explain a viewpoint on a specific issue, giving the advantages and disadvantages of various perspectives or options.

This course introduces some of the major questions and historical debates that continue to surround the origins, implementation, and aftermath of the Holocaust—the systematic, industrialized mass murder of an estimated six million European Jews, as well as homosexuals, communists, Roma and Sinti, handicapped, and other victims by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during WWII. The first part of the course focuses on the historical context, planning, and execution of the Holocaust. The second part of the course introduces the major historiographical debates in the post-war period. The third part of the course focuses on memorialization and the politics of memory in contemporary Germany. Special attention is given to issues in Holocaust studies that are peculiar to Germany as the country of the perpetrators. The course examines domestic German controversies about Holocaust memorialization, the place of the Holocaust in German national self-understanding, and more broadly the concept of "coming to terms with the past" (Vergangenheitsbewältigung).

In this course, students encounter and work with a variety of German sources to refine their linguistic skills. It reviews and deepens students' knowledge of German grammar with an increasing focus on stylistics in both oral and written speech. Special emphasis is on practicing the subjunctive (“indirekte Rede”) while studying and producing journalistic texts about the city of Berlin. This course also includes practical tasks, such as conducting interviews, writing blog posts, and rehearsing a play.