German

In January 2021 a commission appointed by the federal government released an extensive report on the integration of people with a Migrationshintergrund, or migration background, in Germany. The report set out a concept of integration, discussed integration with regard to a wide range of policy areas, including health and housing, education, and employment, and raised issues like religion and language. Also included in the report were the dissenting positions of several commission members, which underline the extent to which integration remains a contested and controversial idea. The course uses this report as the starting point for an analysis of the concept of integration. The course considers the economic, social, political, and cultural aspects of the concept developed in the report, and compares it with terms like cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. The course also discusses the implications of integration for employment and education policy.

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.

This course is for beginners only and covers the A1 CEFR level of German language. Students learn and use expressions and simple sentences for everyday life. Students acquire vocabulary and language structures in order to talk about themselves, places, and time, and in order to ask others about these topics.

This course encompasses more complex structures and communicative competences in the German language. Students gain the ability to express desires and intentions as well as temporal sequences. They solidify their ability to communicate in every-day situations such as searching for housing, travel, general orientation, and relationships. The course also features more demanding texts for listening and reading comprehension. Students distill socio-cultural information from authentic texts such as newspaper articles and short literary extracts. In the realm of writing, the composition of basic types of texts is pursued. This course is at the A2.2/B1.1 level according to CFER.

On the basis of current debates in Germany, this course forms a picture of the state of German debate culture. The course addresses questions in this seminar including: How factual or polarizing are debates in different media? Where do the boundaries lie between free expression of opinion and punishable speech? How do parliamentary debates in Germany formally proceed and what influence does federalism have on political debates and decision-making processes? As a concrete example of debate, the course discusses, among other topics, the current debate on Corona measures such as compulsory vaccination.

This course is designed for students who have successfully completed the basic level of German and who have a sound knowledge of German. This course is intensive and is intended for dedicated, highly self-motivated students who take responsibility for their learning. This course helps students to expand their competences in listening, speaking, reading, and writing as well as strengthen their knowledge of grammar, while emphasizing self-correction. Students also expand their knowledge of the German culture and analyze and interpret cultural, political, and historical topics in German-speaking countries and compare them with their own cultural background. Through this course students develop and regularly use new strategies for language acquisition and are able to engage in detailed discussions on above mentioned topics. Furthermore, students develop reading strategies that help to understand different text types in detail. In addition, students improve their essay writing skills and are able to write short texts on different topics, revise, and proofread them.

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.

This course sets the politics of German coal in technological, social, and environmental perspective. The course examines trends in the German energy mix—with a focus on the decline of nuclear energy as a source of power and the rise of natural gas, biofuels, and wind—and considers the extent to which those trends relate to the policy stances of the various political parties in government. The course also discusses the role of coal at pivotal moments in German history: before and after unification in 1871; from the Treaty of Versailles to the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923; and after the establishment, in 1951, of the European Coal and Steel Community, the institutional forerunner of the European Union.