German

This course is about Berlin, and the story of its tumultuous and epoch defining twentieth century. This history is examined through various lenses: the biographies of individuals; the words of writers who bore witness to the vertiginous social, political, and physical changes the city underwent; and buildings and monuments whose physical construction, destruction and reconstruction reflected the ideological turmoil and conflict of twentieth century Berlin. Famous Berliners covered include the murdered Communist leader Rosa Luxemburg, the artist Käthe Kollwitz, the actress Marlene Dietrich, the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, the adopted Berliner David Bowie, and the famous East German dissident musician Wolf Biermann. The contextualized stories of these individuals offer a unique perspectives politically, artistically, and socially into the tumult and struggle that marked their times in the city. These figures occupy a range of different positions as Berliners, as radicals, as artists of resistance to or collaboration with Nazism, and Communism, as drifters and exiles whose stories reflect Berlin's unique position in the twentieth century as no man's land, frontier, a city adrift in the sands of Central Europe. In a similar way, the course examines the words of writers who bore witness to the extremism and societal upheaval that marked twentieth century Berlin. From the witnessing of Roth and Isherwood to life in Weimar and Nazi Berlin, to the social and political commentary by Christa Wolf and Peter Schneider on the moral struggles of life lived on different sides of the Berlin Wall, the course assesses their writings in their historical contexts. Finally, the course covers the story of places in Berlin whose physical building, destruction, and rebuilding can be situated in the wider systems of ideology, power, and social relations that so cataclysmically defined the physical landscape of Berlin after 1933. In this, the focus is on the story of Potsdamer Platz, the Palace of the People and as an opposite postscript to Berlin's twentieth century, the Holocaust Memorial in Mitte. Structured largely chronologically, the course works with films and novels whilst building on a clear historiographical base provided in class seminars. The teaching is augmented by physical excursions into Berlin to trace the stories encountered and class discussions form the basis for a seminar paper that students are required to submit at the end of the course. This history course approaches the story of Berlin through the reflections and refractions of individual humans' lives who struggled upon the immense stage of a city at the very symbolic and literal heart of the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

This course covers a frequently neglected aspect of the middle-high German literature, namely its Bebilderung. Scripts and multimedia works of art are illuminated, and students question how these works influence the text and our understanding of it.   

This course considers the concept of hypermodernism and its more recent iterations with respect to new and planned buildings in Berlin (by international firms such as OMA and Herzog de Meuron), to places of infrastructure (train stations, airports), shopping centers, so-called POPS (privately owned public spaces), and urban wilderness areas. Students are encouraged to explore the city on their own and respond to particular sites through visuals, audio recordings, (creative) texts, and other forms of artistic expression.

This course is designed for beginners with basic knowledge of German. This course is intensive and is intended for dedicated, highly self-motivated students who will take responsibility for their learning. This course helps students expand their competences in listening, speaking, reading and writing within four weeks, deepen their knowledge of grammar as well as knowledge of the German culture. It enables students to deal with everyday situations in a German-speaking environment and to conduct simple conversations. Students develop reading strategies that allow them to understand simple newspaper and magazine articles as well as more detailed short literary texts. In addition, students improve their essay writing skills and are able to write short texts on different topics, revise and proofread them.

In this course, students read works on German democracy written in American perspective. Students alternate between theoretical texts and those which cover pivotal moments in German history: the revolution of 1848, the institution of democracy in the German Empire, its suspension under Hitler, and the fate of democracy in Germany divided.