How did Berlin come to look the way it does today? Considering Berlin a model for the development of a European capital in modern times, this lecture provides an overview of the development of public and private architecture in Berlin during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The interdependence of Berlin’s architecture and the city’s social and political structures will be illustrated with examples of buildings and sites in the cityscape’s historical evolution – so virtually walk the streets of Berlin with us!

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One of the key questions related to the study of European and German history of the 20th century in particular is: Under what conditions did some individuals manage to offer resistance to atrocities such as happened in the Holocaust? And why did large masses ignore or even support blatant inhumanities and injustice? Understanding the underlying psychological aspects remains acutely important even in our democratic societies today, in which compliance, conformity, and indifference sometimes still seems to be the easiest way out of stress and insecurity.

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80 years after millions of Jews were murdered in the concentration and extermination camps and on German streets, Jewish life and culture in Central Europe has yet again diversified greatly and new voices make themselves heard. However, no Jewish intellectual can speak out without relating, one way or another, critically or nostalgically, to that great and tragic German Jewish legacy of the past. This lecture will give an overview of German-Jewish thinking and culture from the past and the present and introduce key writers, many of whom live(d) in Berlin.

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How do states and societies draw lessons for the future from historical events, and what role did (and does) law play in the peaceful rebuilding of Europe after the wars and political transformations of the 20th and early 21st century? This lecture will look at European legal history shaped by (and shaping) war and peace agreements as well as the legal and political change processes that have occurred in the countries of the former Communist bloc since 1989. Eventually arriving in the present, we will take a glimpse at the European Union’s potential as a common European legal space.

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