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Online Subject Courses

Instructor: Dr. Lauren Van Vuuren
Live Session:
Slot A: Fridays, 9 - 11 a.m. CET (Berlin time)
Slot B: Wednesdays, 7 - 9 p.m. CET (Berlin time)
Duration:
Slot A: Sep. 3 - Dec. 3, 2021
Slot B: Sep. 1 - Dec. 1, 2021
Language of Instruction: English
Contact Hours: 30
ECTS Credits: 6

This course is about Berlin, and the story of its tumultuous and epoch defining twentieth century. We examine this history 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 we will meet 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 will offer us 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 position(s) 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, we will examine 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 on the moral struggles of life lived on different sides of the Berlin Wall, we will assess their writings in their historical contexts. We will assess their words as evocations of Berlin, but also as potential or overt acts of resistance to the extremism they lived under, that attempted to maintain a solidarity with the idea of Berlin as a place of artistic and social freedom and permissiveness.

Finally, we will discover 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, we will focus 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.

This course does not seek to provide a ‘grand narrative’ of Berlin’s twentieth century history. Instead, it follows a thread that weaves through the history: the thread left behind by those who bore witness to their times. By tracing the stories of contemporary witnesses, left for us in books, films and songs, and in the physical construction of the city, we open up a human dimension that enriches and challenges our understanding of Berlin’s traumatic recent past.

Structured largely chronologically, the course will work with films and novels whilst building on a clear historiographical base provided in class seminars. Guests speakers, class discussion, assigned reading work and individual research will form the basis for a seminar paper that students will be 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.

Instructor: Dr. Matthias Vollmer
Live Session: Thursdays, 7 - 9 p.m. CET (Berlin time)
Duration: Sep. 2 - Dec. 2, 2021
Language of Instruction: English
Contact Hours: 30
ECTS Credits: 6

This course will survey the visual arts in Germany from the rise of modernism around 1900 to the present after postmodernism. The aim is to closely study the individual works and interpret them critically by analyzing their formal structure, style and technique, iconography etc. We will investigate the concerns of the artists who created them, and place the works within their wider historical, philosophical, political, social and cultural contexts as well as within the international development of the visual arts in Western Europe and – in the second half of the 20th century – the US.

To understand 20th-century art and its role in society, it is paramount to take into account theoretical thinking and the philosophical climate shaped by Sigmund Freud, Charles Sanders Peirce and others. Hence, the course will also acquaint students with major philosophical ideas of this period and their implications for visual artworks. This will include reflections by art historians on the methods deemed appropriate for studying the objects and ideas which constitute their discipline.

Instructor: Prof. Dr. Volker Nitsch
Live Session: Mondays, 7 - 9 p.m. CET (Berlin time) 
Duration: Aug. 30 - Nov. 29, 2021
Language of Instruction: English
Contact Hours: 30
ECTS Credits: 6

What is today’s role of the European Union? After decades towards greater integration, economic relationships have recently become more fragile. Examples of the rise of disintegration include tendencies of secession and the exit of countries from international institutional arrangements. In view of strong interdependencies between economic actors, these disruptions seem to be particularly costly and may require appropriate policy responses.

This course introduces the main economic aspects of the current development of the European Union (EU) and its policies. The basic idea is to discuss general issues in economic integration with a strong emphasis on experiences in Europe. After reviewing the institutional, political and historical background of European integration, the main focus is on the economic analysis of the policies and prospects for the European Union and its economic impacts on individuals, firms and regions.

Some recent developments in the international policy agenda like sovereign debt crises, Brexit and the euro crisis will also be covered.

Instructor: Dr. Jan-Henrik Meyer
Live Session: Thursdays, 9 - 11 a.m. CET (Berlin time) 
Duration: Sep. 2 - Dec. 2, 2021
Language of Instruction: English
Contact Hours: 30
ECTS Credits: 6

European Politics and the history and politics of European Integration more specifically are characterized by crises, as many contemporary and current observers have highlighted over and over again. In the past two decades, Europe has been shaken by a series of crises – from the failed constitution and the financial crisis to the Migration, Brexit and COVID crises, the rise of populism and the disintegration of democracy in some of the newer member states. Why is European integration apparently so crisis-ridden? And: to what extent has European integration actually been propelled by crises?

This course will introduce students to the history and politics of the European Union (EU), its peculiar institutions and a number of its key policies. The course will address and explain the – often crisis-ridden – processes of widening and deepening of this unique political entity, drawing on some relevant theorizing. Students will learn how institutions changed and how policies are made, as well as the role of the different supranational and intergovernmental institutions. Next to the formal institutions, interest representation, lobbying, and the media have shaped processes of policy making and polity building, and crisis responses. Special emphasis will be placed on Europe’s current crises – the Euro crisis, the migration crisis, Brexit – and the lingering challenges of the environmental and climate change.

The sessions consist of lectures, literature-based discussions, a close reading of sources, in smaller and larger groups. Students will be expected to actively participate, collaborate in groups and prepare oral presentations. A special highlight of the course is a hands-on semester-long group project of developing a lobbying strategy directed at the European institutions. The course also includes a presentation and an opportunity to discuss with a guest speaker from the Commission’s Team Europe.

Instructor: Dr. Marcus Funck
Live Session: Wednesdays, 9 - 11 a.m. CET (Berlin time) 
Duration: Sep. 1 - Dec. 1, 2021
Language of Instruction: English
Contact Hours: 30
ECTS Credits: 6

What is Germany? Who is German? Who defines und who decides – politicians, academics, collective groups, or anyone for oneself? How does it “feel” to be German emotionally? What makes one a German and who might think to be more German than others? What is Germany, and where is Germany? Since when does Germany exist? How many Germanys are there? And, finally, what do others think about Germany?
These questions will be discussed in a course that is covering the still ongoing and ever-changing German discourses on the search for “German-ness”, that is, a national identity rooted in common historical experiences. We will look at how these processes of national “identity-building” have unfolded in German history since 1800. How have history, philosophy, politics, and culture been intertwined in Germany in the past, and what is “German” today – as seen by Germans and others? Throughout the course’s chronology, we will investigate to what extent, if at all, the historical debates we analyze still play into present-day understandings of being German.

Instructor: Till Büser
Live Session: Tuesdays, 7 - 9 p.m. CET (Berlin time)
Duration: Aug. 31 - Nov. 30, 2021
Language of Instruction: English
Contact Hours: 30
ECTS Credits: 6

This course introduces its participants to mass media systems and structures in Germany and Europe and provides them with the analytical tools and background knowledge to assess the ways in which the mass media and politics interact and thus shape each other.

We will start with an overview of the different structures of mass media (public/ private) in Germany, including how they have historically developed and particularly which political ideas have shaped the frameworks in which media institutions and individuals operate. At the same time, we will take a critical look at how the media in turn have shaped and are still shaping the ways in which the political process works and presents itself to the public. Historical and current examples will help us to analyze the manifold points of interaction between media and politics. At the end of the course, students will also have the opportunity to compare European and American media politics and to ask whether there may be trends and influences across the Atlantic (one or both ways) that are shaping today’s politics and mass media on both sides.

Instructor: Dr. Martin Jander
Live Session: Mondays, 9 - 11 a.m. CET (Berlin time)
Duration: Aug. 30 - Nov. 29, 2021
Language of Instruction: English
Contact Hours: 30
ECTS Credits: 6

In order to understand European history of the 19th and 20th century, a focus on Germany is indispensable and unavoidable. It took a long time before the German society transformed into a modern, open and democratic society. The “Revolution of Modernity” (Ralf Dahrendorf) was pushed back before World War I and failed 1933 in the Weimar Republic. Freedom and rule of law were brought to Germany by the allied Armies. The main antimodernist ideologies that caused the Shoah and the German war against the “Jewish Enemy” (Jeffrey Herf) were: antisemitism, racism and nationalism. In the first part of the 20th century Germany attempted to destroy civilization under a blanket of propaganda and by violence, both brutal and coldly mechanistic. Today we experience a Germany that presents itself as one partner among equals in the European Union. This new identity follows 40 years of ideological, social, political, and cultural division between two German states – the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Germany now enjoys the political stability, peace and prosperity of a democratic system. The change in German identity and the meaning of identity within the German context offers a fascinating angle from which to approach German history. From this angle, one gains a new understanding of Germany's contradictions, catastrophes, abysses, and moral bankruptcies before and after the Shoah, and the miraculous reconstruction after enormous casualties and destruction that resulted from the total war between 1939 and 1945.

Within these parameters, the course addresses various topics in German and European 20th century history: different political ideas, systems and movements, as well as social and cultural developments. We will compare and contrast the German variety of these phenomena with other European varieties. Two major themes are the struggles between democracy and dictatorship, and capitalism and communism, which played out through the 20th century. The course will connect these essentially ideological struggles to the two World Wars and the ensuing "Cold War", to memories of trauma, to the history of everyday life, pop culture and gender, and to the experience of youth and immigrants in Germany. Through analyses of the interconnections and distinctions between all these aspects, the course will provide participants with a better understanding of German society today.

Instructor: Dr. Karolina Golimowska
Live Session: Tuesdays, 9 - 11 a.m. CET (Berlin time)
Duration: Aug. 31 - Nov. 30, 2021
Language of Instruction: English
Contact Hours: 30
ECTS Credits: 6

With the divide between mass culture and high art disappearing, popular culture has become a prolific field of study. In this online course, we will consider the many facets and dimensions of pop culture, including its cultural history and the possibilities hidden within what is often assumed to be nothing more than entertainment.

Some of the topics we will address are popular culture’s reflection of discourse, its capability of criticizing or affirming the status quo, and the various modes of ideology within. We will cover many relevant pop culture representations: film, television, comic books, music, paintings etc. and will discuss their significance within the historical frame of reference as well as their international social impact.

Secondary texts will introduce a range of theoretical perspectives through which pop culture may be explored, analyzed, questioned, and understood. We will discuss the function of pop culture in the public sphere, its representations in texts, images, and music.