Berlin Perspectives - Summer semester 2024

History and politics? Migration and identity? Literature and art? Whatever you are passionate about, the Berlin Perspectives seminars are offered in cooperation with the Career Center in the interdisciplinary elective area and rewarded with five ECTS credits. Choose your favorites right now!

Registration takes place via Agnes and is open until April 9, 2024.

History and Heritage Urban Development and Urban Culture Culture and Society Music and Film

History and Heritage

Lecturer
Dr. Victoria Bishop Kendzia

Language requirements
English B2 
Time
Wednesday, 14-18 c.t. (2:15-5:45pm)
Please note the individual session dates:
17 April, 24 April, 8 May, 15 May, 22 May, 29 May, 5 June

Room:  0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7

Course description
Berlin’s rich museological landscape lends itself to in-depth exploration of Germany’s difficult heritage: How are the upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially, remembered and represented? This course aims to enable the students to get to know a number of Berlin museums focusing on Memory and Post-WWII migration using anthropological methods and to critically analyse them within larger theoretical frameworks of “self” and “other” constructions. The aim is to explore the role of museums in rendering such constructions visible and therefore debatable. In addition to visiting the sites, there are scholarly readings and in-class discussions. The discussions will be based on the museum visits and the students’ questions on the readings.

Lecturer
Dr. Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz

Language requirements
English B2 
German A1 
Time
Friday, 10-14 c.t. (10:15am–1:45pm)
Please note the individual session dates: 
19 April, 3 May, 17 May, 31 May, 14 June, 28 June, 12 July

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7

Course description
Berlin is a multi-cultural city with a diverse cultural life and heritage. The course will present critical heritage studies connected to Asia. Starting with the fascination of collectors and travelers to Asia during the colonial period, collections and material culture have lent contemporary relevance to the arts, history, and politics. During the excursions to museums and cultural institutions in Berlin, we want to critically engage in the discourses on what Asian heritage is and how it should be studied and managed. This allows an integration of heritage and museum studies. The course approaches a broad spectrum from crafts, intangible heritage, and memorialization to rights policies and property issues. Monuments, religious sites, or street names reflect Berlin’s colonial legacies and minority histories of different communities from Asia.

Lecturer
Dr. Margareta von Oswald, Dr. Jonas Tinius

Language requirements
English B2 
German A2 recommended
Time
Please note the individual session dates
Monday, 22 April, 16-18; Monday, 29 April, 14-18; Saturday, 4 May, 10h-18h; Sunday, 5 May, 10h-18; Monday, 3 June, 14-18; Monday, 17 June, 14h-18

Room: 408, Mohrenstr. 40/41
Course description
Berlin is a city layered with history: a palimpsest of ruins, rebuildings, and marks of the past, even of futuristic imaginations that are now history. These layers can seem romantic and invited the modern flaneur to imagine Berlin alongside other cosmopolitan and urban projection screens. But the multi-layered city also implies a casting aside, a covering up, digging up, and hiding. The ruins of Berlin tell a story of an injured city, whose wounds are variously exposed to lay the finger on the wound of historical reckoning, or plastered in a vain attempt to heal, or return to a state prior to injury, as artist Kader Attia put it about the city of Berlin. The city as a multi-layered palimpsest thus reveals psycho-affective and political strategies of future-making and heritage-mobilisation. In this seminar, we trace and dig into the difficult, awkward, eerie, uncomfortable heritage of the city and speak to stakeholders involved in its transition: curators, activists, artists, citizens. The seminar will produce a modular book-case, which can be unpacked into a mini-exhibition, featuring students’ own profiled “difficult heritage” sites of the city with a brief problematisation. These loose pages will be put together in a box to create a mobile, modular book-exhibition. Among the sites that may be visited are: Zionskirche, Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer, Stasi Archive and headquarters, Humboldt Forum, Holocaust Memorial and the Sinti Roma Memorial, exhibition "looking back” at Museen Treptow-Köpenick. The seminar focuses on field visits with methodological exercises, which introduce students to diverse ways of doing research that they will build on to articulate their own research outcomes in a multimodal portfolio.

Urban Development and Urban Culture

Lecturer
Carrie Bly

Language requirements
English B2
Time
Tuesday, 14-16 c.t. (2:15-3:45pm)

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7

Course description
What is at stake in reading, writing, depicting and telling the histories of Berlin’s architectural and urban landscape? How do historical and analytical frameworks shape scholarly understandings of the city? How does the architecture of Berlin shape its history and theory? Conducted as a discussion seminar, this course uses recent architectural and urban histories of 20th century Berlin to explore different ways of narrating the city’s history. Each week, students will approach Berlin’s urbanity through different textual and visual media to discuss the themes and methods—from femininity to migration, politics to privatization—by which they narrate the entanglement of Berlin’s physical and social landscape. Over the course of the semester, students will develop their scholarly reading techniques, and their fluency in the multipolar and manifold circumstances of the city. The premise of the course is that engaging the narrative can lead to ‘changing the narrative,’ thereby opening the door for students to develop an original final project, situating their worldly experience in the past, present and future of Berlin.

Lecturer
Shelley Etkin

Language requirements
English B2
Time
Thursday, 12-14 c.t. (12:15-1:45pm)

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7 
Course description
Urban Gardens of Berlin: Transdisciplinary Ecologies situates questions of planetary change through the city of Berlin as a diverse complex ecosystem, focusing on several urban gardens. Asking “what can a garden be?” the course proposes ecological thinking to engage with multiple disciplines informing the field of ecology including environmental, economic, social, political, artistic and spiritual to study relations between many human and nonhuman communities that compose each garden. The course will include on-site visits, including guided tours and talks with local organisers from each of the projects, elaborating on their practices and contextualising within local histories. Students will be supported to work autonomously and collaboratively in creative, critical, and reflective ways, embracing transdisciplinarity, and concluding the course by designing a speculative garden situated in a location within Berlin.

Culture and Society

Lecturer
Dr. Betiel Wasihun

Language requirements
English B2
Time
Thursday, 10-12 c.t. (10:15-11:45am)

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7
Course description
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 will on the one hand examine the impact of surveillance on society by looking at the multifaceted ways technologies, societies and the arts interact and, on the other hand, reflect on surveillance in a totalitarian context while comparing observation techniques in the GDR with contemporary surveillance methods. The course further encourages students to critically engage with the representation of surveillance in contemporary literature, film and popular culture and maps out important themes with regards to surveillance and its repercussions (e.g., visibility, identity, privacy and control). Furthermore, the course provides an overview of the interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies 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.

Lecturer
Betiel Wasihun
Language requirements
English B2
Time
Tuesday, 12-14 c.t. (12:15-1:24pm)

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7
Course description
How do our unconscious biases impact the way we view people within the African Diaspora? The course aims to explore intersectional inequalities of citizenship and the politics of Belonging and how our unconscious biases impact the way we view (Black) Africans and people within the African Diaspora. The relationship between migration, social cohesion and national German identity has become an increasingly contentious political issue. Historically, the settlement of migrant groups and the formation of minority ethnic groups have changed the socio-cultural, political and economic fabric of receiving societies. We will explore the relationship between racial and ethnocultural diversity. Students are encouraged to the intentional notion of undoing – unlearning and dismantling unjust practices, assumptions, and institutions – as well as persistent action to create and build alternative spaces and ways of knowing, particularly concerning the Black (African) Diaspora. Berlin will be used as a case study for themes covered, however, students are encouraged to reflect on their own identities and the expressions of various identities around the city. Class sessions will be composed of lectures, online discussions forums and an excursion through Berlin’s Black History. Course materials and readings are designed to give special emphasis to the African Diaspora initiatives and perspectives of shaping their own history. Ultimately the course provides students with a wide interdisciplinary introduction into the othering of (Black) Africans, so that students can interpret contemporary African issues with an informed historical background.

Lecturer
Julia de Freitas Sampaio, Marco Trejo Picazo

Language requirements
English B2
Time
Tuesday, 16-18 c.t. (4:15-5:45pm)

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7
Course description
The phrase “Germany is not a country of immigration” has been repeatedly said by German officials. Yet, Germany is the second most popular destination for immigrants (just after the USA). But how is this country now, which less than 100 years ago was home to one of the most racist and xenophobic regimes that have ever existed, the home to so many immigrants? In this class, we will explore the history and the continuing-changing laws behind it, and even more, we will hear firsthand stories from immigrants living in Berlin. As the course takes place in Berlin, the city will be our study case. From tours organized by immigrants, walks in the diverse Berliner neighborhoods, and interviews with first and second generation immigrants, this class aims to give a more in-depth, first-hand insight into the condition of immigrants living in Germany. That, remembering to consider history, law, and geography for a richer understanding of the processes that have repeatedly transformed this city (and country) based on the newest intersectional approaches to Anti-Racism, Anti-Semitism, and ‘Integration’ and ‘Belonging.’

Music and Film

Lecturer
Dr. George Athanasopoulos

Language requirements
English B2
German A1
Time
Monday, 10-14 c.t. (10:15am-1:45pm)
Please note the individual session dates: 
22 April, 29 April, 13 May, 27 May, 10 June, 17 June, 1 July

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7
Course description
This course explores the profound connection between music and migration in shaping Berlin's diverse cultural scene. Focusing on key historical events, it unveils the complex factors influencing Berlin's music evolution. The city's history of attracting global artists, notably during periods of political upheaval, commenced with forced migrations in the 1930s and 1940s. The post-World War II era and the Berlin Wall's construction in 1961 further shaped the city's cultural dynamics, while the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked a pivotal moment, drawing a new wave of musicians and contributing to the city's globalized music scene. Electronic music thrived in the 1990s, utilizing abandoned industrial spaces for iconic techno parties. Contemporary migrations significantly enrich Berlin's musical influences, leading to hybrid music forms. World music, fusion, and cross-genre collaborations are prevalent, showcasing Berlin's reputation as a creative haven attracting musicians seeking an open environment, with clubs and venues fostering community and collaboration. The seminar series includes participation in the Fête de la Musique, offering students a real-world glimpse into Berlin's dynamic music scene. This festival becomes a platform for student projects, allowing them to analyze performances, interview musicians, and explore the festival's role in promoting cultural diversity in Berlin's music landscape.

Lecturer
Dr. Deniz Güneş Yardımcı 

Language requirements
English B1
German A2
Time
Friday, 10-14 c.t. (10:15am–1.45pm)
Please note the individual session dates: 
26 April, 10 May, 25 May, 7 June, 21 June, 5 July, 19 July

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7

Course description
The labour migration from Southern European countries to Germany, which started in the mid-1950s, had an important socio-economic and socio-cultural impact on the countries’ societies and influenced their film culture. German filmmakers began to feature the first guestworkers’ difficult lives in films such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (1969). In the 1990s, second- and third–generation Turkish-German directors such as Fatih Akın and Thomas Arslan marked the end of the so-called ‘guestworker cinema’ and started to create a transnational and diasporic cinema featuring a culturally hybrid Germany. Berlin (especially Kreuzberg) has always been one of the favorite settings in all of these migration movies. The transformation of Berlin’s first Guestworker Ghettos to culturally hybrid urban districts over the course of 60 years is very well reflected in all of these cinema cultures. This interdisciplinary course crosses and connects the academic fields of migration studies, film studies, and cultural studies. In the first part of the course, we will explore how migration, immigrants, and diasporas are represented in cinema. The second part of the course then gets more specific and we approach the representation of Berlin in these migration movies.