Berlin's Modern History and Culture: A European Perspective

Catalog description

This course explores the interstices between State power and the individual in the context of Modern Berlin and German history. Our exploration of individual confrontations with politics includes a discussion of how individuals react to State terror––through collaboration or resistance––and how identities flourish, transform or are extinguished under State policies. One important location for individual responses to the State is the arts, and we explore in depth how State power has promoted or stifled these creative voices throughout Europe. Special topics include coercive acculturation in Jewish- German intellectual life, the destruction of the 20s musical Avant-garde, the rise of the Nazi Aesthetic in Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries, the intrusion of State Security (the Stasi) in private life, the photorealist reflections of painter Gerhard Richter on terrorism in Berlin in the 1970s, and Germany’s literary reassessment of individual and collective war guilt following reunification. Readings and lectures are supplemented with walking tours of Berlin and its museums, to look at traces of historical, social and cultural change that has affected individual experience in situ.