GER-E322
Course Description
Berlin is a symbol—a swastika, Stalin’s smile, a television tower—and it is a historical hub
where people gather for the sake of commerce, power, love, and culture. It is
an archeological site of tragic, criminal, revolutionary, and mistaken cities,
a building site of comic, cool, prudent, and exuberant cities, and an imaginary
city of espionage, decadence, cosmopolitanism and solidarity. During the
semester we will try to plumb the bewildering layers of Berlin by asking one
persistent question of different times and representations: what did chance
feel like in Berlin? What did it mean to take a chance in the traffic of
Berlin in the 1920s, what did in mean to take a chance in art and architecture?
What did it mean to take a chance on political revolution? What chance did one
take when one committed to an idea… or a prejudice? What did it feel like to
risk trusting a stranger, a friend, or a lover during the Weimar Republic,
Third Reich, or Cold War? Was it a risk to reunify Germany with Berlin as its
capital—and who took it? What chances do people take living in Berlin’s global
economy today? What chances does a refugee or a wanderer face? To answer our
guiding question we will consider representations of uncertainty, risk, and
novelty (and their opposites: identity, security, normality, predictability)
over the last hundred years of ever-surprising Berlin.
BOOKS
Jana Hensel, After the Wall: Confessions
from an East German Childhood (Public Affairs) ISBN-13: 978-1586485597
Philip Kerr, March
Violets: A Bernie Gunther Novel (Penguin) ISBN-13: 978-0142004142
Irmgard Keun, The
Artificial Silk Girl (The Other Press) ISBN-13: 978-1590514542
John le Carré, Spy
Who Came in from the Cold (Penguin) ISBN-13: 978-0143121428
Christa Wolf, They
Divided the Sky (University of Ottawa Press) ISBN-13: 978-0776607870
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