At NYU Berlin, students have the opportunity to explore a city of great historic importance that is also at the cutting edge of modern cultural and artistic discovery.
The new Global Orientations Course German Histories in Contemporary Life provides students with a distinct perspective on European and global issues as they relate to Germany and Berlin. Berlin has seen dramatic transformations in the space of just a century, as the capital of Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, the divided front-line of the Cold War and the new metropolis of reunified Germany. Students consider these transitions and the emergence of Berlin as a center for politics, business, culture, art, and media. By gaining an informed perspective on Germany during orientation, students are better able to relate to some of the topics covered in their courses as well as deepen their relationships to local schools and Universities.
The Berlin program strongly benefits from very strong connections with NYU departments, and a number of new courses reflect the intellectual rigor and creativity that result from these relationships.
“Designing truly effective exchanges between NYU’s global sites and the Washington Square campus requires that course content and curricula achieve a synergistic balance between productive use of the experiential opportunities in unique global learning contexts, and the maintenance of curricular seamlessness between global course offerings and overall programs of study at Washington Square,” says Anne Rademacher, assistant professor, Environmental & Metropolitan Studies, NYU.
Rademacher and Sigi Sliwinski, NYU Berlin, collaborated to design two courses that provide “theoretical, methodological, and experiential frames for understanding the intersection of social processes and urban ecology in New York and Berlin.” The pilot course Greening Berlin taught in Berlin is soon to be complemented by a New York-based course.
In Berlin students’ academic life is enriched through their participation in seminars and workshops. Recent examples include an international conference Re-examining Democratic Transitions in Times of Crisis, organized by NYU’s Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, NYU Berlin, and the Free University, Berlin. The conference assessed models of transitions in Southern Europe in the 1970s, Eastern Europe in the 1990s, and present phenomena in Arab countries. And as part of the joint NYU Berlin / Humboldt University course on Global Education in the 21st Century, German and NYU Berlin students presented their collaborative research projects to a general audience during a colloquium held in the Senatssaal where Albert Einstein taught his courses.
NYU Berlin’s extra-curricular activities are designed to promote cultural immersion, support personal transformation and growth, and expand collaborative work in an intercultural setting. A recent photography exhibit offered students the opportunity to focus their lens on the beauty of some of Berlin’s uglier sites. A play co-authored and performed by NYU Berlin students and students of the Kurt-Tucholsky-Oberschule at the English Theater in Berlin exemplified the benefits of our immersion projects. Finally, the literary and arts magazine Abend(b)rot had vibrant submissions.
NYU Berlin, in collaboration with NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Art and Art Professions, and the Deutsches Haus, organizes an annual group exhibition that invites former NYU Berlin students to reflect on Berlin as a place of continuous reinvention both symbolically and physically. At the opening on March 6, two students were awarded the “NYU Berlin Culture Brewery Prize 2014.” Each winner received $700 for a return trip to Berlin.