Each NYU study away site has a Global Orientation Course to orient incoming students to their new city. We’ll be exploring how students are oriented across the global network starting with Berlin.
The course in Berlin, German Histories in Contemporary Life, provides students with a unique perspective on European and global issues as they relate to Germany and Berlin. The experience really seems to ground the students and allows them to embrace the practice of Heimsteigen (“entering a new place and immediately adopting it as home without gradual transition”). This was a term that was coined and favored by some of the NYU Berlin Fall 2013 students.
Professor Joseph Pearson, Global Orientation Course Coordinator at NYU-Berlin, describes the course:
When we invite speakers to participate in NYU-Berlin’s Global Orientation Course, one of the most compelling draws is that they will have the chance to address students during their first week in the German capital. It’s a moment when students experience their first plunge of immersion into the local culture–– full of fresh impressions and observations. For speakers, it is not simply the opportunity to help form students’ first reactions, but also to re-examine their own well-formed responses to issues through the perspective of the newcomer.
As part of the most recent Orientation Course, NYU-Berlin welcomed incisive speakers discussing Berlin’s emergence as an arts capital: art critic Carson Chan, curators Sönke Müller, and Marcel Schwierin of Transmediale (Berlin’s digital arts festival), and Dr. Thomas Köhler, the Director of Berlin’s modern art museum who also teaches a class at NYU-Berlin. They are all experienced hands in the Berlin art scene and presented their concerns about market forces, growing commercialism and the rising costs of studio space. Our students, many fresh from New York, were the ones able to put these concerns in a comparative context––many of them astonished by just how un-commercial, un-gentrified and affordable Berlin remains despite its Renaissance as an arts metropolis. Precisely this exchange of expectations, and standpoints, has made the course so exciting.
Take this energy to subjects as polemic as what constitutes an appropriate memorial to the victims of the Holocaust (with on-site visits), the debate over a multicultural Germany, or Germany’s role in the ongoing Euro-zone crisis, and there’s plenty to keep one awake despite the post-arrival jetlag. All the sessions investigate the weight of the past on contemporary issues not just in Berlin, but in Germany as a whole, with a view to how often tragic histories can potentially be the basis for more tolerant societies. The bridge between the past and the present can perhaps be best seen in our screening of the landmark 1927 city film Berlin Symphony of a Great City, with a live-DJ’d score mixed by the group Tronthaim. The contemporary electronic soundtrack is like a séance, recognizing our position as viewers looking back at documentation of a city that has largely vanished––destroyed by wartime bombing.
As a historian––often inured to the war damage that pockmarks the façades in Mitte––I sometimes forget what a remarkable classroom Berlin can be. Having a student walking by my side and pointing up to a Soviet memorial or a stray piece of the Berlin Wall makes you see again what the eye has begun simply to glance over. Indeed, we all need to be orientated and re-oriented in Berlin––to be shown new places from which we can see the city.

A group of students are visiting the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial, a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman. Their guide is NYU Berlin professor Cristiana da Silva, who teaches classes in architecture.