Berlin's Cultural Diversity Across Two Centuries

FAIN: FV-50294-11

Texas A & M Research Foundation (College Station, TX 77843-0001)
Robert R. Shandley (Project Director: March 2011 to April 2016)
Brent O. Peterson (Co Project Director: March 2011 to April 2016)

A five-week seminar held in Berlin for sixteen school teachers to study Germany's cosmopolitan society over the past two centuries.

This seminar uses writers and film makers associated with Berlin, the city's museums, neighborhoods, and larger cultural scene to explore how German society's sense of itself has been tested and enriched by its encounters with migrants during the past two centuries. Participants will use the tools of the humanities to contrast the twin myths of German homogeneity and German monoculturalism with the literary and social reality of Germany's cosmopolitan capital. Locating the seminar in Berlin will let participants make the leap from intellectual awareness to a genuine understanding of contemporary German culture. Our objects of inquiry include an 18th-century French migrant to Berlin and a number of Berlin's German-Jewish authors. The seminar also focuses on the Turkish Germans, who are presently Berlin’s largest and most culturally significant minority, and it includes a Russian Jew and Berlin resident, now one of the most popular chroniclers of "multi-cultural Germany."