Geschichte einer Stadt: Berlin der Aufklärungen - Einzelansicht

For over a century, Berlin has been one of Europe’s most exciting cities, attracting immigrants and travelers from across the globe for its multiple cultural scenes, pluralistic social fabric, religious tolerance, and intellectual diversity. Yet the story of Berlin as a city on the edge begins already in the 18th century, at a time when the capital of the Prussian monarchy had become a center of Enlightenment philosophy, literature, and arts, where tensions between court and civil society, high- and lowbrow, Jews and Christians yielded some of European modernity’s most fruitful, constitutive moments and shaped such notions as tolerance, diversity, friendship, and public sphere. In this course, we will learn about some of those key moments, get to know the men and women who shaped the city’s rich socio-cultural milieux, the dilemmas they faced, and the spaces they inhabited (including a class tour in Berlin-Mitte), and explore the malleability of religious, social, and gender boundaries that characterized Berlin society around 1800 and continues to do so to this day. Focus will be given to the role of the arts, sociability, and philosophy in Christian-Jewish encounters, drawing on letters, visual images, music, philosophical texts, and poetry next to secondary literature.

The course will be conducted in English.

6 LP (benotet): active participation in class reading, discussion, and small group work; four-five assignments per term; take-home exam in the form of an essay: a short analysis of one text or topic addressed in the course (13-15 S.)