Marlene Dietrich on stage in a smoke-filled cabaret, the Soviet flag atop a shattered Reichstag, jubilant crowds spilling over the Wall in 1989, the haunting expanse of Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial . . . no city is associated with more of the twentieth century’s most deeply etched images than Berlin.

Taking in the full range of media where Berlin’s multiple personalities have been constructed and perpetuated—including film, literature, music, architecture and visual art—we are going to examine the city’s history from its medieval origins to the present, paying special attention to its several twentieth-century identities: the hypermodern Babylon of the Weimar Republic, the capital and gravesite of the Third Reich, the quintessential setting of Cold War intrigue and, now, the palladium of civil liberties and digital rights. Students will acquire not only an understanding of Berlin’s unique profile in modern memory, but an appreciation of the responsible and serious-minded way in which Germans have reckoned with the last century’s ghosts.

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (Harvard UP 2006)
ISBN: 978-0674022225

Search for a new outline