My cousins in Pakistan who are studying to be doctors often boast of their capacity to treat human beings’ greatest impediments in life—physical ailments. Such confidence comes from their commitment to contemporary medicine, which (unfortunately) is often mistakenly thought to be omnipotent for the rather remarkable strides it makes concerning patient health. Many debilitating diseases
CategoryAcademic Excursions
Finding my Genius
The trip to Weimar was literally one of the ‘Aha’ moments in my life. This is how Weimar happened; a day before we actually had to leave, I spent the whole day reading Galileo for a class. With my head drowned in my books I wondered to myself if I would ever get to spend
Martin Scorsese Exhibition at The Museum of Film and Television (Museum für Film und Fernsehen)
Every year Professor Matthias Hurst takes the students of ECLA of Bard for a walk around Marlene Dietrich Platz (where Berlin’s international annual film festival takes place), stopping at the Museum of Film and Television, located in the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz. Beyond being of particular interest for students – like myself – taking
The Anti-War Museum
On April 16th Irit Dekel, instructor of the Past in the Present: Collective Memory, Politics and Culture class, led a trip to the Anti-Kriegs-Museum (Anti-War Museum) in Berlin. Opened by Ernst Friedrich in the 1920s in the working class district of Wedding, the museum was closed for many years before it was re-opened by Friedrich’s
Playing Democracy
Willy Brandt, Germany’s first – malicious tongues might say only – left wing post-war chancellor was born in 1913. One hundred years later, the Deutsches Theater in Berlin showed the play “Democracy,” in which Michael Frayn tells of the rise and fall of one of Germany’s most important political figures of the 20th century. The
Watch the Gods Falling: Backstage Visit to “Götterdämmerung” at the Schiller Theater
The typical image of a visit to the opera is associated with elegantly dressed ladies, men in tuxedos, glasses of sparkling champagne, and polite conversations. However, at the end of February, ECLA of Bard students had the rare opportunity to get a glimpse behind the curtains of the shiny art world, by attending a rehearsal
The Käthe Kollwitz Museum
On December 7, the students in the Berlin: Experiment in Modernity course visited the Käthe Kollwitz Museum as part of their then on-going class discussion about social democracy, through the lens of Europe’s workers’ movement in the 19th and 20th century. Situated in Berlin’s elegant Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf neighborhood, the museum is actually a modified 19th century
Two Capitals: A Trip from Berlin to Dresden
In the first weekend of December, two small groups from ECLA of Bard left the German capital to visit Dresden. The first group, lead by Prof. Florian Becker and Prof. Aya Soika, visited the city as part of their Berlin: Experiment in Modernity, starting on Friday, November 31st. The second group, initiated by ECLA of