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

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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

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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

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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

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Steinbeck and Spinoza

When I last went back home, I experienced something quite unique. My parents, having grown older, are now looking forward to an altogether different period in their lives. All my siblings, having settled in different parts of the world, have left the house rather empty. It was once a house where the five of us

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