For most students and faculty, including myself, the ECLA community lies outside of their home country. We live in a state of which we are not citizens. Nonetheless many of us retain an undiminished concern for the political conditions of the country where we were born. In such a situation, addressing the question of what
An Evening with Euclid
On November 16th, students and faculty, led by Michael Weinman, came together for a seminar on Euclid’s Elements which was a supplementary seminar to the Academy Year core course on Plato’s Republic. The discussion aimed to relate Euclid’s propositions to the concept of the divided line found in Book VI of the Republic and Socrates’ suggested educational
Stories from ECLA’s first BA Students
Not only will they be the first class to graduate with a bachelor’s degree from the Value Studies programme in June 2012, but they are students who have played a decisive part in shaping ECLA’s academic culture. The present article will deal with the personal, individual—both unique and shared—experiences of three seniors, who talked to
The Immeasurable Weight of the Void
On Friday 21 October at the Brücke Museum in Berlin, ECLA faculty member Aya Soika presented, in collaboration with the executors of his estate, her catalogue of and commentary upon the work of Max Pechstein. The results were no light production. Weighing in at 8.4 kilograms, with 1188 pages and 1340 illustrations, the labour-intensive project
Analogue Photography Workshop with Joe Dilworth
A group of ECLA students dedicated the weekend of November 5th and 6th to the Analogue Photography Workshop led by Joe Dilworth, a British photographer who currently works and lives in Berlin. He showed us how to use ECLA’s darkroom along with the analogue cameras the College has bought in the course of the last
The Great Wave
On October 28th, a group of ECLA students got the chance to visit the temporary exhibition of works by the famous Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai at Martin-Gropius-Bau. On display were 440 works out of his oeuvre of 30,000 which were produced over a period of 70 years. His prolific career seemed to be matched by
Heinrich Meier: A Political Confrontation
On the evening of October 27th ECLA was honored with a lecture by the highly-respected German scholar Heinrich Meier. Meier has written extensively on Carl Schmitt, a controversial political theorist whose work has received increasing attention in the past three decades. In the lead-up to Meier’s lecture, Schmitt and his theories emerged as a topic of
ECLA Autumn Excursion: A Reflection
Every autumn term, after the first three palpitating weeks, the ECLA community departs on an annual excursion. And since beginnings are about exploration and searching, every year the autumn trip has a different destination, revealing the sometimes hidden marvels of Germany, bit by bit, town by town. On October 21st, students, along with the members