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Germany/Austria 2007 Archives

September 9, 2007
September 27, 2007
November 13, 2007
December 7, 2007

December 7, 2007

It's hard to believe that in one week, the 2007 Germany/Austria program will draw to a close!  For the last month and a half we have been located in Vienna, Austria, where we have taken intensive courses -- in German! -- in Art History, European Politics, and Austrian Literature.  Two of those courses, Politics and Literature, are located at the America Institute, which is nestled in a street right beside the Vienna State Opera House
(see above).

The Art History course is taught in varied locations -- the city is our classroom, basically!  (Although we do also use a classroom in a church across the city.)  In the photograph above, we are learning about the baroque architecture inside the National Library of the Imperial Palace.

A couple of weekends ago, we took a weekend excursion to Prague, the capital of the neighboring Czech Republic.  What a beautiful city!  Along with learning about important developments in Prague that led to the fall of the Iron Curtain, we also enjoyed what for many of us was our first experience in an opera -- seeing The Magic Flute performed in the Prague State Opera House.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next week we celebrated Thanksgiving together with our host families, some of our professors, generations of former Earlham students and Earlham language assistants who are now living in Vienna, and one of their newborn children, who could end up being the next generation of Earlham students! It was a lot of work, but it was certainly a lot of fun!

 

 

In the next week, we will wrap up what has been an intensive six weeks in Austria, filled with lots of new information about a new country, lots of new cultural experiences, and hopefully a new perspective about the world and one's place in it.

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November 13

Brandenburg Gate and The Wall at Bernauer Strasse


We just finished our four weeks in Berlin, a city of around 4 million that is now the capital of reunited Germany, and a bustling metropolis that is still reconstructing itself after being divided into two cities and two countries for forty years.

We visited a documentation center on Bernauer Strasse, where the city has preserved part of the wall, in order to read and listen to first-hand
accounts of the effect the Berlin Wall had on the people who lived in this city.

 

 

 

 

We also took the opportunity to visit other cities outside of Berlin -- in this photo we are posing in front of a statue of Martin Luther and the reconstructed Frauenkirche in Dresden.  This church was destroyed by the allied bombing of Dresden during the Second World War and was only rebuilt in the last couple of years.

 

 

 

Speaking of Martin Luther... we also visited Wittenberg, where Martin Luther was said to have nailed his 95 theses to the door of the
Schlosskirche, which started the Protestant Reformation.  We also visited the Luther Museum which is located in the house where he was born.

 

 

 

 

Among other trips that we took, we visited Potsdam, seat of Sans Souci palace, where Frederick the Great ruled Prussia as one of the so-called "enlightened despots".  While we were at Potsdam we also visited the Cecilienhof, the villa where the allied powers -- Stalin, Churchill, Truman -- agreed to divide Germany into different occupation zones, and Berlin into different sectors.

 

 

 

Of course, most of our time we spent at the DID Language Institute in Berlin, where we all took intensive language classes as part of our preparation for the next stage of the program -- Vienna!  Where we will be taking classes in Art History, Politics and Literature -- all in German.

 

 

 

Before we left for our ten days of independent travel, we spent one last weekend together in Jena, a town in the formerly East German state of Turingia, where we stayed with host families and listened to important stories about East-West conflict, reunification, and what it means now 18 years after the wall has come down.  We visited Leipzig -- and heard a beautiful Motette in the cathedral where Bach played.  And on a very foggy morning we visited Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp, a somber place that leaves memories that are difficult to describe.  And finally we visited Weimar, the seat of German classicism, home of Goethe and Schiller and the architectural and artistic movement of the Bauhaus.  It was a moving closing to the German portion of the Germany-Austria program

More from Vienna later...

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September 27, 2007

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September 9, 2007
Our first update from the Germany Austria Program.

It’s hard to imagine, but the first two weeks of the Germany/Austria Program have already gone by.  And what a blur!

In our first week we plunged into an intensive schedule of events to orient us to the city of Marburg as well as to immerse ourselves into the Program’s culture course in a hands-on and experiential way.

On Monday we all participated in a “Stadtralley,” a combination treasure-hunt and information session, where we wandered around the city of Marburg, getting our bearings for the grocery stores, the cafeteria at the Philips University, the city library, the old-town, the public transportation and the Elisabethkirche, one of the oldest Gothic cathedrals in Germany.

The subject of Tuesday’s tour was the history of Jewish life in Marburg, looking at what historians know about Jewish life in Medieval Germany all the way through the Holocaust and postwar German-Jewish life.  We visited the recently excavated remains of Marburg’s Medieval synagogue, and we saw the memorial site of the 19th century synagogue that was destroyed in 1938 on Kristallnacht ­ the Night of the Broken Glass.  And finally we visited the new synagogue that was just opened in Marburg and listened to a talk from the Chairman of the Marburg Jewish Congregation.

On Wednesday we visited Hessenpark, an open-air museum that attempts to recreate traditional houses and traditional agriculture that were typical in Hesse, one of the sixteen Federal States in the Federal Republic of Germany.  The park uses traditional building methods to rebuild half-timbered houses, barns and churches that have been relocated to this park, and they also use heirloom varieties of grain, and heirloom breeds of animals to try to imitate the kind of agriculture that was traditionally practiced in this region.

Thursday we took a trip to Amöneburg, a small town near Marburg that was ruled by the bishops of Mainz since the Middle Ages and was for a long time contested by the Counts of Thuringia because of its unique high vantage point.  Below the town is the Brücker Mühle, one of the oldest still-functioning grain mills in Germany ­ first mentioned in 1248 and still in use to this day.  We visited the mill, where we saw the miller demonstrate his process to us first-hand, and we also enjoyed a traditional Hessische Kaffee and Kuchen (coffee and cake) outside the mill’s kitchen.  Then we went up to the remains of the Amöneburg fort and heard more about the history of the region (and also really grasped the power of that vantage point ­ although for us its power lay more in the beauty of the countryside).

On Friday we packed in a visit to the Saalburg, a reconstructed Roman fort, a visit to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, and a tour of the Mainz cathedral.  At the Saalburg, we saw the remains of the ancient Roman Limes ­ the dividing line between the Roman Empire and “the barbarian” lands, which the Romans called “Germania.”  At the museum in Mainz we witnessed ­ and participated in ­ a demonstration of the printing process using a printing press similar to the one Gutenberg invented.  We also had the privilege of viewing three copies of the original 1452 edition of the Gutenberg Bible ­ the first book printed with movable Roman type.  At the Mainz cathedral, we got a small taste of the art history course we will have in Vienna, as our guide explained to us the unique combination of Romanesque, Gothic, and Baroque styles that all coexist in this building.

Finally, on Sunday, we were invited to a Kräutermarkt ­ literally “herb market” ­ in Amönau, where the head of our language institute lives.  The Kräutermarkt offered more than just herbs:  There were traditional arts and crafts for sale, as well as snacks and refreshments.  The highlight of the day, however, since we are in Brothers Grimm territory, was a story teller who sold a hundred grams of story for one Euro.  However many grams of story we heard, it was definitely worth it!

And that was just the first week!  On the second week, our language classes began in earnest at the Speak + Write Institute in Marburg and the students began to collect information for the culture course using the mini-ethnography as their method.  And in just two more weeks we will be on our way to Berlin.

More later…

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