things to check out online for Berlin group

Here are some things to checkout online. Some will be better if you speak German, but some you will be able to understand without German. Most of these have multiple videos. Viel Spaß!

Sesamstrasse:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=4HjycnhU5yk

Verstehen Sie Spaß:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dtFMylC41VU

Commercials:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-pUPsAcGndE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_FFaOya5Nw&feature=related

http://youtube.com/watch?v=pjILGORTVeQ

Strange things that Germans like:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=v1wG9g1wjSA

I think that's all I've got for now. If you want more, let me know!

the perfect topic seems to be just beyond reach...

Ich bin schon wieder an der Arbeit, und ich weiß wirklich nicht, was ich machen soll. Mich für ein Project zu entscheiden ist sehr schwer. Ich habe schon vieles gemacht, und ich habe eine gute Idee von dem, was ich nicht machen will. Dankmäler sind nicht so interessant, und wir haben sie in Deutsch 322 schon besprochen. Die will auch nichts mit der Mauer zu tun haben. Ich habe schon einen Aufsatz über sie geschrieben, und sie langweilt mich jetzt. Vielleicht machen ich etwas mit den Türken. Sie sind neu, und das könnte vielleicht interesstant sein.

Alright, now it's time to get serious. When thinking about a project topic, sometimes my German just comes out. Don't worry though; nothing to important is in that section and I'll hopefully pinpoint some interesting things in this blog.

Picking a topic and committing to it for the next several months in a little bit daunting. I've already been in a class about Berlin's memorial culture and depiction of memory, so I'd like to stray away from that. The wall is another thing that would allow for a million questions and answers, but after spending all of last quarter writing about how and why it came down, I don't think I could talk to someone who wanted to keep it or put it back up without laughing. I just don't think they'd get it.

So right now I have two big ideas that are floating around in my head, both of which involve the immigrant population, but at this point I’m not sure how feasible one of them would be. I would like to focus on the Turks in Germany’s social system and their ability to integrate. Rather than focus on something like head scarves, I would like to focus on the school system as a whole. How has the dramatic increase in non-Germans influences in the school system affected the population? Has this sped the imbalance that already threatened the system or slowed its demise?

How do Berliner’s plan to fix their school system and what would an ideal system look like?

One of the other questions that interests me is the effect the Turks are having on the German language. Most commonly when a large migration of population occurs, the language is dramatically changed. Berliners take great pride in their dialect and post signs throughout the city about how to “pronounce” things correctly. Have the Turks had any influence on the German dialect spoken in Berlin? Have they refused to German and what effect has that had on Germans and Turks? How is this reflected in the cityscape? What Turkish words (Döner) have been accepted as German, even though the people have not been? This is an interesting project, but I don’t know who feasible it will be. I’m sure that I would have to consult some Linguistics professors. This project would be great, because I’m thinking about doing German linguistics for a master’s degree, but that’s way off in the Future!

I would also be interested in doing something with the German neo-Nazi party, but I’m not sure what. When I was in Germany, there was supposed to be a neo-Nazi rally and it just ended being a huge citywide protest, which was interesting. I would like to know what average Germans think of this party and what their platform is. I’d also be interested in meeting some of their voters.

Here are some pictures from the Tuebingen "neo-Nazi rally" July 2007.

That’s all for now!

Spät ist besser als nie..

Alright, I apparently dropped the ball on the blog about the ballet.

We went to see "A Midsummer night Dream" about a few or so ago. At first I was a little skeptical. I've always found Shakespeare very interesting and I really enjoy his puns and plays on words. I thought that a lot of what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare would be lost without the words. To my delight, the dancers performance was amazing and captured all of the important aspects of the characters and the relationships between them.

The only thing that I really noticed a lack of was names. For most of the performance, this didn't seem to be a problem. Something that seems so important to us in our daily lives, we can do without. That is until the second act, when a strange couple appeared, danced beautifully and had nothing to do with the story. This was a little confusing for everyone and upset me. This beautiful performance without words or the need for words suddenly lost its charm. These people were obviously connected to each other, but had nothing to do with the rest of the story. It seemed to take away from the validity of dance as a medium of communication, which is a real tragedy.

Overall I really enjoyed the performance. I am amazed that people are able to move so gracefully and convey so much without words. I would never be able to such things. I really liked the costumes. None of the costumes were over done and I felt that the dancers really need to fill their roles, the costumes didn't do all of the work for them. This was a very good experience and I would like to go again.

Week two

Ok, so there's a lot to talk about from this weeks material, and I of course put it off until the night before. Stupid me. This might be a long one, so bear with me.

Because I just finished up the readings in Ghost of Berlin, I shall start there. Overall I thought it was a very interesting discussion of the development of Berlin and the different phases that the city went through as it was pulled apart by various external forces (war, Hitler, the separation of East & West.) It was really interesting to read about the scale of buildings that Hitler had intended to build and how that fit into his portrayal of a perfect German society. I think that Ladd really should have mentioned that Hitler wanted to rename the square in front of the Brandenburg gate (or one near it) to Adolf Hitler Platz. I think that would have really fit in with what Ladd was trying to say. I also wish that Ladd had talked about the building quality of the buildings that Hitler did build. Many were not properly designed, created with cheap materials, and simply fell apart. (I watched a history channel show it. Neat huh?)

As interesting as Ladd’s book is, I feel that his discussion of the Holocaust memorial was too simplified and missed many important points. I’ve looked through at the book of proposed memorials and I know that that well over 527 were submitted for the first competition, in fact thousands were submitted. I was also disappointed that he did not acknowledge the financial element connected to the winner of the first competition. It was suggested that Germans could sponsor names (of Jewish victims) to be written on the massive structure. Many people saw this as a way to escape dealing with the past by simply paying for redemption, which ultimately played a role in the demise of the design. I also disliked Ladd’s write off of the “Bus Stop” proposal as something anti-establishment or counter productive. I like the idea that memorials/monuments alleviate society of its responsibility to remember. I think that this idea is certainly true to some extent. We’ve essentially assigned memory a physical place, which encourages us to remember only when we’re at that specific spot. However, this was not a problem in the proposed Bus Stop! memorial. The fact that the memorial was attempting to have a basis in a genuine historical sight, wasn’t its main goal.

Well, I think that’s all that I’ve got about the book. (At least for now..)

I know that we’re supposed to talk about Seattle’s monuments and memorials, but to be honest with everyone; I don’t really know Seattle all that well. I’ll start off with a little differentiation. The word memorials is more directed towards that object that is being remember than the actual project that is being constructed. Memorials can take many shapes: days, books, festivals, etc. Monuments, as I understand them, are the physical things that are being use to memorialize a person or event. There are tons around the university. In fact, our big flag pole is a memorial to soldiers of World War I or maybe II, I’m not sure. Anyway, most people think about memorials as being sad, while monuments recall victories or heroic individuals.

I’m terrible at thinking of monuments in Seattle. They just seem to be so much more subtle to me. I would like to talk about Underground Seattle. This is the original construction of the city that eventually burnt down and was built over. In general, this part of Seattle’s history has literally been swept under everything else. There is a small museum like structure that gives tours that are over priced and not too excited, so the tradition lives on, but barely. I think this is an important part of Seattle’s history that should get more recognition, even though it was poorly planned and rat infested. I guess Seattle doesn’t want to admit exactly had terrible that early planning was.

One other thing that comes to mind about Seattle is our constant reference to the Native Americans who use to live here. Seattle has a lot of totem poles and seems to care about its native population, but I feel these obvious symbols help the people to ignore the deals of the past. (This doesn’t apply to Seattle alone.) Like it or not, the people of the United States did terrible things to Native Americans and have never really been forced to atone for it. I see the inclusion of Native American art and names in Seattle as a way of acknowledging their presence and their contributions to society without forcing the people of Seattle to see our own cruel treatment of them.

Rethinking thinking

At first, I was really excited by this article, but the more I read, the more I felt the need to question its methodology. I agree that we are not really born with specific analytical thinking skills and that we need to develop them. (That’s why I’m in college ;-). )The purpose of this article seems to be, to investigate the best way of furthering thinking skills and then to convey that to everyone. This follows from the idea that everyone has to develop these skills, because they are not inherent. Although I believe that intuition and “gut feelings” are important, this does not fit with this methodology. If we’re all supposed to be capable of learning how to think or improving our thinking skills, this seems nearly impossible. Gut feelings cannot be learned or taught. You can teach someone of their essential value and encourage them to follow those feelings, after all they might lead somewhere great, but if someone doesn’t have their own intuitions, there’s not much you can do about it. As for the idea that scientist don’t think in math or equations, I think I would generally agree. If anything, the human body is most capable of act based on perception. All of our senses allow us to communicate with the world, with or without math. Before the development of math, humanity had already achieved some of its more important things. Having a background in linguistics, the idea that language is not vital to the thought process is a little far fetched for me. You can have an idea that you can’t express in words, but the words eventually come or are created. Language is what we know of humanity and without being a non-communicative deaf blind person, or someone starved of language from birth, it’s impossible to know if man is capable of thought without language. Everything we perceive in the world, we ultimately define through language. But I still think that gut feelings are important.

Research 101

I haven’t had a chance to look through this as well as I would have liked. My computer is being kind of stupid (as usual). I shall go to the library and give it a good look over tomorrow, as I have to work in the morning. I had been to the library presentation called research 101 and it seems very similar, so I don't know how helpful it will be. We had to go to it for SIS 201 and wrote a research paper following these guidelines, and it help quite a bit.

After looking at research 101, I think my original assessment was right on. I think this is a great resource for people who don't really understand how to tackle a research paper or where to start, but I'm a little more advanced than it.

1st day of class and Composition One

Welcome to H A&S 397 B. Woo! Hertzlich Willkommen.

To be completely honest, I was a little bit afraid of what would happen on the first day. Being a German major and not an actor, I must say that a lot of the Viewpoints book went over my head. Jo-ha-kyu might as well have been ro-sham-bo. (That's rock paper scissors, just fyi.) The book also talked about working under short time limits, which didn't seem to insurmountable, except for the 15-20 things that it said could be incorporated into each composition. That just scared me a little. So alright, after the initial fright subsided, I was pleased with our compositions. I didn't think that mine was particularly impressive, but I wasn't very sure of myself. Hopefully I can work on this. I really like seeing all of the progressions through time that people incorporated. The idea to do a composition didn't even occur to me. Everyone in our group did a single event rather than a time progression, which was interesting, because they were common in all of the other groups. I also thought that it was interesting how much better I could understand the images after I heard the stories behind them. I'm not an art person, so interpretation is beyond my realm of understand. I also really enjoyed how different the stories behind the compositions were. It just really brought to my attention that such different people can be interested in the same things and create in such different ways.

I also really enjoyed Heidi's talk about the history of Berlin. I've been to Berlin to many of the places that she talked about and I never knew the history. I particularly enjoyed the parts about the wall and her brief mention of Hitler's bunker, which I have apparently stood on top up and didn’t even know!

I'm excited to see what we will do next time in class.

Time for a new adventure

Okay, so if anyone actually reads this blog, it's time that I let you know; I'm off on a new adventure. In Mid-August I will be heading to Berlin for a month. This is with a school program, that is focused on performing arts and culture. I'm very excited to have the opportunity to live in such a large vibrant city and to be able to perform in a way relevant to my studies.

We'll be staying in Berlin Mitte, which is the city center. Much different than Carnation, eh? These are something like what our apartments will look like.

http://www.nyu.edu/studyabroad/pdf/Berlin.Apartments.pdf

For the next few months, this blog will be used for my seminar before leaving for Berlin, so you might find that it has a different style. Sorry if that bothers you, but I can't mange two blogs at once. As most of you know, I can hardly do one at a time. Anyway, the class also has a blog if you'd like to check it out.

http://honorsinberlin2008.blogspot.com/

That's all for now.

Rachel