I currently teach in two of the Freie Universität’s international programmes, Fubis and the European Studies Programme.
In 2023 I developed a brand new course for both programmes currently entitled ‘Rebels, Radicals, Revolutionaries: Resistance and Protest in Post-War Europe 1953 – 1989’. In this course I examine the emergence of mainly youth-led resistance and protest movements in post-World War II Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and attempt to understand their origins, their meaning and their effect on the societies in which they occurred. From the so-called Baader-Meinhof Gang to ‘Soviet Hippies’, from Berlin 1953 to Prague 1968, one of the exciting aspects of the course for me is that it opens up an exploration of the worlds of the Eastern Bloc, and explores resistance movements on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Key to this course is the work of Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, and their attempts to grapple with the meaning of the Totalitarian hell leashed upon our world by Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. Both authors are astoundingly relevant to the complex problems facing our world today. Both had the courage to face the questions raised by the demonic hell that of Totalitarian dreams and lived reality. If I’m using emotive and un-academic terms to describe these things, it is because polite or tight descriptions leave us utterly disconnected from the horror of what we must face when we face this history. Students in my course are encouraged to do just that: face this history, and those caught into its terrible wake.
In 2024 I will continue to teach ‘Twentieth Century Berlin: People, Places, Words’, my beloved and now well established course that situates Berlin at the epicentre of the defining catastrophes the twentieth century, including the First World War, the horror of the Nazi era that resulted in the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the long grubby Cold War that saw the city physically divided between capitalism and communism in an embodiment of the conflict between the American and Soviet worlds. This course also explores the boundary breaking art, progressive politics and anarchic subcultures that thrived and died in the furnace of this constantly changing social, political and economic turmoil.
For more information click here.
Below is a little blog I wrote about 2025
Autumn Class of 2025 for the Freie Universität: This class impressed me with their deep desire to understand the arguments of Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno and Jeffrey Herf in the context of genuinely frightening questions about whether or not the USA is descending into Authoritarianism.
I taught 3 other semesters in 2025, but as the heat of political turmoil in the world began to boil up our classrooms, it was this class that affected me the most with their passion and intelligence. They showed their maturity by recognising that there are no easy answers.
Each and every class I teach now challenges me in ways I could never had imagined being challenged in my early teaching at that far distance university at the foot of Africa. In 2025, as greedy oligarchs fold up most of the world’s wealth and then sell their tawdry attention destroying shit back to us, and as we give up our very thoughts and our sense of what it means to be autonomous humans …..then I find hope amongst my students, who for all the stereotypes about the Gen Z, are also the bravest kids I’ve ever taught, with the very clear eyed and unvarnished views of a generation facing existential crises on a daily basis. The dreamers and the doers are still out there, that I trust, despite the dark days we find ourselves in.
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Rebels, Radicals, Revolutionaries class Spring 2024 – learning Berlin in this year of rage and loss around the world.
Lauren van Vuuren 