I currently teach in two of the Freie Universität’s international programmes, Fubis and the European Studies Programme.
In 2023 I’ve developed a brand new course for both programmes currently entitled ‘The Spectre of Revolution: 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 opens up an exploration of the worlds of the Eastern Bloc, and explores resistance movements on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
In 2023 I will continue to teach ‘Twentieth Century Berlin: People, Places, Words’, my beloved and now well established course that situates Berlin at the epicenter of the defining catastrophes of 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.
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Lauren van Vuuren 