The Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany) has the pleasure to offer to you an International Summer University courses on "Watching Watching: Tracking Surveillance in German Media Culture" The International Summer University will take place from July 21st through August 17th 2001. The language of instruction is English. Course description: While the proliferation of surveillance seems like a thoroughly contemporary phenomenon, closer examination reveals that it has a long and complicated history dating well back into the 18th-century. Indeed, any substantive analysis of the complex issues surrounding the threats to certain conceptions of privacy posed by the development of new media from CCTV to cyberspace must first explore in detail the development of these questions across cultural and media history. This interdisciplinary seminar will focus on the significant role played by questions of surveillance in 20th-century German-language culture, from Fritz Lang's paranoid Dr. Mabuse films of the Weimar period to Michael Klier's 1984 classic "Der Riese" [The Giant], a feature-length film composed entirely of footage from surveillance cameras. Our investigation of what we will come to recognize as a distinctive aesthetics of surveillance in German media history -best captured in Friedrich Dürrentmatt's 1986 novella "Der Auftrag oder Vom Beobachten des Beobachters der Beobachter" [The Assignment, or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers]-will take us from film and literature to questions of architecture and urbanism, from Stasi bureaucratics to the uniquely German debates about the ethics of the so-called "reality soap" entitled "Big Brother." This, in turn will allow us to better understand what is at stake in the surveillant dynamics which have recently come to dominate much blockbuster cinema from "Enemy of the State" to "The Truman Show". This class will be instructed by Thomas Y. Levin who teaches courses in philosophy, media and intellectual and cultural history and theory at the German Department at Princeton University. The tuition for this course is DM 1,200.--. There is an additional one-time registration fee of DM 150.--. Besides the above mentioned course we offer 17 other fully-credited courses covering topics on Berlin, Germany, and Europe. More information on this course and the International Summer University in general can be obtained from the Internet at http://www.fu-berlin.de/summeruniversity. Contact person: Mr. Jens Westerfeld M.A. Freie Universität Berlin Abt. IV Kaiserswerther Str. 16-18 14195 Berlin Germany Tel.: +49 30 838 73 445 Fax: +49 30 838 73 444 Email: [log in to unmask] Please visit the FUBiS web site on the internet: http://www.fu-berlin.de/summeruniversity ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]