This innovative, experimental program has been organized in conjunction with the FSU Honors Program, the Center for the Advancement of Human Rights and several academic departments. The program offers an integrated nine-credit broadly inter-disciplinary experience for which students can register in a combination of three credit courses offered by several departments including History, Religion, Social Sciences, Language, Humanities, and Criminology. However students register, the core experience is basically the same. The program focuses on the lasting impact the Nazi and Socialist eras had on Western and Eastern Europe with a focus on Germany, the Czech Republic, Holland and Poland. While the Holocaust and its victims and subsequent socialist atrocities are important topics, the program’s primary goals are to understand and explain the behavior of those who carried out these atrocities as well as those who enabled them or stood by and did nothing.
The impact the Nazi era had both in Western Europe and on the socialist regimes which emerged in Eastern Europe is the secondary topic focus. Thus, the examination is not only of what happened in the Nazi years, but also on the way various shared collective memories of totalitarian regimes have been constructed. The means of understanding these events are based upon a broad interdisciplinary analysis that include academic histories, witness testimony, eyewitness accounts, literature, publicly erected memorials and museums, photography and film. Interdisciplinary perspective focuses on “memory,” the on-going and sometimes troubled ways in which succeeding generations construct shared cultural understanding about the past, and on how memories of totalitarian regimes impact upon current human rights issues in this region and globally.
The program will be centered in Berlin, but we will start in Prague, CZ. There will be two travel periods of approximately one week each, during which students will visit cities such as Nuremberg, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Warsaw, and Krakow.
Eligibility
Students in the FSU Honors Program will find this program of particular interest, especially those who are International Affairs, Religion, Humanities, Language and Criminology majors.
Housing
Students stay in hotels throughout the trip.
Areas of Study:
•Criminology
•Holocaust Studies
•Human Rights
•Humanities
•German
•International Relations
•Religion
