Princeton sent me to Berlin last summer to study Critical Theory. I didn’t speak a word of German, had never taken a German department course before, and had only a vague impression of what the words “critical theory” even meant, but when I boarded my long-haul flight, I suspected that my experience in Berlin might alter how I saw the world. I was right.
In class, we began with art. We read Benjamin and Adorno and Horkheimer and discussed them thoroughly, both in our airy, sunny seminar room and over German breakfast fare in the dining hall. In class, we found the readings such fertile ground for expansion and debate that our professors resorted to listing the names of students queued up to give their thoughts in a long list that wound up and down over a yellow legal pad.
German breakfast for lunch in the Kreuzberg neighborhood with a friend from the program.
Outside of class, we began by learning to navigate the extensive public transport system. We took the daily activities the program gave us—tickets to concerts and plays, museum visits, guest lectures, and day trips—and expanded on them, tacking on vintage shopping trips before or long dinners after. We wandered the bright streets of the Mitte neighborhood, stopping in half-English-half-German bookstores, photo booths (“Photoautomats”), and trendy coffee shops where I learned how to order a matcha latte in German (“Kann ich einen Matcha haeben, bitte?”).
A Photoautomat in the Mitte neighborhood.
The city was perfectly suited to our course. Berlin, the subject of decades of political tug-of-war between global superpowers, teemed with local art with global legacies. A class favorite was the film Wings of Desire (1987), which we saw as a group at the historic Babylon Theatre in the city center; the film is an invisible angel’s view of a walled-off Berlin. We loved it so much that our TA arranged for us to see an exhibit at Berlin’s Bode-Museum on angels and the city. Klee’s “Angelus Novus” was the centerpiece, and happened to be an important muse to Walter Benjamin—a Berlin local and the first writer we read in the course.
By the end of the course, I had worked hard to try on the critical perspectives of various important thinkers. I could borrow a little of their genius by understanding their frameworks for interpretation and applying them to the fascinating art scene and culture of Berlin, to which we were exposed daily. I had spent weeks with an unforgettable group of classmates who brought perspectives from across disciplines and cultures.
The TV tower from Mitte; my program group waiting for a train in Berlin black.
In that first reading, Benjamin wrote of a kind of artwork in which detail “carried the idea and was liquidated with it.” On our last night in Berlin, I found myself agreeing with him. The concept of Princeton in Berlin—to develop a skill set for thinking critically about media and power—was carried not by the experience of the class as described in the Course Overview, but by details like the summer rain we walked under at the palace Sans Souci, or a warm pretzel on the S-Bahn at 4 A.M., or laughing with program friends at a café by the Spree. These moments, bound together by Princeton’s programming, left me with an unforgettable, enriching experience of Berlin.