PSYCH/HIST: Magic Mountain

Course Details

Preferred majors for this course: Psychology, History, English, Art, Political Science, International Relations It isn't a story spoiler to note that mortality is a fixed fact of the human experience. We all die. The curious thing about the absolute truth of our mortality is how little work we put into processing what the certainty of death can mean to our lives as individuals or as a community. Go to any cemetery and look at a tombstone. What matters most in what you see? One thing. The dash that separates the year someone was born from the year when they died. It is their dash. Their life. Who were they and how did they use their time? This course has ambitious and exacting goals. Together in Vienna, Berlin and at the Auschwitz Extermination Camp Site, we will use Social Psychology, History, Literature and Art as our daily tools to explore what famous and average people from the past have endured and triumphed over during the pivotal moments of their lives. We will teach in front of an infamous plaster-cast death mask in Vienna, on a day when we will also meet the ghost of Sigmund Freud in the museum where he founded psychoanalysis. Similarly, we will visit the museum of Judaism on a day when we explore the positive psychology of Viktor Frankl--a Jewish Psychologist who was himself deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis--in his former home and clinic. And then on the day we leave Vienna, we will travel together to Auschwitz, where we will have a field-school day to explore a place where the greatest crime against humanity every occurred. How have European conceptions of death and the meaning of life changed over time and through the experiences of trauma, death and survival that modern lives have featured? From overarching questions about hope, loss, bereavement and resilience, we will explore the salient question of what each of us can do in our lives to make meaning and connection from the challenges and opportunities we will face. The German writer Thomas Mann wrote about how life and death were a kind of "magic mountain." In this class, we will climb that metaphorical mountain together each day, and from its summit we will see new meanings in who we are in society and in ourselves. 3 Credits in Psychology or History