The Covid-19 emergency spurred a flurry of teaching innovations as higher education institutions turned to online or blended learning models, and as international collaborations have moved nearly entirely online. These circumstances inspired us to revisit the digital transatlantic seminar, “Germany 1945: History and Memory in Germany after WWII,” taught by Höhn in Spring 2018 to a group of seven Vassar students (Brill-Carlat among them) and six advanced high-school students—between the ages of 17 and 22—who had come to Berlin as asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The course dealt with history and memory of World War II and the Holocaust in Germany. As such, it reflected a core commitment of the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education (CFMDE), founded by Höhn at Vassar and partners (Bard, Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, the New School, and the Council for European Studies): the importance of providing opportunities for our undergraduate students to learn with and from refugees and displaced individuals if they are to understand and tackle the global, multidimensional challenges of forced migration. As institutional resistance to digital teaching necessarily vanished with the Covid-19 pandemic in Spring 2020 and the direction of future online-learning policies is up for debate, we revisit the 2018 class to examine lessons learned and how this project points the way to another digital venture: digitally “hosting” displaced scholars at liberal arts campuses.

At Vassar College, online learning was frowned upon as contrary to the college’s liberal arts tradition until Covid-19 forced faculty and administrators to shift course dramatically. Höhn had managed on two occasions to overcome this institutional resistance to virtual education. In 2005 and 2008, she taught a class on “Holocaust History and Memory in the U.S., Germany, and Israel” that brought together Vassar students and German students from the Department of Jewish Studies at Potsdam University and the Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum in Potsdam, Germany.Footnote 1 Those two classes were rewarding for all involved, but they were also expensive, elaborate endeavors that would have been impossible without generous financial support from Vassar alums. None of our schools was equipped to facilitate this unusual class at the time, making it necessary to rely on the one video-conferencing space each school had, largely reserved for administrative purposes. Through video calls, the German and American instructors taught a weekly multidisciplinary seminar. The class also included in-person visits, first from the American students to Berlin, for two weeks. A few weeks later, the Berlin students came to visit Vassar during their semester break to visit sites of memorialization and research related to the Holocaust.

The virtual course in Spring 2018 was a way to use technological advances since 2008 to capture the spirit and excitement of these previous seminars, in service of two main objectives. First, we strove to achieve our goal of creating a forced migration curriculum (through the CFMDE) that asks Vassar students to learn with and from displaced students. Second, we wanted to gauge whether such a class could help young students with a forced migration background to advance their educations (and English skills) and gain a better sense of their new home country: by understanding Germans’ concern with their country’s Nazi past and why that past is so indelibly imprinted onto the cityscape of Berlin. Later in the chapter, we present feedback and reactions from the students, as well as lessons learned by the instructor, to evaluate our success on this count.

The course was also inspired by the belief that education and scholarly exchange have long been building blocks of democratic renewal and preserving democratic traditions. For example, American universities were important to Germany’s reconstruction after WWII, and institutions such as the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) University in Munich employed hundreds of U.S. and refugee scholars as well as those who had survived the Holocaust, to teach thousands of Holocaust survivors and refugees in the aftermath of WWII.Footnote 2 In this spirit of learning together, we were inspired to find creative ways to expose American students to refugee/migrant knowledges in a class environment that stressed learning with and from each other, especially after the Trump administration’s dramatic curtailment of the refugee program and its assault on asylum laws.

The Course

The course introduced American students and displaced students in Berlin to the long process of what Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or the “coming to terms with their past,” and to how the memorialization and commemoration of the murderous Nazi past and the Holocaust, in particular, are embedded in the cityscape of Berlin. Given the situations of the refugee students, who had escaped war-torn societies, the class also mobilized two of the big lessons of postwar German history—that rebuilding a country after war is possible, and that there is a precedent in Germany of welcoming large numbers of refugees in the past—to educate and energize the students in Berlin and Poughkeepsie alike.

We settled on doing a pilot in Berlin for two reasons. Berlin offered the necessary stable Internet environment for the class, as Consortium member Bard College Berlin made a classroom available to us. In addition, we knew we had an engaged partner in the German student-founded Schüler Treffen Flüchtlinge (STF: Students Meeting Refugees) initiative, founded by Joshua Kriesmann in 2015 when he was in high school.Footnote 3 STF had been a frequent collaborator in our own students’ efforts on behalf of refugees.

Not surprisingly, teaching such a class presented numerous challenges, given the circumstances that displaced students face: recent trauma of war, dangerous flight, displacement, uncertainty of asylum status, interrupted education, navigating two new languages (German and English) at the same time, and trying to make home anew in a foreign land. With this in mind, we decided early on that this could not be a full-semester class (the students in Germany attended this class on top of their regular course load). We chose the format of a six-week “pop-up” class. The syllabus was adapted from a course taught by Höhn at Vassar in years past.

After discussing the teaching goals with STF leadership, designated mentors Helen Schmitz and Gina Kriesmann selected refugee students at a Berlin Gymnasium whose English was appropriate for the sort of exchange we had in mind. They also helped the students (Ali, Nagibullah, Mohammad, Hani, Bassam, and SamFootnote 4), who lived in different parts of the city, to travel to the Bard campus located in Pankow, an outer borough of Berlin. They also provided them with additional academic coaching. Class was held once a week for two hours via Zoom with the full cohort of Vassar students (Matthew, Mojan, Zoë, Sabrina, William, Sasha, and Joan). In addition, tandems of one Vassar student and one Berlin student video-chatted once a week outside of class.

Aware of the structural asymmetries between the Vassar students and the displaced students in Berlin, Höhn raised money from alums and friends to purchase iPads for the Berlin-based students to use for the one-on-one video calls (STF kept the iPads for use in future classes). The iPads were also central to another component of the class. Every week, the students in Berlin digitally brought Vassar students to designated sites of commemoration in Berlin’s rich landscape of memorial culture: the Holocaust memorial, the Berlin Wall memorial, Topography of Terror, the book burning memorial on August Bebelplatz, and the Neue Wache. In that manner, the Berlin-based students were able to share their particular knowledge of being in a space instead of just reading about it or seeing images of it—bringing specialized knowledge to class discussions that the Vassar students would otherwise not have access to, thereby unsettling the humanitarian hierarchies often embedded in nominally “equal” exchanges between privileged Westerners and displaced people from the Global South. For the new Berliners (as well as for the STF mentors), it was also a way to explore and discover their city from a wholly different perspective.

We quickly discovered which concepts translated readily to the transnational format, and which required innovation to fit different levels of educational preparedness. Throughout, Höhn engaged in discussions with our STF partners in Berlin and the two groups of students themselves, to gauge their progress. One particular concern of Höhn’s was whether students who might have been exposed to war and violence could be re-traumatized by the topic at hand. She did, however, want to share historical footage of Europe’s destroyed cities after the war. After a long conversation, the Berlin mentors (who consulted with the students) assured her that the students were fine with such footage. If anything, they were puzzled by Höhn’s suggestion of a trigger warning, but in the end Höhn gave one to the whole class.

Höhn wanted to teach the class like a typical Vassar seminar-style class with lots of student engagement, and recruited the students as partners in ensuring the success of the course. Both the students at Vassar and in Berlin understood that this was a pilot intended to figure out the nuts and bolts of such an exchange, with an eye to carrying out similar classes with students in refugee camps and around the world (the Vassar students who enrolled did so under the title “Building the Digital Classroom”). Neither Vassar nor the instructor had a Zoom account at this point (oh, the innocence!), and we struggled mightily learning the new technology after the college bought us an institutional subscription. The Vassar students received college credit for the class, but the Berlin cohort did not because they were not enrolled in a college. We hope to run credit-bearing classes in the future.

On a week-to-week basis, Höhn altered her typical class rhythm in order to help the Germany-based students who had had their educations disrupted, were new to the liberal arts college model, and were being asked to work academically in a third (or fourth or fifth) language. Structurally, that meant that assigned readings had to be reduced. In addition, Höhn prepared PowerPoint presentations with text, maps, and images that students and their mentors could consult before class. This helped them prepare in advance for an English-language discussion of complex topics. If memorials had inscriptions, Höhn provided both the German and English language texts. Historical footage illuminated for the students the utter destruction of Berlin in 1945, but also gave a glimpse of the hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons living in the rubble of the city. Historical film footage also brought home to the students the reality of the Berlin Wall, of which, thirty years after its destruction, only a few small sections remain standing as memorials.

Bilateral Learning

The class was supposed to expose all of us to new insights, and we were not disappointed. Historical footage sparked different responses in the two groups of students, but also offered new educational perspectives for Höhn. Watching the clips of the destroyed city of Warsaw, and then Berlin—to make clear that the fighting was started by German aggression—was a sobering moment for the American students. Despite their perceived “familiarity” with the history of WWII due to popular culture, few Americans understand the full scope of prolonged carpet bombing or intense ground warfare. The Berlin cohort watched the footage of Warsaw and Berlin quietly; perhaps the sight of flattened buildings and deserted, rubble-strewn streets was familiar enough that they could grasp what must have happened. However, when Höhn showed twenty-first-century photographs of the same blocks and landmarks in Berlin that had been pummeled by bombs during WWII, they were astounded to see how the city had recovered. They, like the Vassar students, internalized the calamity of the bombings, but they, perhaps more than the Americans, were heartened that a new and thriving metropolis could arise out of such destruction. If Berlin could be resurrected, why not Aleppo, or Mosul, or Kabul? “We can do this too,” said one student from Afghanistan. Another said it made her feel more at home in Berlin, and gave her confidence that she could rebuild her own life in a rebuilt city.

If one lesson from the Munich University after WWII is that “international contact and collaboration,” especially in humanist-oriented projects, “were needed to build a sturdy post-war peace,” then cross-border partnerships grounded in the liberal arts are still necessary to establish global comity.Footnote 5 We also need these partnerships to ensure that displaced people can equip themselves with the intellectual and technical tools necessary to lead reconstruction efforts in their homelands.

Other class sessions similarly prompted both groups of students to reach different conclusions. The fact that the Allies converted former concentration camps or SS barracks into refugee and displaced persons (DP) camps for survivors after WWII shocked the Vassar students. The Berlin students, more accustomed to a wide variety of shelters—and unburdened by American mythology about the end of WWII and instantaneous “liberation”—were less surprised. They responded pragmatically to the use of such emergency shelters.

The visual memory culture around the Holocaust that has emerged in much of the West did not evoke the same resonances among our Berlin-based students. For example, when we looked at the memorial at the Dachau concentration camp, they did not “read” the abstract depiction of tortured and starved bodies intertwined in barbed wire—one student saw guns, another saw bones, and a third saw people fighting each other. The lesson for the Vassar students was that the Western visual vocabulary of the Holocaust in which they have been immersed is not universal.

The Berlin-based students had a wealth of knowledge, acquired from their schooling and life experiences, that the Vassar students did not have—and vice versa. Sometimes it was a matter of explaining certain American English idioms, but occasionally the situation required a more intensive, deeply rewarding process of bridging the gaps between the two frames of reference. The Berlin-based students had fresh perspectives on how to memorialize mass suffering and destruction, while at the same time moving on and healing societal wounds. As one Vassar student put it, “It’s easy for me to sit in twenty-first-century America and chastise 1950s Germany for papering over the full extent of the country’s crimes in order to rebuild first. But my partner in Berlin told me that he wants new schools, rather than punishments for former ministers, to be the priority when he returns to a peaceful Syria.” This Syrian student, faced with the task of authoring an unwritten future, changed the way the class approached history. This U.S. student, in turn, was jolted out of the comfort of hindsight and invited to reconsider the past and the received wisdom of liberal American circles, with a fresh perspective. Exposure to new and challenging perspectives is an essential part of education, and this project succeeded in offering that to students on both sides of the Atlantic.

In a reflection written at the end of the class, Brill-Carlat wrote that the one-on-one conversations with his partner, Ali, provided many of the most productive and enjoyable moments of the class. “Deviating slightly from the content of the assigned readings,” he remarked, “led to unexpected and really fruitful conversations about, for example, the role that sports can play in healing or aggravating divisions between (and within) towns and even nations.” At its most successful, the structure of the class allowed both groups of students to learn the course material together—and also to strike out on their own and learn from one another individually.

Lessons Learned

The Vassar students agreed that the one-on-one conversations were highlights of the course, and that hectic schedules—especially the demands on the Berliners’ time from school, legal proceedings, and other obligations—made it difficult to connect regularly. In a future iteration of the class, we agreed that a series of shared assignments might bring the two groups even closer together: perhaps a video, zine, or website could become a culminating project. Having taught digitally for over a year, we now know that a blend of synchronous and asynchronous activities and assignments might help relieve the scheduling burden on both groups of students and reduce screen fatigue. Our 2018 struggles with Zoom, which we thought at the time was an outlandish software that would never catch on, made us more nimble in 2020.

Our class prefigured 2020 in another way as well: Vassar purchased laptops and Internet subscriptions for low-income students when the pandemic first hit, just as we had to fundraise for iPads to be able to learn with and from the Berlin-based students. Then, as now, successful virtual learning requires firm commitments and investments from colleges to ensure equitable access. It also requires a less rigid sense of what is doable and what is not. As colleges and universities tout new community-engaged and social-justice-oriented curricula, institutions need to be more flexible with teaching times, open up policies on course credit (or certificates), and provide institutional incentives for taking on the hard work of developing new teaching models to fit current world circumstances and to respond to student calls to be more engaged global citizens. With this in mind, our goal is to allow students like the Berliners to earn course credit and/or certificates for taking classes with Vassar students.

Conclusion

Today, as Americans and people all over the world contend with the corporatization of the university, programs such as the one discussed here can return faculty and students to the core principles of the academy: namely, to foster a free exchange of ideas, and also to be a place of refuge.Footnote 6 Though we did not know it at the time, the Spring 2018 pilot course illustrated a model that preserves the emphasis on bilateral learning from in-person exchanges while adapting to politics and pandemic alike. Now that students and professors alike are gaining proficiency in online pedagogy, and now that colleges rethink their former, often restrictive, policies on digital learning, we offer our reflections on this course as a possible template for these new circumstances. Lest our institutions reflexively snap back to the old ways without considering what we can learn from the past two-plus years, we contend that the model we have described is one that colleges would do well to preserve even as Covid-19-related travel restrictions have largely ended, as it allows professors to bring their students together with students in other cities and around the world for shared learning.

In the past few years, we have learned that a whole day of classes on Zoom can be dispriting, but we also learned to be more gutsy and experimental. Even as the world returns to in-person teaching, we urge institutions to consider running the occasional class using the model we offer here, and to recognize and reward instructors for this kind of pedagogical creativity. Carefully planned digital courses are one way for colleges to stick to an essential value of a liberal arts education—mutually beneficial exchange of ideas—and to remain nimble in an age that demands constant innovation and rethinking of institutional assumptions.

We must take care not to reflexively go back to the old ways without considering how our institutions might have been needlessly exclusionary. The old ways went out the window long ago, along with in-person concerts, conferences, and department meetings. Out of necessity, our institutions have already done the unthinkable—the impossible, the verboten—by erecting tent classrooms, shunting classes online, rejiggering the academic calendar on the fly, and more. The period of forced experimentation in 2020–2021, and our experience working with the Berlin students, prompts us to keep brainstorming: why not bring that same sort of innovation to consider how to brave the morass of time zones and expand our offerings to displaced students abroad? Why not employ scholars trapped in camps or displaced somewhere across the globe to teach digitally until they can return home or receive asylum? We have a tremendous opportunity now to hold each entrenched practice in our institutions up to the light to see if it still has a place in our rebuilt and more equity-minded ways of conducting teaching and research.