Description: This fall marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Empire. The wall was not made of bricks, but of reinforced concrete, and, no, the seminar is not about Pink Floyd. But we will use artistic material (movies, songs, literature) along with historic texts, to study the bricks (metaphorically) which made up the wall of Communism and the world it meant to contain, as well as the anatomy of the wall's crumbling.
Book: Just so you have something intriguing to read, I ask you to get the book ``Can the Soviet Union Survive until 1984'' by Andrei Amalrik (originally published in 1969). It should be available used at amazon, for below 10 bucks, in sufficient quantities. This book proved to have remarkably deep insight into the hidden fragility of the Soviet Union that would eventually allow the fall of the Berin Wall and the Iron Curtain. And it's not too long a read either.
You may also borrow the book from the library, and there is no specific edition needed. All I'd like you to have is the text (by default in English translation, but if you happen to read other languages, that would be fine, too.)
Course Contents: I plan to give some glimpses of the ideological premises of the Soviet system that was imposed over a large part of Europe after WW2. But it shouldn't be too dry: some of that stuff can be highlighted in underground jokes, in movies, or in poems or prose literature, in small historic detail events, much better than in long theoretical treatises. We'll see some of each of these.
You may not know how the Chattanooga Choo-Choo song sounded in East Berlin, and how it was poking fun at the ruling chieftain there, but you'll learn about it (and a translation will be provided). You may never have heard the love song for Magdalena (and what was between the lines), but I'll tell you. You may not care to read boring treatises about the philosophy of `dialectic materialism'. But a story about a food delivery related by the late Gorbachov advisor Galina Starovoitova illuminates it more clearly than anything I ever read about the subject.
Well, these are but a few glimpses; I won't give it all away. For those of you UG students 25 years or younger (I guess that may be almost all), they are glimpses from a world as remote as can be. But some glimpses may nevertheless look strangely familiar even if they ought not. It was a world that looked rigid as steel-reinforced concrete. But oh, camouflage, things are never quite the way they seem: poof it was gone. Or was it? Residues should still be lingering around, shouldn't they?
As a college student you want to be watchful and discerning. Sometimes ideas turn into bricks or concrete, and lofty stuff becomes tangible. So come and explore.
Why a math professor? If you wonder why a math professor teaches a class that touches on history, philosophy, and literature, here is the answer: Why not? Someone has to do it. I spent a good deal of time observing the events unfold, and yet more digesting them afterwards. It's still fresh, so why not harvest it now? Let's think out of the box together.