Events
Hofstra’s First Study Abroad Program
in Munich, Germany A Success
From August 2 to 28, 2007, Hofstra presented it first study abroad program in Germany in the beautiful city of Munich, the capital of Bavaria. This was also the first study abroad program Hofstra presented during Summer Session III.
See photos from the Study Abroad program
The program director, Neil H. Donahue, professor of German and Comparative Literature and associate dean of Hofstra University Honors College, led the group of six students. The students lived in the housing complex (known as Stu-Stadt, or student town) of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University. As is customary in Germany, each student had a private room with its own bathroom, shower and kitchenette, in buildings surrounding a common quad, adjacent to the magnificent English Garden, a huge park that runs right into the center of Munich with fast-running Alpine streams, lovely fields, beer gardens and people at their leisure.
Every day from 10 a.m. to noon, the students attended Professor Donahue’s seminar on “Munich in German Literature and Culture,” which offers an introduction to German history and culture as it appears in literature and the arts. The students read works by the great novelist Thomas Mann, the dramatist Frank Wedekind (Spring Awakening, now a Broadway musical), the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the Bavarian author Herbert Rosendorfer and the American detective novelist Faye Kellermann.
Work in the classroom directly related to the seminar’s physical exploration of the city and its vast resources. The city as it is portrayed in literature and the arts came alive as the group walked the streets of Munich, visiting the same places and tracking down details from the texts they were reading.
Each student had a pass for the city’s excellent mass transit systems (subway, bus, streetcar and tram). Every afternoon Professor Donahue led excursions around town. They toured many famous Munich museums: the overwhelming German Museum of Science; the Glyptothek, which houses an amazing collection of ancient Greek statuary; and its counterpart across the plaza, the Antiquities Museum, with its special exhibit on the Trojan War; the Siemens Center, demonstrating that company’s many technical innovations over the last two centuries; the Lenbach House, home of the Expressionist Blue Rider group; the Alte Pinakothek, with its mind-boggling collection of Old Masters; and the Munich City Museum. There were visits to many other sites of interest - from the Hellabrun Zoo, the first in the world to keep animals in their natural habitats; to the site of the Oktoberfest beer festival as they were setting up for that frothy event; and a three-hour bike ride through the English Garden.
Dr. Hans-Peter Söder, resident director of the Wayne State Junior Year in Munich program and the Hofstra program liaison, gave the group an eye-opening tour of the Königsplatz, the centerpiece of Ludwig I’s neoclassical vision of Munich as an “Athens on the Isar” and later Hitler’s administrative center for the Nazi Party. After a tour and visit to a special exhibit on Munich during the Third Reich, the group visited the first concentration camp, Dachau, just outside of Munich (with its bitterly cynical entrance gate: “Arbeit macht frei” or “Work Sets You Free”). The students met with a surviving member of the White Rose student resistance group. Key members of the White Rose, Christoph Probst, Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie Scholl - all in their early 20s - were caught in 1943 and swiftly executed for distributing their anti-Hitler leaflets around Munich and at the university (as depicted in the film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days [2005]). Franz-Josef Müller was in the Ulm branch of the group and sentenced to five years at a concentration camp (then considered a virtual death warrant), but he was liberated after two years by the Allied forces. The discussion with Herr Müller was enlightening and moving. He transported the Hofstra students back in time and shed light on the White Rose - who despite their young ages and enormous pressures and risks showed tremendous courage both before and after their capture, facing down Nazi persecutors for the sake of their humane ideals.
On Fridays and weekends, and sometimes mid-week, the group set off on excursions outside of Munich: to Salzburg, Austria - the city of Mozart - where they rode with the funicular up the steep incline to the castle for spectacular views of the surrounding hills (alive with music, as it were, of Julie Andrews fame); to Starnberg Lake, which they crossed by boat, with the Alps in the background, to get to the Museum of Phantasie, built by Lothar-Günther Buchheim (of Das Boot fame). There they saw Buchheim’s collection of art, including his important collection of German Expressionist paintings, as well as his own paintings. There was also travel to the great city of Nuremberg, the ancestral home of German emperors from the Middle Ages, known also for its own unfortunate Nazi past, where the group discovered the incredible Museum of German Culture and the equally incredible Nuremberger Bratwurst, the best sausages in Germany. Then it was down into the Alps to visit Neuschwanstein, the spectacular and very theatrical castle retreat of mad King Ludwig II, which was dedicated to Richard Wagner and his operas, later becoming the model for Cinderella's castle at Disney World.
All excursions were paid by student program fees and included regular group meals in Munich and on the road.