A four-week seminar in Berlin and Prague for sixteen school teachers on the background of the anti-communist movements leading to the peaceful revolutions in East-Central Europe in 1989.
Project director Christiane Olivo leads a seminar on the history and philosophical underpinnings of the dissident movements in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, and the revolutions in 1989 that brought down communist rule. Beginning with three weeks in Berlin and ending with a final week in Prague, this project seeks to elucidate the role of democratic opposition movements in the fall of Marxist governments and the enduring significance of these movements. A day trip to Leipzig, "which was an extremely important center of dissident activities and helped to usher in the large, peaceful demonstrations in the GDR [the communist German Democratic Republic] in late 1989," is also included in the program activities. The seminar focuses on the "power of the powerless" to undermine totalitarian rule by, in Vaclav Havel's phrase, "living in truth" and rejecting the ideological lie at the base of communist rule. The seminar examines the role of ideas among the dissidents: communism as "virtually immune to reform," rural resistance against "a vast but vulnerable machine," self-organization in an alternative civil society, and the affirmation of individual dignity. The seminar engages teachers in careful reading, journaling, and discussion of pertinent texts; guest lectures by leading scholars and major figures from the East German and Czech dissident movements, such as Martin Palous and Jan Wielgohs (Europa University Viadrina); tours of sites significant for the pre-1989 opposition (including Stasi Headquarters in Berlin and the Vaclav Havel Library in Prague); and screenings of films such as Czechoslovakia 1968: We Don't Want to Live on Our Knees and Solidarity. Works by the following authors are included: Timothy Garton Ash, Adam Michnik, Vaclac Havel, George Konrad, Vladimir Tismaneanu, and Gale Stokes. The project director has allotted time for the development and presentation of lesson plans by participants and has mounted a comprehensive website to be sustained after the seminar.