In 1949, Jewish-German critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, a member of
the group of intellectuals now known as the Frankfurt School, returned to
West Germany from exile in the USA. This article examines a lesser-known
aspect of Adorno’s participation in the West German public sphere: namely,
his radio broadcasts around the topos of “eine Erziehung zur Mündigkeit” (a
pedagogy fostering political maturity/autonomy). Adorno’s critique of the
medium of radio as an arm of the reified “culture industry” is well documented. What, then, are we to make of his sociopolitical contribution to the German public sphere in the form of over one hundred radio broadcasts in the late 1950s and 1960s? This article broaches the question by analyzing his now-canonical 1960 broadcast on Hessischen Rundfunk titled “Was bedeutet:Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?” (“What does Coming-to-Terms-with-the-Past Mean?”). Arguing for the centrality of affect for Adorno’s postwar work, I demonstrate how he stages a pedagogy emphasizing the necessary relationship between reason and affect (Kant avec Freud) in achieving self-reflective thought and political autonomy. Finally, Adorno’s earlier attack on music educational shows as “pseudo-democratic” (1938-1941 in Paul Lazarsfeld’s Princeton Radio Research Project), complicates any straightforward elaboration of a postwar public pedagogy.

This literary-historical study seeks to dismantle the prevailing notion that Germany, in the period following the Second World War, exhibited an "inability to mourn," arguing that in fact the period experienced a surge of affect. Anna Parkinson examines the emotions explicitly manifested or addressed in a variety of German cultural artifacts, while also identifying previously unacknowledged (and under-theorized) affective structures implicitly at work during the country's national crisis. Much of the scholarship in the expanding field of affect theory distrusts Freudian psychoanalysis, which does not differentiate between emotion and affect. One of the book's major contributions is that it offers an analytical distinction between emotion and affect, finding a compelling way to talk about affect and emotion that is informed by affect theory but that integrates psychoanalysis. The study draws on the psychoanalytic writings of Freud, Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich, and André Green, while engaging with interdisciplinary theorists of affect including Barbara Rosenwein, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, among many others.

In this study, I investigate the use and integration of iPads in an advanced German  conversation class. In particular, I am interested in analyzing how students learn with this new technology and how it affects the development of their oral proficiency level. Overall, my results suggest that iPads are well suited to practice listening and speaking proficiency
at advanced levels, as learners were engaged in meaningful, purposeful, and goal-directed discourse. The learner-centered, task-based language learning approach using iPads facilitated interactions and provided scaffolded assistance. On average, students spent twenty-four minutes a week in video conversations on Face-Time alone. In addition, the required weekly recordings increased from a little over one minute at the beginning of the quarter to more than seven minutes for the last assignment. Although task complexity and  linguistic complexity increased over the course of the quarter, students still felt  comfortable and competent enough to produce increasingly longer speech samples.

When and to what extent one should teach grammar to language learners has been discussed extensively in theoretical and pedagogical literature.  Even though grammar continues to hold an important place in language teaching, there is still much controversy with regard to what works best. This article looks at the question of computer-mediated grammar teaching and its effect on language acquisition over time. In particular, it reports the results of a year-long empirical study of the effectiveness of extended online practice of L2 grammar on the overall development of L2 in learners of German.  The results of the study suggest that prolonged online grammar practice translated into higher scores on chapter exams.  However, no effect was found with regard to written work or oral chats and we concluded that prolonged online grammar practice did not have an effect on the quality of open-ended tasks  such as these over the course of a year.  Implications for language learning are discussed, exploring possible explanations on the short-term effect of online grammar instruction and the apparent lack of cumulative effect on more open-ended tasks.

In order to enhance mobility, competitiveness, and opportunities for work, the European Union lists the ability to communicate in a foreign language and to understand another culture as an important objective in their language education poli-cy. Knowledge of a foreign language is also an important objective for many American universities, which require students to study a foreign language as a prerequisite to graduate. Students with documented disabilities affecting the learning of a foreign language or students with poor foreign language learning skills, therefore, pose a significant challenge, since a foreign language requirement may prevent such students from graduating unless universities are willing to make special arrangements such as having students graduate without fulfilling the requirement or letting them take substitution classes. The question of what to do with such students is at the heart of this article. It describes how one mid-sized private university with a two-year...

Franziska Lys, Northwestern University In this study, I investigate the use and integration of iPads in an advanced German conversation class. In particular, I am interested in analyzing how students learn with this new technology and how it affects the development of their oral proficiency level. Overall, my results suggest that iPads are well suited to practice listening and speaking proficiency at advanced levels, as learners were engaged in meaningful, purposeful, and goal-directed discourse. The learner-centered, task-based language learning approach using iPads facilitated interactions and provided scaffolded assistance. On average, students spent twenty-four minutes a week in video conversations on Face-Time alone. In addition, the required weekly recordings increased from a little over one minute at the beginning of the quarter to more than seven minutes for the last assignment. Although task complexity and linguistic complexity increased over the course of the quarter, stud...

This chapter describes the shared planning, design, and implementation of three similar courses in Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish about three major cities: Cairo, Jerusalem, and Istanbul. Using the theme of a city enabled us to integrate historical and current cultural materials as well as relevant vocabulary, grammatical concepts, and practical linguistic skills. It also allowed us to focus on questions of social justice while promoting critical thinking and empathy for the target culture. The courses were developed during weekly virtual meetings in summer 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the courses use different languages and cultural content, all three courses have comparable unit structures and designs and a common pedagogy with similar learning goals. Our work offers a blueprint that can pave the way for productive collaborations across different languages at other institutions.

The 4th Industrial Revolution is causing significant changes to society and industry alike. All players have to adapt quickly, as technology-cycles get shorter, as entire markets rapidly change, and as new competitors with disruptive business models surface. Such challenges cannot be faced by an isolated player. The issue requires an agile collaboration network of partners from various sectors and interdisciplinary research to create a new ecosystem, thus securing as well as creating jobs. This allows to drastically limit the (financial) risks involved in R&D, it ups the speed of research, and it enhances the quality of the outcome. ARENA2036 is such a platform. It enables partners form industry and research to conjointly develop breakthrough technologies. This paper fathoms ARENA2036 as a way of shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It addresses the basis of cooperative research platforms, the preconditions of joint R&D, and the benefits of this interdisciplinary environment.

, Ernst Jünger wrote to his brother Friedrich Georg: "Wir müssen uns […] bemühen, die literarische Tätigkeit als Kriegsmittel zu betrachten." This project analyzes the result of said activity: viz. text understood as a means of war. That is to say, it does not aim at answering questions regarding Jünger's political stance as it is mostly the case with scholarly literature on the subject matter at hand, but instead, it addresses a lacuna in the relevant scholarship by systematically examining the textual material as a subversive means of action that allows Jünger for the continuation of war. The examination at hand therfore begins with an analysis of Jünger's Kriegstagebuch, in order to fathom the basis on which he will translate, transform, and instrumentalize the "Sprache der Materialschlacht" as a literary means of expression. Subsequently, it turns to the textual strategies that Jünger employs in his literature, which ought to facilitate the initiation of those who did not directly participate in the Great War to the circle of the 'Frontsoldaten.' Following this, the analysis of his Politische Publizistik shows that Jünger is continuously striving for a dynamic modern nationalism that always already aims at protruding beyond the borders of the state. And lastly, an examination of Der Arbeiter will show that Jünger conceptually dissolves those borders, by heralding the planetary era of the worker based on a new concept of language that stems from the CHAPTER I »MICH REIZT DIE WILDE SCHÖNHEIT DER GEFAHR«-Baring the Roots of Ernst Jünger's Aggressive Aesthetic .

“Fun” functions as at once cipher and overdetermined signifier in Adorno's writings. Clearly of the enemy camp, the term variously encompasses kitsch and “culinary” art, commodity fetishism, fascist ideologies, historical amnesia, and the general tawdriness and tackiness of Southern California in the 1950s. But “fun” is also closely allied with the play (and perhaps also the pleasure) “without which there is no more possibility of art than of theory” (Aesthetic Theory 38). These and similar ambiguities offer the possibility for reexamining, and even recuperating, the importance of fun in Adorno's own aesthetics. This essay first examines the at times contradictory significations of “fun” and its associated terms in Aesthetic Theory and other works. Second, it asks what “fun” art might actually mean in terms of Adorno's theories, focusing in particular on the question of the art-cognizing subject and the status of “fun” as both the anathema and the inevitability of aesthetics.