I’m leaving Germany after a two month long teaching gig at Leuphana University in Lueneburg, which is near Hamburg. Again I was impressed with the version of a university education that is being developed there—it values learning and investigation.
Here is a blog I wrote about German Bildung, the philosophy of education, two years ago: http://www.ethnography.com/2013/02/building-bildung-and-other-improbabilities-among-german-university-undergrads/
As a going away blogs, I’m also leaving you with two of my favorite Germany blogs, both having to do with Germany during World War II. The first was written last month after I attended the war crimes trial of Oskar Gröning in June 2015. Gröning is the “The Bookkeeper of Auschwitz.” He is on trial as an accessory to 300,000 people in Auschwitz in 1942-44 I the summer of 2015 in Lueneburg where I was teaching.http://www.ethnography.com/2015/06/the-last-auschwitz-trial-moral-guilt-and-criminal-guilt/
The other was written in 2007, after I met a man on a German train who told me his childhood memories of the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. He watched the same bombing that Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “documented in Slaughterhouse 5. .http://www.ethnography.com/2008/01/a-baker-from-dresden/
Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.