Academic literature on the topic 'Returned students – Germany'

This article follows the story of the first African students in the German Democratic Republic, 11 Nigerians who arrived in 1951. Thousands of other African students followed them in the years leading up to the GDR's dissolution in 1990. My work is the first to chronicle the Nigerians' story, and how East Germans received and reacted to these Africans living among them. I focus on what each side hoped to gain from the exchange. East German government officials and university administrators were intent on using the Nigerian students to promote socialism as an alternative in a British colony quickly moving towards independence. Meanwhile, the students wanted scientific educations to help boost their economic standing and class status when they returned to Nigeria. Although Nigeria would never become aligned with the Soviet Bloc after decolonization, in the 1950s East Germans imagined that a socialist future was possible. Drawing on their country's sizable scientific expertise, officials argued that the GDR offered the ideal blend of technological and Marxist knowledge to attract exchange students like the Nigerians into the communist orbit.

The article presents a specific biographical case for an unrealized female academic career because of the changed political regime in Bulgaria after 1944. The documentary traces of Kostadinka (Dina) Tvardishka are preserved and "hidden" in the archive of her husband (the artist Dimitar Rizov) in Bulgarian Central State Archives. In 1941, through the German Scientific Institute in Sofia, K. Tvardishka studied in Germany with scholarships granted by the foundation Alexander von Humboldt. Until the summer of 1944, under the leadership of the famous Prof. Constantin von Dietze, at the University of Freiburg, she developed a dissertation on "Social problems of the Bulgarian village" (Die sozialen Probleme des bulgarischen Dorfes). Her research was almost completed when a pro-Soviet regime of government was established in Bulgaria. Fearing political repression, like dozens of other students and postgraduate students in the Bulgarian-German scientific networks from the WWII period, K. Tvardishka never returned to scientific work, and her study was never published.

AbstractThis article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of higher education between Angolan independence and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on oral histories collected in Luanda from twenty-one returned Angolan students in 2015, triangulated with archival material from Angola and the GDR, it argues that students negotiated between accommodation and resistance in their everyday life at the university and beyond. Conscious of the importance of academic success and adaptation to the East German learning culture, Angolan students drew a line when regulations infringed on their personal freedom and responded by engaging East German officials in discussion or simply by circumnavigating the rules. The life history of a female student illustrates how she negotiated between responsibility to formal learning and personal needs within a controlling society. When one considers the conditions of Angolan student life in East Germany as a whole, it becomes apparent that the East German notion of the model foreign student did not map onto the complexities of Angolan student lives. This article sheds light on the student migration of a generation of Angolan post-independence technocrats, many of whom studied in the former East during the Cold War. Through the eyes of Angolan educational migrants, we see the limits and possibilities of the lives of foreign students in the GDR.

The purpose of this study is to establish measures of language dominance in bilinguals who speak structurally different languages, in our case German and Turkish, with tools that are based on fluency and oral proficiency. A ‘balanced’ bilingual with equal proficiency in two (or more) languages is hardly ever found (e.g. Grosjean, 1982; Olsson, & Sullivan, 2005) but the identification of the dominant language is a huge methodological problem, especially in studies of structurally different languages (see Daller, van Hout, & Treffers-Daller, 2003). The participants in the present study are a group of Turkish—German bilinguals who grew up in Germany and returned to Turkey during their school career, the so-called ‘returnees’ (n = 60), and a group of Turkish secondary school students who grew up in Turkey and learned German as an L2, the so-called control group (n = 55). We firstly establish the language dominance of the two groups with a C-test. We then use oral picture descriptions in both languages to measure a variety of fluency measures, both manually and using scripts written in ‘Praat’ (Boersma & Weenink, 2007). On the basis of these scores, we are able to develop measures of fluency that correlate highly with the C-test scores and have a highly predictive value in a logistic regression in the prediction of group membership (returnee or member of the control group). We conclude that this corroborates the validity of the measures. Overall we conclude that it is possible to develop measures of language dominance based on fluency and overall oral proficiency.

Background Klasse2000 is the most widely adopted school-based prevention program in Germany. It addresses health promotion, addiction, and violence prevention in primary schools. As a universal prevention program, it has reached more than 1.4 million German children in the past 25 years. Objective The effectiveness of Klasse2000 will be evaluated with a large representative survey among students. Students who have participated in the prevention program (intervention group) will be compared with students who did not participate (control group). The comparison will cover the following outcome domains: well-being, self-esteem, emotion regulation, food habits, behavioral problems, and school and classroom atmosphere. Furthermore, victimization and perpetration regarding bullying, alcohol consumption, smoking, and media consumption are assessed. Methods To control for potential group differences, treatment effects will be estimated using propensity score-matching, which matches students from the intervention and control groups based on an identical propensity score or a propensity score that does not differ by more than a previously defined distance. The treatment effect will then be estimated in the matched sample taking the matching process into account. Results Enrollment of schools began in March 2017. A total of 6376 students participated in the survey (n=4005 in control group; n=2371 in Klasse2000). The parent survey was returned by 52.13% (3324/6376) of parents. Results are expected in mid-2020. Conclusions The results on the effectiveness of the Klasse2000 prevention program will form an empirical basis for legitimizing universal prevention programs and for planning future prevention approaches. Trial Registration German Clinical Trials Register DRKS00014332; https://tinyurl.com/y2trvq4p International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/14371

The University of Heidelberg, in Heidelberg, West Germany, had a significant influence on the development of the geological sciences in North America between 1860 and 1913. During these years, in a reversal of the current scene, the brightest young scientists of North America came to Europe to pursue graduate studies. Of these scientists, twelve came to Heidelberg to study the geological sciences and then returned to North America to make significant contributions in their field. For example, two students developed the CIPW normative calculations; one performed the first quantitative laboratory experiments, duplicating rock deformation in the earth's crust; another student became the first "geologist-in-charge" of the United States Geological Survey (USGS); and a fifth mapped Yellowstone before it was a national park. The students came to Heidelberg to learn the newest techniques from professors such as Rosenbusch, Bunsen, and Salomon-Calvi. They also learned to develop theories based on the technique of detailed and careful observation that these men used. They caught the excitement about the world around them exuded by these same men, and they, in turn, spread what they had learned in Heidelberg when they returned to North America as professors and members of the USGS.

Eighteenth-century Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765) is a highly celebrated and symbolically important figure in Russian culture, but he is not well known outside of Russia. In this paper I review his biography, his contributions to geology, and the key influences on his geological writings. He spent his youth on the coast of the White Sea, near the Arctic Circle, working with his father, who was a fisherman and merchant. This experience helped him to become a keen observer of natural phenomena. At age nineteen he traveled to Moscow, falsely claimed that he was the son of a nobleman, and talked his way into the Slavo-Graeco-Latin Academy. He excelled as a student and was chosen to continue his studies at the university in St Petersburg. From there he was one of three Russian students chosen to spend several years studying in Germany, primarily to learn about mining and the extraction of metals from ore. Lomonosov's four-and-a-half years in Germany were critical to his development as a scholar and scientist, immersing him in contemporary European knowledge and epistemology. After Lomonosov returned to the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1741, he worked his way up the academic ladder, eventually becoming professor of chemistry, but it was not a smooth and steady climb. At one point he was under house arrest for eight months for rowdy conduct and discourteous behavior. Lomonosov made significant contributions to many fields of science. He wrote several geological publications, the most significant of which is On the Strata of the Earth (1763), which became available in German only in 1961, and in English only in 2012. Lomonosov's work in geology was motivated by his desire to promote economic development in Russia through the extraction of mineral resources, together with a deep curiosity about natural history.

Biodiversity is declining, and knowledge about biodiversity declines in a similar way. Previous studies have already addressed predictors of species knowledge. Here, we studied bird species knowledge related to demographics, but also to individual differences in affinity to nature, by including (i) birding specialization and (ii) bird-related activities/interest. Data were collected from July to October 2020 via an online questionnaire, containing demographic data, birding specialization, interest/activity, and images of 28 bird species native to Germany. Participants were adult students, lecturers and administrative staff of the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. A total of 1967 questionnaires were returned in this study (35.3% male, 53.8% students, 69% had access to a garden). Mean identification score was 16.31 ± 6.38. Thus, participants were able to identify more than half of the species (total species n = 28). Men identified more species than women, garden owners had higher identification scores than non-owners, while hometown size was not significant. A distance to the next forest patch >10 km was related to lower identification scores. Employees scored higher than students. Correlation between species knowledge and birding specialization was high, as was the correlation with bird interest/activity. Higher scores were found in older people. In the linear univariate model, birding specialization and bird interest were the most influential predictors of species knowledge, followed by distance to next forest patch and occupation (student vs employees). Other variables were not significant. We suggest including such measures (interest, attitude, etc.) into further studies and move forward from the urban–rural narrative to more complex analyses of living circumstances.

First, this paper sketches the development of labour history as a historical subdiscipline up to the 1970s and 1980s when it became a booming field, an area of great excitement and high productivity. Why this should have been the case is an interesting question to ask in hindsight. Secondly, I discuss certain trends in the last 10–15 years that are related to a decline in this field, not in terms of sophistication, but certainly with regard to the field's popularity among historians, students and the public. Dealing with this rather dramatic change might tell us something about the way my discipline – modern history with a stress on social history – works, where it gets its vitality from, its conjunctures and fashions. Thirdly, I present some personal ideas about how one could, and perhaps should, deal with the present situation, its problems and its opportunities. I am presently working on the third volume of a history of labour in 19th century Germany – a project to which I have returned after many years. Some of the general problems I have encountered in this project will also be dealt with, indirectly, in this paper.

COVID-19, first originated in November 2019 in the city of Wuhan, China. The virus spread from China to almost all the countries of the world. India is not an exception to this malady. The virus was carried to India by students studying in China and Indian workers from Italy who returned to India. Italy had become a centre of the corona virus after China. All of a sudden the central government was forced to declare a complete lockdown throughout the country on 25 March 2020. Movement of labourers and all the economic activities came to a standstill. In the initial phase government was committed to prevent the spread of the disease because even advanced countries like USA, France, England, Germany, Italy failed to stop the spread of the virus, leading to large scale human deaths. The Indian economy was rapidly moving towards development. But this pandemic has given a severe blow to all the economic activities in India. Within a month, unemployment rose from 6.7 per cent on 15 March, 26 per cent on 19 April to 7.24 per cent on 20 January 2021 During the lockdown, an estimated 14 crore people lost employment1. This paper discusses what is the next economic situation after COVID-19, that is positive and negative circumstances. This is a controversial subject. So, here I am going to analyze what are the situation we will face next and also find out what are the solution recommended by the government to overcome this current scenario with the help of secondary data collection.

Defence date: 21 June 2002
Examining Board: Prof. Bart Cockx, Université Catholique de Louvain ; Prof. Jennifer Hunt, University of Montreal ; Prof. Andrea Ichino, EUI, Supervisor ; Prof. Grayham Mizion (Supervisor), University of Southampton
First made available online on 21 May 2018

Since the beginning of the economic crisis of 2008, Spain, like other Southern European countries, has witnessed a mass departure of mostly young people looking for opportunities abroad. Leaving Spain is based on 58 autobiographical narrative interviews with recent Spanish migrants who went to the UK and Germany, and sometimes returned. By presenting a combination of in-depth case studies and comparative analyses, the author demonstrates the potential of biographical research and narrative analysis in studying contemporary Europe, including its overlapping crises. The scope of the sociological study is not limited to examining how those who left Spain experienced single phases of their migration. Instead, it focuses on the significance of migration projects in the context of their life histories and how they make sense of these experiences in retrospect. This book will not only be of great interest to social scientists and students in different disciplines and interdisciplinary studies such as sociology, anthropology, human geography, European studies, education, and social work, but also to professionals, European and national policy makers, and those interested in learning more about migrants’ experiences, perspectives, and (often invisible) contributions.

If you amble through the curving lanes of Burlington’s Aspen Grove Cemetery, designed by Aldo’s Grandfather Starker, you will come upon the Starker family vault nestled on a woody knoll. Pines and oaks guard simple stones inset in the grass marking the graves of Aldo and Estella. Aldo had returned to the land and family that had first instilled the land ethic within him. Then Clara Leopold died within a few months of her beloved eldest. Marie, Carl, and Frederic Leopold remained active in Burlington and in local conservation, with Fred becoming nationally renowned for his work with wood ducks. Thankfully for Estella, shortly after losing her husband, new grandbabies arrived on the scene, with new children for Luna and his wife Carolyn, Nina and her husband Bill, Carl and his wife Keena (Starker and Betty also had a child born that year). Though bowed by grief, Estella was made of the same strong stuff as her New Mexican ancestors, and after a few years, she slowly built back her life, now solo. Nina recalled, “Mother grew into her own person,” even traveling to Cuba and to Germany with her family. But Estella also continued to tend to the Shack land, as it tended to her. “Cultured, gentle, talented” as the Madison Free Press described “Stella”, she started to speak out publicly about local conservation issues while kindly serving as “an adopted grandmother” and mentor to graduate students and neighbors. In 1973, Northland College awarded Mrs. Estella Bergere Leopold an honorary doctorate of science. The degree was presented to her at the familiar haunts of the Wildlife Ecology Department. About two years later, in January 1975, on a visit to her family in Santa Fe, Estella grew ill and died at the age of eighty-five, a couple of days after her husband’s birthday. Her burial in Burlington next to Aldo, her sister Dolores, and twice brother-in-law, Carl, symbolized the integral intertwining of the Leopold and Luna-Otero-Bergere families.

While an extended stay abroad is generally assumed to be a valuable experience, some students are reluctant to take up the opportunity. To understand this phenomenon better, this study looks at students’ concerns before they embark on their time abroad (to undertake a study placement, work placement, or a language assistantship) and looks at returning students’ perceptions, to see the extent to which their initial concerns materialised. The research is based on two questionnaires distributed to over 800 participants at two universities (one in the UK, one in Germany). Besides quantitative data, qualitative responses give additional insights into the students’ perceptions. The results show marked differences between the two cohorts and also produce evidence of a considerable shift in students’ perceptions after their return: a high percentage of students noted that their anticipated concerns were not realised. The results of this study are useful in shedding some light on students’ concerns and can inform student support and Year Abroad (YA) preparation.

Abstract ‘Hares’ was the name for Birkbeck students who skipped with great speed between the various academic and social programmes offered by the College, while ‘Rabbits’ simply attended lectures and returned home. Sporting and other social activities were more common at Birkbeck prior to the Second World War and were tied to exploration, empire, ‘muscular masculinity’, and ‘character’. In the early decades of the London Mechanics’ Institution, gymnastics were in vogue, influenced by the German Turnen movement. In 1920, Birkbeck acquired the Greenford playing field, on which it built a pavilion in 1928. The students also held annual dinners, published their own magazines (the most notable of which was The Lodestone), and started numerous societies. The chapter also explores what little is known about the sex lives of students. In the interwar years, the College was home to William Joyce, a leading fascist who went on to become ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, spouting propaganda for the Nazis. More typically, Birkbeck’s students and staff have supported refugees from all over the world.

This chapter examines Irving’s 1824 story ‘The Adventure of the German Student’ alongside his two earlier tales, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’, focusing on Irving’s radical rethinking of the historical tale as a site of ghostly returns. The presence of death and ghostly figures at the heart of foundational historical moments makes the telling and retelling of the historical tale a fraught endeavour. Irving’s seemingly harmless ‘ghost stories’ are in effect radical reinventions of ‘History’ as a constant problem to be grappled with in the here and now. In ‘The Adventure of the German Student’, the figure of the guillotine offers a prime symbol for this deathly presence at the heart of the historical event, casting it as always already horrific and showcasing History’s deadly and beheading forces at work on the individual and the collective alike.

Both Rabindranath Tagore and Paul and Edith Geheeb were deeply committed educators. Their respective schools in India and Germany (and later Switzerland) were at the core of their creative lives. These schools helped to shape the image and the international influence of their founders. Due to Tagore’s global contacts after he won the Nobel Prize in 1913, many foreign teachers offered their services in Santiniketan. In Paul Geheeb’s case, too, Indian persons came to teach Indian philosophy or just to participate in the school’s activities. Indian influence on the students’ lives has been notable. I have been visiting the Ecole d’Humanité often for over two decades. I met Paul Geheeb’s successor, Armin Lüthi, who allowed me to use the Ecole’s Archive. I sent a trained artist from a tribal village near Santiniketan to the Ecole to teach; he was twice invited to return. Thus the link between the Ecole and Santiniketan could be revived.

The rise of totalitarian regimes in Russia, Germany, and Italy between the two world wars preceded the professionalization of the study of politics. The political experience of recent decades suggests that where authoritarian regimes have given way to democratic systems in which politicians can be held accountable and where a rule of law prevails, there is little likelihood of a return to authoritarianism, least of all in the form of Communism or fascism. It is easier to continue to deny political liberties to people who have never experienced them than to remove freedoms to which citizens have quickly become accustomed. Whether the world’s first Communist state, Russia, will succeed in breaking decisively with its authoritarian past remains one of the most momentous of all the unresolved puzzles. It is one question among many likely to keep British students of politics busy into the twenty-first century.

Hegel is one of the most influential thinkers of modernity. Less recognized, but equally significant is his life-long engagement with ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. As a student of the Stuttgart Gymnasium, sometime headmaster of the Nürnberg Gymnasium, contemporary of philhellenes like Goethe and Hölderlin as well as seminal classical scholars like August Wolf and Niebuhr, Hegel developed his encyclopedic system at a time when classical scholarship was being institutionalized as Altertumswissenschaft, and when Hellenic studies in particular were experiencing a ‘renaissance’, especially in Germany. This chapter surveys Hegel’s life, education, publications, and persistent ideas, placing these in their immediate context in the revolutionary era after 1776. Hegel’s persistent and many-faceted return to antiquity—to the Romans as well as the Greeks—is clear in his Berlin lecture series on politics, art, religion, philosophy, and history. These themes form the core of Hegel’s philosophy of ‘spirit’, and are here outlined as the focus of subsequent chapters.

The term ‘neo-Kantianism’ indicates various attempts at a renewal of Kant’s philosophy in the modern context. It began with the rehabilitation of Kant to overcome the speculative turn of classical German idealism and ground philosophy in the investigation of the conditions of knowledge. In this sense, the origins of neo-Kantianism are sometimes dated back to figures opposing speculative idealism in the early nineteenth-century philosophical landscape, including Johann Friedrich Herbart, Jakob Friedrich Fries, Friedrich Eduard Beneke (Beiser 2014). Philosophers from the next generation sharing the commitment to a Kantian theory of knowledge also include Kuno Fischer, Eduard Zeller, Otto Liebmann, Jürgen Bona Meyer, Friedrich Albert Lange. More specifically, ‘neo-Kantianism’ is used to indicate a philosophical movement developed beginning in the 1870s with the intent to shed light on the basic tenets of Kant’s work and face challenges to traditional philosophy coming from nineteenth-century scientific advancements in the spirit of Kant’s critical philosophy (see, e.g., Köhnke 1991; Patton 2005; Luft 2015). The neo-Kantian movement started with Hermann Cohen’s seminal interpretation of Kant (Cohen 1871a; 1877; 1885), and subsequently flourished in German universities, with two main centres in Marburg, where Cohen was appointed lecturer in 1873, and in South West Germany. The development of experimental methods in nineteenth-century life sciences offered important insights for the theory of knowledge, but also raised the question about the possibility of reducing cognitive processes to physical ones. Kant’s critical philosophy offered a powerful argument against materialism, by limiting the validity of causal explanations to the realm of appearances rather than replacing them with metaphysical explanations. In conjunction with the materialism controversy, the 1860s saw a resurgence of interest in classical interpretative issues concerning Kant, including the assumption of a thing in itself, its relation to the sensibility, the status of a priori elements of knowledge. Following a suggestion first made by the physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, some of those who argued for a return to Kant believed that Kant’s a priori forms deserved an empirical explanation. In contrast with this, Cohen emphasized that the individuation of a priori elements of knowledge requires a meta-level inquiry into the presuppositions of the sciences, that is, what Kant identified as the transcendental cognition. Cohen took Kant to imply that experience is given in the fact of science, and the transcendental task is to derive the preconditions for the possibility of this fact by regressive analysis. This formulation allowed Cohen to address the controversial issues raised in the Kant scholarship by emphasizing the logical structure of experience, while considering part of Kant’s considerations about the natural sources of knowledge to be a remainder of his reliance on empirical psychology in the precritical period. At the same time, Cohen’s interpretation of Kant set the task of a novel investigation of the historically documented facts of science and culture in the wake of the transcendental method. Cohen’s interpretation set a standard, not only for its contribution to the historical reconstruction of the development of Kant’s thought, but also for the idea of a fruitful correlation between interpretation and philosophical theorizing. In this sense, the revival of Kant’s critical philosophy involved also the idea of a constant renewal of it. Over the next decade, other influential interpretations were developed with various theoretical purposes, from the attempt to integrate the Kantian theory of a priori cognition with insights derived from the empiricist theory of knowledge (Riehl 1876; 1879) to the appreciation of Kant’s attempt to account for the application of universal rules of thought outside the domain of the mathematical science of nature in the third Critique (Windelband 1878–80). The Marburg School formed in the wake of Cohen’s characterization of the transcendental method. Its main representatives were Paul Natorp, who became Cohen’s colleague at Marburg in 1885, and Ernst Cassirer, who studied there from 1896 to 1899, and continued to subscribe to the methodology of his Marburg teachers throughout his intellectual career. The South West German School developed around Wilhelm Windelband’s teaching at the universities of Freiburg from 1877 to 1882, Strasbourg from 1882 to 1903, and Heidelberg from 1903 to 1915. Other leading figures of this school were Heinrich Rickert and his student Emil Lask. There were also neo-Kantians who did not strictly belong to a school or combined neo-Kantianism with other philosophical traditions. This includes, for example, Alois Riehl, Jonas Cohn, Richard Hönigswald. Each school focused on some common themes. Marburg neo-Kantians gradually broadened the scope of their research from Kant to the philosophical and scientific roots of what they called a critical or scientific form of idealism, according to which the objects of experience are constructed by scientific concepts. They sought to provide an account for the various spheres of human experience by extending the transcendental inquiry from the fact of science to the facts of culture. South West German neo-Kantians focused on the question concerning the grounds for relating unconditionally valid values to contingent experience. This led them to engage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century debate about the possibility of an autonomous foundation of the human sciences. They pursued the project of a philosophy of culture offering a unitary account of the various human activities from the standpoint of the theory of values. These commonalities notwithstanding, neo-Kantianism was a complex movement, with internal debates and major developments within the same school, as well as connections between different schools and traditions. Neo-Kantianism dominated the philosophical scene until the early 1910s, and remained in the background of the main philosophical innovations in the German-speaking world for the next two decades until the rise of Nazism. It is considered to have made lasting contribution in epistemology, philosophy of science, history of philosophy and philosophy of culture (see, e.g., Luft and Makkreel 2010; De Warren and Staiti 2015; Edgar and Patton 2018; Kinzel and Patton 2021).

Abstract A Student Exchange Program began with four students from Germany visiting Siemens-Westinghouse and the University of Central Florida in Summer, 1999, as an initiative from Siemens training officials in Muelheim, Germany. In Summer 2000, a program with four German apprentices coming to the U.S. and four U.S. interns working and studying in Germany was very successful. The initial UCF students continued part-time work at Siemens during their senior year and were offered full-time employment upon graduation. Not only did the German students complete their work, but some of them returned for employment in the U.S. Siemens, as a multinational enterprise, is preparing technologists and engineers to understand product design and manufacturing for integrated systems in international markets. Students will benefit from an understanding of the systems, standards, and cultures involved. The internship model being developed uses the best from the German and U.S. systems and merits further study and implementation.