Vienna and Prague: At the Crossroads of Central Europe

Vienna, Austria & Prague, Czech Republic
August 1 - 31, 2007

Program Description | Courses/Requirements | Proposed Field Trips | Accommodations/Meals | Fees

Interior of the new Shakspeare Globe Theatre Class Size: 16-26

The city of Vienna, one of Europe's great imperial capitals, will be our classroom, as we study European history from a local perspective. A gateway to Eastern Europe, Vienna was the scene of epic battles between Christians and Muslims, as Ottoman Turks besieged the city. A musical capital, Vienna was home to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sigmund Freund and Gustav Klimt made Vienna the birthplace of "modernity" around 1900. The city of Adolf Hitler's youth, Vienna saw the destruction of Vienna's flourishing Jewish community during WWII. In the cold war, Vienna, officially "neutral," became a United Nations headquarters. Today, with the fall of the iron curtain, it is again a meeting point between East and West.

Visit the 2006 class website: http://history.ucdavis.edu/f/Stuart_Kathy/vienna/
View photos from 2006: http://history.ucdavis.edu/f/Stuart_Kathy/vienna/images/

This program is full. The programs below are still open and may be of interest to students who wish to study history or to study in Europe.


Other programs of similar interest:

Proposed Field Trips and Activities - subject to change

Courses

Instructor

Kathy Stuart, Ph.D.
Department
kestuart@ucdavis.edu

This Program carries a total of 8 units. Enrolled students take both courses listed. Auditing is not an option. History 102S (5 units) is pending approval. Until it is approved, students have the option of taking either History 102E or 102D as the core course . All students will take History 198.

Course Requirements

This class focuses on European society, politics, and culture through Austrian lens. Vienna and Prague will be our classroom. We examine the interplay of religion and politics in the formation of the Habsburg Empire. We study religious art of the sixteenth century and retrace seventeenth-century pilgrimages to Marian shrines and saints' relics to understand militant Protestant and Counter-reformation Catholic spirituality. We study contact and conflict between Muslims and Christians, as two empires collided in the Ottoman sieges of Vienna. We visit Baroque and Rococo palaces to see how Austrian imperial ambitions were reflected in architecture and interior design. We experience Vienna as a center of classical music and the Austrian Enlightenment through the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. We analyze the Viennese institution of the Coffeehouse as a center of enlightened sociability, intellectual life, and political culture. We trace the emergence of modernism and modernity in the cosmopolitan multiethnic metropolis around 1900, in the works of Freud, Klimt, Schnitzler, and Wittgenstein among others.

With the collapse of the Habsburg Empire after World War I and the emergence of the Austrian Republic, we turn to the rise of National Socialism, with a particular focus on Adolph Hitler's time in Vienna. We reconstruct the experience of Viennese Jews through the memoirs of Ruth Klüger, who was deported from Vienna to Auschwitz as a young girl. We visit Mauthausen, Austria's most notorious death camp, where Simon Wiesenthal was freed by American forces in 1945. Finally we explore Vienna in the post-war period as a center of international diplomacy during the cold war and beyond, and as a new gateway to Eastern Europe with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Our final fieldtrips will be to United Nations facilities and various NGOs. The class will be taught from an interdisciplinary approach, so that it will be of particular interest not only to history majors, but also to students in a variety of majors including German and comparative literature, art history, architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, music and musicology, philosophy, psychology, religious studies, Jewish studies, film studies, political science, and international relations.

Required Texts

* Textbooks added (12/21/05)

Selections from the following will be available online at the class website:

Class Schedule

Note that the following schedule is from the 2006 program. The 2007 class schedule will be slightly different.

Charles V, Ferdinand I, Reformation and Counter-Reformation
    • Readings:
      • Lehne and Johnson, pp. TBA
      • Demetz, pp. TBA
    • In Vienna:
      • Kunsthistorisches Museum: World class museums with fabulous collection of Renaissance and Baroque art
      • Stephansdom (St. Stephens Cathedral): This excursion will satisfy students macabre interests: the catacombs contain the skeletons of several thousand victims of the last Viennese plague in the eighteenth century.
    • Field Trip: Melk Abbey
      This is one of the oldest Benedictine monasteries in Europe, and will allow me to show students some medieval background, as well as religious developments during the Catholic Counter-Reformation. It has many saints' relics!
    • Film: The Hapsburgs, Part 1: The Dream of an Empire (1992)
  1. The Thirty Years War and Origins of Confessional Absolutism
    • Readings:
      • Lehne and Johnson, pp. TBA
      • Demetz, pp. TBA
    • In Vienna:
      • Hofburg: Schatzkammer (Imperial Treasury)
      • Klosterneuburg: All the pomp and circumstance, and grandiose excess of the absolute monarchy.
    • Film: The Hapsburgs, Part 2: Cross and Crescent (1992)
  2. Christian Muslim relations: Ottoman Sieges of Vienna, 1529 and 1683
    • Readings: Lehne and Johnson, pp. TBA
    • In Vienna:
      • Heeresgeschichtliche Museum. Permanent Exhibition "War against the Turks": Very topical exhibit on warfare between Christians and Muslims.
    • Film: The Hapsburgs, Part 3: The Jewel in the Crown
  3. The Baroque Monarchy
    • Readings:
      • Lehne and Johnson, pp. TBA
      • Joroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles, pp. TBA
    • In Vienna:
      • Schloss Schönbrunn: Rococo palace of Empress Maria Theresia. Austria's answer to Louis XIV's Versailles. Playfulness and illusion of Rococo art and architecture.
      • Kapuzinergruft: Again, a macabre excursion: the above ground tombs of members of the Habsburg dynasty, replete with death masks.
    • Film: The Hapsburgs, Part 4, Between Empire and Nation
  4. Mozart's Vienna
    • Readings:
      • Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. TBA
      • Demetz, pp. TBA
      • Mozart libretto
    • In Vienna:
    • Film: Amadeus (1984)
    • Fieldtrip: Salzburg to hear more Mozart ("The Sound of Music Tour" is optional)
  5. Coffeehouse Culture, Enlightenment, and Civil Society
    • Readings:
      • Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment (selections)
      • Ilay Ors, "Coffeehouses, Cosmopolitanism, and Pluralizing Modernities in Istanbul," Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 12 (2002), 119-145
      • Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
    • In Vienna:
      • Café Central and other Viennese Coffeehouses
      • Wiener Kaffeemuseum
    • Film: Colonel Redl (1984)
  6. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
    • Readings:
      • Schorske, Siècle Vienna, pp. TBA
      • Kafka, Metamorphosis
    • In Vienna:
      • Sigmund Freud Museum
      • Leopold Museum: World's largest collection of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, etc.
      • Walking tour Ring Strasse - Modernist architecture and urban design around 1900
      • Zentralfriedhof - graves of Austrian luminaries
    • Film: Wittgenstein (1993)
    • Field Trip: Four days in Prague
      • Topics: The Court of Rudolf II; Jewish history: visit to the oldest extant Jewish cemetery in Central Europe; Kafka's Prague; Prague Spring
  7. Hitler's Vienna and WWII
  8. The Holocaust: History and Memory
  9. The Cold War and Beyond

Accommodations

Vienna
In Vienna, students will be staying in single rooms in three or four room flats. These rooms come with a shared common room, bath, and kitchen. The kitchen is equipped with a refrigerator, sink, hotplates, microwave, percolator, kettle, toaster, and dishes (no pots or pans). Note that there is a grocery store across the street from the accommodations.The rooms are furnished with linens, telephone, and free internet access. A laundry room is also available at the residence hall.

PragueSacher Torte
In Prague, students will stay in a hotel near the city center.

Meals

Meals are not provided.  

Fees Do Not Include

  • Round Trip Airfare
  • Passport
  • Passport Photos
  • Doctor's Appointment
  • Textbooks and Supplies
  • Transportation to/from Airport
  • Personal Items

Fees

Fees for UC Davis Summer Abroad include the Program Fee, Course Fee, and Accommodations and Activities Fee. The Accommodations and Activities Fee covers lodging, selected meals (if included), selected field trips, group accidental death & dismemberment and emergency health insurance, select publications and additional program specific costs. Airfare is not included. Students will need to pay for some museum entrance fees (approx. $100) because Summer Abroad cannot purchase these items ahead of time. All fees are subject to change.
UC Davis Summer Abroad Fees
$1000.00 Program Fee
(includes $300 non-refundable deposit)
$1176.00 Course Fee ($147/unit X 8 units)*
$1324.00 Accommodations and Activities Fee
$3500.00 TOTAL ESTIMATED FEES CHARGED TO STUDENTS
* This fee level is based on the proposed 2007-08 governor's budget. The fees are subject to Regental, legislative, and gubernatorial action and may change without notice.