Berlin America Institute
The Berlin America Institute was an educational institution for English and American studies that existed from 1910 to 1945. It was built from 1908 with financial support from industrialists, bankers and Kaiser Wilhelm II .
Hugo Münsterberg , exchange professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (FWU), opened it in 1910 with 10 employees. It was not a university institution, but was intended to provide auxiliary science services to any public institution that needed information about the United States . Representatives of the Prussian Ministry of Culture and the FWU sat on its board of trustees.
During the First World War it was used for information and propaganda, after which it was supposed to revive the cultural exchange with the USA. From 1919 onwards it was directed by the assistant of the America Institute, Karl Oscar Bertling . In 1926/27 the institute was incorporated into the America department of the English Department of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. The seminar had organized language and culture courses since 1921/22 under Alois Brandl and Wilhelm Dibelius .
From 1936, the institute was headed by Friedrich Schönemann , who was also head of the America department of the German Institute for International Studies (DAWI) of Franz Six .
In 1945 the institute was dissolved. In 1955, as part of the founding of the West Berlin FU Berlin , a new America Institute was created, which was converted into an inter-faculty institute in 1963 and renamed the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies . Ernst Fraenkel became its director .
An America Institute has also existed at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich since 1949.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Christian H. Freitag: "The development of American studies in Berlin up to 1945 taking into account the American work of state and private organizations". Berlin Diss. 1977.
- ^ Frank-Rutger Hausmann: English and American Studies in the “Third Reich” . Klostermann, Berlin 2003 ( partly online ).