Days of Rage: Exploring Militancy & Political Action through The Weather Underground, Red Army Faction, Anonymous & Wikileaks

Summer (4 weeks), 4 credits

Prerequisites: 2.8 minimum GPA, and at least sophomore status by the start of the program.

Each summer, a Lang instructor leads a course during a four-week summer session at the Freie Universität Berlin International Summer (FUBiS).

This course investigates the many similarities between the young, middle-class radicals of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in Berlin’s student movements, the American Weather Underground, and today’s Wikileaks, as well as Anonymous, the loosely associated international network of hackers, whistleblowers, and hoaxers. Can Anonymous be understood as modern-day equivalent of the RAF or the Weather Underground, which originated in the late sixties and early seventies? We’ll start by exploring how U.S. counter cultures of that time informed emerging Internet culture, and move on by studying how today’s media activists respond to the realities of economic inequality, racism, and injustice.

Through our studies, we will learn that moral indignation, militancy, and disruptive acts of civil disobedience both online and off, can play both constructive and harmful roles in efforts at positive social change. After successful completion of this course, participants should be able to demonstrate the ability to give a nuanced account of the challenges and mechanisms of social change expedited through political action and media activism, and specifically the role of Anonymous, Wikileaks, the RAF, and the Weather Underground.

Readings are supplemented with 5 field trips to locations that are relevant to the topics discussed such as C-Base (the infamous center of Berlin’s hacker scene), Tactical Tech, Deutsches Technikmuseum, and site-based conversations with political activists and media artists.

Seminar-style discussions of texts by Fred Turner, Gabriella Coleman, Jeremy Varon, and others, complemented by the scheduled field trips, will alternate with screenings of films by Sam Green, Margaretha von Trotta, Brian Knappenberger, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Harun Farocki, and Werner Fassbinder.