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Words From Friedman Kline Winner Ace Chisholm
As a recipient of the Friedman-Kline Family Foundation Fellowship, I wanted to extend my deepest thanks for your aid, which made it possible for me to participate in the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG) program Summer in Bonn at the Akademie für internationale Bildung (AiB).
The culture course, Bonn - Cultural Capital of the Rhineland, was a very fast-paced course, meeting only a couple times a week with only an hour and a half to cover material and filling the other days with relevant excursions. It was a bit of a survey course, having only four weeks to cover significant architecture, art, poetry, music, and history. I wish there had been more time to delve deeper into each topic, but it did well with the time it had available. My interest was piqued the most during the section on the Rhine in music and poetry, and I and two classmates led a presentation and class discussion on Romanticism and the Lorelei, examining her development from a story of a girl inspired by the landscape of the Lorelei rock to her literary transformation into a siren to her voice as an alert to political danger to her pop culture image as a femme fatale figure. In addition to learning the historical factors of Bonn’s appointment as the provisional German capital, I also learned about and personally observed some of the impacts of its time as a capital city and its remaining status as a UN city.