Participants
Christoph RaetzschFreie Universität Berlin
I was born in Potsdam in 1980 where I spent my entire childhood until the
breakdown of the wall in 1989. My interest in books and music has always been
fostered by my parents and supposedly dates back to that time. For my
secondary education I attended the Hermann-von-Helmholtz Grammar School which
specialized in bilingual training offering courses on history and politics taught in
English. I have always enjoyed learning English (and later also French)
because it gave me the opportunity to discover different cultures and has helped
to make acquaintances all over the world. At the time of my Abitur I started
learning to play the piano and to produce electronic music on various
synthezisers. Apart from playing in a café I listened to lots of WARP's best
artists (Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher) and tried to imitate their kind
of music. To finance my expenses for new instruments I worked in several well
known gardens in Potsdam which brought me into close contact to
nature's beauty as well as the laws of landscape architecture. With the beginning of
my studies at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the FU Berlin in 2001 I was
given the possibility to pursue my interest in the American culture and to
study culture and literature in depth. After a time of orientation I got
interested in the writings of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Henry Miller. In the
field of culture I'm especially interested in products of contemporary
culture (music, film, graphic arts, photography, architecture, urban living)
and the writings of Baudrillard, Toffler and McLuhan. For my further studies
I want to exlore more theory on society (Weber, Luhmann, Simmel) as well as
philosophy of the 20th century.
Paper: Cultural Hybridity
(Session I)
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