As anyone who has stood before a painting by Gustav Klimt will readily attest, Vienna's golden age literally glittered with gold. It began to glow in the 1850s and shone brightest from the turn-of-the-20th century until those pistol shots were fired in Sarajevo in 1914. Of course, no one knew then they had been living in a golden age. They would realize that only later, after the gold had been tarnished, stripped, and finally stolen.
It has been over a week since the conclusion of the 2014 Centropa Summer Academy. It probably will be many more weeks until I can truly process everything that was seen, felt, experienced and learned during the trip. It is rare that a place can blow you away, exceeding any expectations that you may have. Even more rare is it happening in three different cities.
Using the Centropa film "Max Uri -Looking for Frieda", which is a touching love story, together with Emily Dickinson's poem "I Held a Jewel", you can expose your students to learning history, poetry and culture.Through an individual life story of a couple falling in love and then being separated by the war, your students will experience and learn about Jewish life in Vienna prior to WWII.
The poem is used as an analogy to love, or to what is meaningful in life .
The interactive film scripts combine the scripts of the Centropa Films with the links metioned in the Study Guides, thus marking various historical, cultural and geographical references.
You can use the film scripts in your class in order to understand the film better and help students to dig deeper in the (personal) stories by exploring history.
The film scripts are available in English and German and can be downloaded as PDF documents.