Young European Summer School  

The Young European Summer School will take place in 2025 from July 13th to 26th. The 2025 summer school will take place under the theme “What is enlightenment?”

The summer school is aimed at 16 to 18-year-old students from Germany and other European countries with a good knowledge of German (level B2). In joint seminars in Ossmannstedt, visits to museums in Weimar and our own research in the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, we deal with texts from around 1800 and question them about their relevance for our time. At the end there is a separate presentation on a topic of your choice.

Participation fee: 100 euros for overnight accommodation, meals, seminars, excursions and admission fees

Participants are responsible for organising and financing their arrival and departure.

Accommodation: Manor house of the poet Christoph Martin Wieland, the Education Centre at the Wieland Estate in Ossmannstedt.

You can register directly using the registration form until April 30th. You will receive feedback by 14th May the latest as to whether you are participating.

For more information as well as registration please visit our German website.

The Young European Summer School is supported by the Gesellschaft Anna Amalia Bibliothek e.V., the Literary Society of Thuringia e.V. and the Friedrich Foundation.

Review of 2024/2023

The Young European Summer School took place in 2024 under the theme “The discovery of the modern self in literature”.

The past few years have been a challenge for Europe: the Corona crisis with its consequences as well as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East made the vulnerability of societies visible. Nevertheless, the oft-cited failure of the European idea ignores the fact that Europe has developed - solely through people coming into contact, through trips abroad, through study stays, through the experience of multilingualism and through engagement with the common cultural heritage.

This is where the Young European Summer School started. As the annual theme for 2024, it asked the question of the modern self against the background of its historical perspective and in today's world.
The seminar was divided into joint seminars, excursions, including a visit to Erfurt and a hike in the Thuringian Forest, and the participants' independent work in the Duchess Anna Amalia Library. They connected their topic areas with current problems and presented their results to an interested public at the end of the two weeks.
 

The Young European Summer School 2023 was dedicated to the topic “Home Europe?”.

The starting point for the questions was the “difficult” development of the German nation in the nineteenth century. This national identity formation is particularly visible in the “material” cultural heritage in Weimar. During the workshop we looked at the different historical and current influences from the participants' different countries of origin. We asked the questions about identity and home in Europe in context to the background of their historical perspective. We related three areas to each other: historical texts, the rich cultural landscape in and around Weimar and finally and above all: the experiences of the participants with their different living environments.