Bard College Berlin News
Bard College Berlin’s 2025 Commencement Ceremony Honors Graduates
Managing Director Florian Becker opened the ceremony by stressing the responsibility of universities to help maintain constitutional freedoms and democracy. In the four years since this graduating class began their college education, Becker noted, the world has experienced the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, the all-out invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the terrorist attack on Israel, the subsequent and ongoing assault on Gaza, the second election of Donald Trump, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, the ongoing catastrophe in Sudan, and the growing presence of the AfD party in Germany—recently designated as “far-right extremist” by the Federal Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution. Many of these events personally affected the lives of graduating students.
He added, “It seems to me that, no matter where you are heading and for the foreseeable future, your and our freedoms as citizens and thinking human beings remain under threat… But I am confident that, whatever institutions you will join in your professional and civic life, and however imperfect they may be, you are equipped to probe them for their potential to resist such threats and to bend them in the right direction.”
This year’s Commencement address was given by Fatin Abbas. Abbas has previously taught literature courses at Bard College Berlin, including in the Language & Thinking program. She is the author of Ghost Season: A Novel (2023), set in the borderlands of Sudan and South Sudan, the non-fiction collection Black Time: Essays on the Invisible (2025), as well as other internationally-published short fiction, journalism, and non-fiction work. Born in Khartoum, Sudan and raised in New York, she currently resides in Berlin and Cambridge, MA, where she teaches fiction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Drawing from her childhood memories of escaping war in Sudan and her experiences in New York and at the University of Cambridge, Abbas spoke particularly on the feeling of home experienced by students in a diverse, intellectually stimulating university such as Bard College Berlin. “For me, like many people,” she stated, “home has always felt transitory, uncertain, and fleeting… I found a home in books, in literature… And when I was 18, I discovered home at university… College gave me not only a new sense of myself and my own potential, it gave me a new sense of home.”
However, she also acknowledged that the reality facing college graduates today is very different from twenty years ago, shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, the ubiquitousness of social media and AI, rising right-wing extremism, and increasing climate anxiety. She applauded the humanitarian and activist initiatives of students in Berlin and around the world: “You stand in solidarity with those who are weaker and more vulnerable than yourselves… In that sense, you all have been building a home that is even more open and embracing than the one I had.”
“I have great faith in your vision and your courage,” she concluded. “I’m very excited for the homes you will imagine and build for the future—You’re on the right track and you are showing the way.”
Two students were chosen by their peers to address the graduating class: Miyu Sasaki and Sarah Rassem. In a joint speech, they remarked, “We leave this place today, where we learnt to be ourselves. Our path from here will not be easy; it will be a struggle for each of us to find our own place in the world. But we will not be afraid of the new and the different. We already made a choice: a choice to be away from home and to go through an education which did not give us machine-like efficiency or that which can be counted in numbers, but which taught us to value what is slow and complex but meaningful and vital – humanity and empathy, the listening ear, and the writing hand.”
Senior thesis awards were awarded to Gali Har-gil for her thesis “The Political Trigger Points of Theater: Challenging Collective Memory on Stage” and Frosina Kekenovska for her thesis “What’s Behind the Brain Drain? A Survey-Based Analysis of Youth Emigration in North Macedonia.” Students are nominated for the thesis prize by their academic advisors, and one winner for each BA degree is chosen by a committee that includes members of the faculty, university leadership, and the Board of Governors.
Unique to this year’s Commencement ceremony, Ali ATH—Afghan hip hop artist and producer, Artist Protection Fund Fellow, and 2024/2025 artist-in-residence at Bard College Berlin—provided a musical interlude in the form of a live hip hop performance. In a dynamic musical set that had graduates and guests out of their seats dancing along, he performed his songs “Da Baana,” “I Feel Good,” and “To Khobi o Ma Bad.”
Congratulations and best of luck to the Bard College Berlin Class of 2025 as they embark on their post-grad journeys!
By: Sophia Paudel, Bard College Berlin Communications
Post Date: 05-21-2025