David Kretz

Where are you from originally and which program were you enrolled in at Bard College Berlin?

I am from Vienna, Austria and enrolled in the Value Studies B.A. in 2012, which is now the B.A. in Humanities, the Arts, and Social Thought.

How would you describe, in a nutshell, the experience of studying at Bard College Berlin?

It's been a transformative experience on many levels. Before I came to Berlin I studied Philosophy and Business in Vienna. Studying at BCB taught me to see the world through even more different disciplines, to feel at home in them, but – more importantly – it challenged me to look at it without any disciplinary glasses, to experience it always anew as fresh, strange, and wondrous. I was quite active in university politics and that, too, has helped me to grow as a person and taught me some good lessons. Many of my colleagues, and also quite a few of my teachers, have become close friends.

How has the college influenced the path you've taken since completing the program?

After BCB, I first enrolled in an MA in Contemporary Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. Since 2018, I am a PhD student in Germanic Studies and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. There I continue to work on a project that really started for me with my BCB senior thesis: on the figure of the poet and the figure of the translator as two paradigms for political action in moments of crisis.