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Successful format: Professors lecture to a broad audience at the Saturday Morning Lectures. Photo: Bender LINKS » www.uni-freiburg.de/forschung/­ wissenschaftsmarkt » www.surprising-science.de » www.hochschuldidaktik.uni-freiburg.de » www.studiumgenerale.uni-freiburg.de/­ vortragsreihen/samstags-uni-ws2011-12 » www.scienceslamfreiburg.blogspot.com ever be of any use at all. “As you can imagine, that does not look very good in a headline. But it would be nice if society also had more understanding for this necessary part of science.” Saturday Morning Lectures: From the Farmer’s Market to the Lecture Hall The University of Freiburg is even full of life on the weekend. Each Saturday morning at 11:15 a.m. knowledge-hungry citizens gather on campus to learn about the big bang, the Germans and the forest, mathematics, or the financial crisis. The Saturday Morning Lectures are aimed at an audi- ence that doesn’t usually attend lectures, such as school students, retirees, or people who never went to college. Each lecture series runs for a ­semester and tackles a current topic from various perspectives. The university launched the program in 2006 in cooperation with the Freiburg Adult Edu- cation Center. The lecture series are now even available as audio recordings on the Internet. The program is practically one of a kind in Germany. “I actually had the idea a long time ago,” says Prof. Dr. Günter Schnitzler, director of the Studium Generale Program. “We wanted to open ourselves to the city, invite people to visit us regularly.” The plan worked: People come straight from the farmer’s market on Cathedral Square with their shopping bags. For many of them the lectures have become a Saturday morning ritual. The professors revise their lectures for the pro- gram to make them suitable for a general audience, say Schnitzler and his colleague Dr. Jens Awe. In the beginning, some of them just recycled lectures they had used before for regular students. “That sometimes became a bit awkward.” Today the speakers embellish the lectures and reinforce their arguments by explaining figures with diagrams, showing clips from films, or playing excerpts from pieces of music. They also adapt their language to the mixed audience: no obscure facts in convoluted sentences, no polysyllabic jargon if a more com- mon expression will fit the bill just as well. The most successful lecture series so far dealt with myths, attracting an average of 600 partici- pants every Saturday. So many people wanted to attend Bernhard Zimmermann’s lecture “The Myth in Greek Antiquity” that he had to hold it a second time. The professor of classical philology chose a different focus for his second lecture: “I didn’t have a complete manuscript with me. I find it more ­important to keep an eye on the audience when giving a lecture. Then I can see what the people find interesting or where they start yawning in boredom.” But what do non-experts find interesting about Greek myths? The philologist looked for par- allels to everyday life – for instance in colloquial language. “Everyone knows expressions like ‘a Herculean task’ or ‘Ariadne’s thread.’ So I used them as a starting point: What are the stories ­behind these expressions? And what impact and function did they have for the ancient Greeks?” ­Afterwards, the audience was given the opportu- nity to ask questions. Zimmermann was over- whelmed by the response: Around 50 participants emailed him to ask him for tips on further reading. Many of them visited him during his office hours to ask about things like how Goethe came up with the idea of writing a play about Iphigenia or what kind of relationship Oedipus had with his mother. More- over, he recognizes some of the faces from his Saturday morning lecture in his regular lectures – the best compliment of all. Rimma Gerenstein 8