Alumni on ECLA
Stefan Przybilka, Germany
Attended: Academy Year 2003/04
Currently: Student, Law, Humboldt University
Would forlorn hope be the term to qualify the attempt of communicating something with words that can't be understood but by living it?
Well, I won't deliver an explanation of how some things at ECLA really are beyond words, nor will I be content to get down to those elements that are easily accessible to them. Instead, let me try to use my mental distance to current ECLA everyday life to materialise some of the feelings I carried out of the place after one year, and what reflection has made of them. Those very personal thoughts left aside, I don't think it is necessary to emphasise again that I highly esteem ECLA and that I can recommend it to anyone who is willing to see the benefit of education on a larger scale than the purely professional one.
Towards the end of the ECLA year and still more after it was over I came to realise what had unimitably belonged to it - something fairly unspectacular if you wish, but all the more precious. This thing, let me call it unity.
Imagine a few dozen people, most of them in their lower twenties, gathered together by the invisible hand of the ECLA selection committee. Imagine those people - they are from all over the place, with differing backgrounds and evenly different outlooks - coming together in Berlin: a city most are not or just briefly acquainted with. Let them live under one roof, work on similar topics and discover their city together. The community you obtain is highly diversified and highly knit at the same time. Its setup is artificial: it would never have spawned organically or, in other words, there is a shape-granting will behind it. And I doubt it could go on existing for a long period of time. Vitalising tension entails strain and, sooner or later, weariness (a very rewarding one though!). The social experiment at ECLA is bonded to the educational one - the ECLA experience being unlocked in my view by a successful adaptation to those unique circumstances.
Modern life (and life in general) tends to be hostile towards a focus that aims at uniting most aspects of a person's life under one guiding principle. ECLA, in my opinion, will be worthwhile for anyone willing to adhere to such a principle. This will uncover the possibilities contained in ECLA, more fully so as brevity makes intensity. It may be your only chance to become acquainted with a way of life largely sheltered from the centrifugal forces normally present. By providing a stable framework for that unity, ECLA can claim more of a right of existence as an institution than some of the bigger universities that are really only administering a conglomeration of solitary autodidacts.
Looking back from today, I cherish my ECLA time as a glimpse on something unattainable. More than that, I have come to estimate it as something lost quite irretrievably, yet worthy to be striven for in the attempt to keep meaning within sight among the fragments of a life.