France & Germany UC Irvine Program Sept 2026

September 1 – 10, 2026

CIEL just completed another France and Germany student trip with a group of students from the University of California, Irvine. Over ten days we moved through Paris, Normandy, Strasbourg, Colmar, and Berlin, examining a relationship between two countries that went to war three times between 1870 and 1945 and now anchor much of the European Union.

The program centered on the occupation and resistance in France, the institutions built after 1945 to bind the two countries together, and the way Germany handles memory today. Students visited the Mémorial de la Shoah and Mont Valérien in Paris, then Omaha Beach and the American and German cemeteries in Normandy. They met with researchers at IFRI, the Franco-German Youth Office, Fabienne Keller at the European Parliament, the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin, the office of Bundestag member Yannick Bury, German co-chair of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly, and Christian Braun, a scholar of the ethics of war and peace.