Results for GERMAN

Developing the courage to do what is right and maintaining the strength to resist evil in the face of personal persecution are fundamental human dilemmas. Many who lived in Nazi Germany had neither the courage, the intellectual and/or spiritual means, nor the strength to speak or act against the evil with which they were confronted. But some did possess courage and strength, and they serve as touchstones for understanding the best of the human spirit during the worst of times. This course focuses on documents generated by nonmilitary resistance groups during the period of National Socialism. Letters, essays, diaries, and statements on ethics from the Bonhoeffer and Scholl families form the core of the readings. The resistance novel, Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada, is also included. Texts will be read as historical documents, reflections of German thought, statements of conscience, attempts to maintain normal relationships with others in the face of great risk, as poetic works, and as guides for the development of an ethical life.

The German writers Georg Büchner (1813-1837) and Frank Wedekind (1864-1918). Many of the most important theater and film directors of the last century, including Max Reinhardt, G. W. Pabst, Orson Welles, Robert Wilson, and Werner Herzog, have wrestled with their works, as have composers and writers from Alban Berg and Bertolt Brecht through Christa Wolf and Thalia Field. Rock artists as diverse as Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Duncan Sheik, and Metallica have recently rediscovered their urgency. Reading these works in translation and examining artistic creations they inspired. Classroom discussions and written responses; students also rehearse and present in-class performances of excerpts from the plays. The aim of these performances is not to produce polished stagings but to creatively engage with the texts and their interpretive traditions. No previous theatrical experience required.

How do conservatives respond to the modern world? How do they find a balance between tradition and freedom, or between stability and change? This seminar will examine selections from some conservative and some classically liberal writers that address these questions. At the center of the course are thinkers who left Germany and Austria before the Second World War: Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt. We will also look at earlier European writers, such Edmund Burke and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as some recent American thinkers. Taught in English.

This course explores German history, culture and politics by tracing five (largely untranslatable) words and exploring the debates they have engendered in Germany over the past 200 years. This course is intended as preparation for students wishing to spend a quarter at the Bing Overseas Studies campus in Berlin, but is open to everyone. Preference to sophomores.

This course focuses on documents generated by nonmilitary resistance groups during the period of National Socialism. Letters, essays, diaries, and statements on ethics from the Bonhoeffer and Scholl families form the core of the readings. The resistance novel, Every Man Dies Alone, is also included. Texts will be read as historical documents, reflections of German thought, statements of conscience, attempts to maintain normal relationships with others in the face of great risk, as poetic works, and as guides for the development of an ethical life. Taught in English.

For Seniors who are declared German Studies majors. How to write about various topics in German Studies for a wide public through opinion pieces or blogs. Topics based on student interests: current politics, economics, European affairs, start-ups in Germany. Intensive focus on writing. Taught in English. Fulfills the WIM requirement.

Historical, biographical, linguistic, and literary look at the Kinder- and Hausmarchen of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Readings from the fairy tales, plus materials in other media such as film and the visual arts. Four short essays, one or two oral reports. Preference to Freshmen; class then opens to all. Fulfills WIM for German majors (must be taken for letter grade.) In German.

This course provides an opportunity to engage with issues and actors, politicians and parties in contemporary Germany, while building German language abilities. We will work with current events texts, news reports, speeches and websites. Course goals include building analytic and interpretive capacities of political topics in today's Europe, including the European Union, foreign policy, and environmentalism. Differences between US and German political culture are a central topic. At least one year German language study required.

This course has two primary goals. First, it is designed to provide students with a visual and linguistic foundation for discussing and writing about German film from the Weimar period to the present. To that end we will review important genres, directors, and technological developments in the history of German film. Second, using film as a lens, we will examine several key moments in German cultural history from the 1920s to the present. Certain themes will reoccur throughout the course, including gender, the city, technology, violence, and social crisis. All materials and class discussion in German.(Meets Writing-in-the-Major requirement)

Introduction to the reading and interpretation of lyrical poetry in German from the 18th century to present. Readings include poems by Goethe, Holderlin, Brentano, Eichendorff, Heine, Rilke, Trakl, Celan, Brecht. Ways of thinking about and thinking with poetry. Attention to poetic form, voice, figural language, and the interaction of sensory registers. Taught in German.

Published in 1924, The Magic Mountain is a novel of education, tracing the intellectual growth of a budding engineer through a maze of intellectual encounters during a seven- year sojourn in a sanatorium set high in the Swiss Alps. It engages with the key themes of modernism: the relativity of time, the impact of psychoanalysis, the power of myth, and an extended dispute between an optimistic belief in progress and a pessimistic vision of human nature. Through its detailed discussion of disease (tuberculosis), this remarkable text connects the study of medicine to the humanities. There will be an exploration of this rich and profound novel both as a document of early twentieth-century Europe and as a commentary on the possibilities of education that are urgent for liberal arts education today. Taught in English.

This course covers material from the fairy tales of German romanticism, expressionist poetry and painting, literary responses to Nazi Germany and reflections on a unified Germany. Exploring the shifting relationships between cultural aesthetics, entertainment, historical context, and "what is German" we will cover roughly 250 years of literary and artistic production, social and political upheavals, as well as the lives of numerous authors, both male and female. Taught in German.

Key moments in German history through documents: personal accounts, political speeches and texts, and literary works. The course begins with the Prussian monarchy and proceeds to the crisis years of the French Revolution. Documents from the 1848 revolution and the age of Bismarck and German unification follow. World War I and its impact on Germany, including the rise of Hitler, as well as the aftermath, divided Germany in the Cold War through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Taught in German.

We read and discuss selections from works by the key master thinkers who have exerted a lasting influence by debunking long-cherished beliefs. Do these authors uphold or repudiate Enlightenment notions of rationality, autonomy and progress? How do they assess the achievements of civilization? How do their works illuminate the workings of power in social and political contexts? Readings and discussion in German.

Even before Novalis claimed that the world must be romanticized, thinkers, writers, and artists wanted to perceive the human and natural world poetically. The pre- and post-romantic poetic modes of thinking they created are the subject of this course. Readings include Ecclestias, Zhaozhou Congshen, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Kafka, Benjamin, Arendt, and Sontag. This course will also present poetic thinking in the visual arts--from the expressionism of Ingmar Bergman to the neo-romanticism of Gerhard Richter.

Required gateway course for Philosophical and Literary Thought; crosslisted in departments sponsoring the Philosophy and Literature track: majors should register in their home department; non-majors may register in any sponsoring department. Introduction to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Issues may include authorship, selfhood, truth and fiction, the importance of literary form to philosophical works, and the ethical significance of literary works. Texts include philosophical analyses of literature, works of imaginative literature, and works of both philosophical and literary significance. Authors may include Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Borges, Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas, Pavel, and Pippin. Taught in English.

Survey of Germany at war through historical, theoretical and literary accounts. War in the international system and the role of technology. Religious wars, rationalization of warfare, violence and politics, terrorism. War films, such as All Quiet on the Western Front. Readings by authors such as Clausewitz, Jünger, Remarque, Schimtt, and Arendt. Taught in English.

An historical perspective on the intellectual and social impact of developments in information technology will be examined. Focusing on the evolution of media from scrolls to codices to printed books we will look at the social, historical, cultural, and economic sources and ramifications of innovation in media and information technology, and explore why such innovation occurs in certain places and within certain social groups and not others. Examples draw from German cultural history, e.g. Gutenberg and the printing press, but also from the broader European history of the book. Students will have the opportunity to work with historical materials from Special Collections. Taught in English.

This class will address major works by Franz Kafka and consider Kafka as a modernist writer whose work reflects on modernity. We will also examine the role of Kafka's themes and poetics in the work of contemporary writers. (Meets Writing-in-the-Major requirement)

Each student participates in a capstone interview and discussion with a panel of the German Studies faculty on topics related to German cultural and literary analysis. In prepration for the interview/discussion, students submit written answers to a set of questions based on several authentic cultural texts in German. The written answers, normally in English, should be well-formed and coherent. Within the interview/discussion, students must demonstrate a further understanding of the topic(s) posed, through cogent argument.

Repeatable for Credit. Instructor Consent Required

Central Europe is not a clearly defined region so much as an idea debated with particular intensity in the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Part reality part fantasy, "Central Europe" refers to a contested space between East and West, between cosmopolitanism and provincial narrowness, a space whose diversity has fostered cultural creativity, political conflict and utopian fantasy. Our survey will focus on fiction, memoires and essayistic commentary from the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It will comprise the dissolution of the empire, the interwar years, the Cold War decades and the postcommunist era. Attention to the predicament of small nations, "minor" literatures and cultural cross-pollination. Authors include Musil, Kafka, Roth, Kosztolányi, Márai, Hasek, Svevo, Kis, Torberg, Hrabal, Kundera, Esterházy, Magris. Discussion and readings in English.

This seminar offers a survey of literary, cultural and intellectual developments in German-speaking lands from ca.1200 to 1600. We will begin our investigation with a sampling of medieval heroic epic, romance, lyric poetry, and mysticism. From there we will move into humanism and consider the invention of print and the popular literary forms characteristic of Reformation culture in the German lands. Discussion in English. All texts are available in modern German or English translation. Undergraduates enroll in 220 for 5 units, graduate students enroll in 320 for 8 units.

How German writers respond to the rise of historical awareness in the long nineteenth century. The role of historical precedents and models, especially Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman legacies, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the French Revolution and its aftermath. The vexed relation between cultural production, material circumstances and political agency. The belatedness of German modernity and the anomalous character of Germany's development. France as a screen for the projection of nationalist and utopian fantasies. Authors include Herder, Goethe, Fichte, Heine, Büchner, Marx, Nietzsche, Fontane. Taught in German. Undergraduates enroll in 220 for 5 units, German graduate students enroll in 320 for 8 units.

Masters of German 20th- and 21st-Century literature and philosophy as they present aesthetic innovation and confront the challenges of modern technology, social alienation, manmade catastrophes, and imagine the future. Readings include Nietzsche, Freud, Rilke, Musil, Brecht, Kafka, Doeblin, Benjamin, Juenger, Arendt, Musil, Mann, Adorno, Celan, Grass, Bachmann, Bernhardt, Wolf, and Kluge. Taught in English. Undergraduates enroll in 222 for 5 units, graduate students enroll in 322 for 8 units.

Both identity and narration rely on memory and (some extent of) cohesion. What happens in the case of dementia, when the ability to remember fails and language tends to disintegrate? Reading scientific and (fictitious or biographical) literary texts, we will analyze competing concepts of forgetting, their bioethical and political impact against the backdrop of (post-) World War II, possible differences between European and American ways of relating dementia, and the aesthetic strategies of telling stories about the breakdown of language. Readings include literary texts by J. Bernlef, Irene Dische, Ulrike Draesner, Jonathan Franzen, Arno Geiger, Michael Ignatieff, Tilman Jens, and Alice Munro. Taught in English with some readings in German. 6-week course, offered weeks 1-6.

Written in the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, Hegel's masterpiece is a freewheeling philosophical story about what Hegel takes to be the experiential path that consciousness must traverse from rudimentary awareness to insight into the absolute truth. Experience, as Hegel understands it, is a necessary process in the course of which consciousness becomes estranged from itself in order finally to recognize itself in its object. This recognition seals the knowledge that thought is not finite and constrained by an inert reality but absolutely free, the only source of authority for modern subjects. We will ask whether Hegel's thesis about the supremacy of conceptual thought is compatible with his reliance on narrative form and dramatic impersonation. How does Hegel's survey of rival models of consciousness and forms of life relate to historical reality? Is the ideal of modernity upheld by Hegel still relevant in the light of recent developments? Discussion and readings in English.

Frequently associated with the work of Richard Wagner, The Total Work of Art (or Gesamtkunstwerk) is a genre that aims to synthesize a range of artistic forms into an organic unity, a unity that both models and helps to forge an ideal state. This seminar will examine the history of the Gesamtkunstwerk from its roots in German Romanticism to the present day, focusing on the genre's relations with technology and mass culture across a wide range of media. Creations we will consider include Wagner's Festival Theatre at Bayreuth, Walter Gropius' plans for a Totaltheater, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's radio-oratorio The Lindbergh Flight, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, Walt Disney's theme parks, Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and Bill Gates' "home of the future." Taught in English.

Eighteenth-century culture seen as permeated by intellectual and artistic practices and plays pushing principles of reason and rationality to an extreme that becomes self-undercutting. Such obsessions and practices are becoming more visible and prominent now, as the traditional concept of "Enlightenment" (synonymous with the 18th century) is undergoing a profound transformation. Among the protagonists of this seminar will be: Diderot as a philosopher and novelist; Lichtenberg as a scientist and writer of everyday notes; Goya, accusing violence and obsessed with nightmarish visions; Mozart as the excessive master of repetition and variation.

This course is devoted to Germany's role and policy in international relations since 1990. It is based on the premise that Germany's post-Cold War foreign policy was shaped by two potentially conflicting impulses which is historical learning versus the country's economic role and geopolitical position. The course's objective is to make students familiar with the overall conditions of German Foreign Policy in the post-Cold War era and to analyze related tensions and dilemmas. Empirical examples are Germany's role in the Yugoslavian wars in the first half of the 1990s, the transatlantic crisis over the Iraq war of 2003 and Germany's engagement in Afghanistan and German Foreign Policy during the country's tenure as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council 2011-2012. Discussion in English; German reading knowledge required.

Walter Benjamin's work as cultural historian, critic, literary author and philosopher, seen from the trajectory of a German-Jewish intellectual life in the context of the first half of the 20th century. Providing such a historical perspective will be the condition for an actively critical reading of Benjamin's works; a reading that -- counter to the predominant Benjamin-reception -- will try to distinguish between works of purely biographical and historical interest and those Benjamin texts that prove to be of great and lasting intellectual value. Taught in English.

Drawing on literature, the arts, political discourse, museums, and new media, this course asks why and how we take interest in the watershed events of the modern era; how does contemporary culture engages with modern, made-made disasters such as the World Wars or 9/11? Readings and viewings include the literature of G. Grass, W. G. Sebald, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy; the cinema of Kathryn Bigelow and Steven Spielberg; speeches by Barak Obama; and the theoretical writing of Walter Benjamin, Hayden White, Fredric Jameson, among others. Taught in English.

The nineteenth century witnessed profound developments in neurological and psychological sciences, developments that fundamentally altered conceptions of embodiment, agency, and mind. This course will place these scientific shifts in conversation with theatrical transformations of the period. We will read nineteenth-century neuropsychologists such as Charles Bell, Johannes Müller, George Miller Beard, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Hippolyte Bernheim alongside artists such as Percy Shelley, Georg Büchner, Richard Wagner, Émile Zola, and August Strindberg.

Concern for environmental threats increasingly draw on traditions of cultural and civilizational criticism. This course explores literary and cultural dimensions of environmentalist discourse, especially in German-speaking Europe but with opportunities for comparative treatments of ecological tendencies in other countries. Topics include: Environmentalism as progressive or as conservative; ambivalence toward technology; sustainability and the critique of growth; humans and animals. Authors such as F. Jünger, Jahnn, Wolf, C. Amery, Dath, with comparisons to Leopold, Atwood, Ghosh, Latouche and others. Reading knowledge of German or permission of instructor.

Open only to German majors and to students working on special projects, including written reports for internships. Honors students use this number for the honors essay. May be repeated for credit.

The seminar provides an opportunity to study some of the seminal texts of Critical Theory dealing with music. Concentrating on Theodor Adorno's writings on music, we will also include key philosophers who informed Adorno's thinking (in particular Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche), influential nineteenth-century aesthetics of music (Hoffmann, Schopenhauer and Hanslick), other contemporaries of Adorno (for example, Ernst Bloch), and some later authors whose work was influenced by the Frankfurt School (such as Carl Dahlhaus). We will also consider the impact of Critical Theory on recent scholarship. Weekly meetings will be organized around various topics, ranging from central concepts such as "Enlightenment" and "musical material" to individual composers. Music by Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Weill will feature prominently on the syllabus.

This seminar offers a survey of literary, cultural and intellectual developments in German-speaking lands from ca.1200 to 1600. We will begin our investigation with a sampling of medieval heroic epic, romance, lyric poetry, and mysticism. From there we will move into humanism and consider the invention of print and the popular literary forms characteristic of Reformation culture in the German lands. Discussion in English. All texts are available in modern German or English translation. Undergraduates enroll in 220 for 5 units, graduate students enroll in 320 for 8 units.

How German writers respond to the rise of historical awareness in the long nineteenth century. The role of historical precedents and models, especially Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman legacies, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the French Revolution and its aftermath. The vexed relation between cultural production, material circumstances and political agency. The belatedness of German modernity and the anomalous character of Germany's development. France as a screen for the projection of nationalist and utopian fantasies. Authors include Herder, Goethe, Fichte, Heine, Büchner, Marx, Nietzsche, Fontane. Taught in German. Undergraduates enroll in 220 for 5 units, German graduate students enroll in 320 for 8 units.

Masters of German 20th- and 21st-Century literature and philosophy as they present aesthetic innovation and confront the challenges of modern technology, social alienation, manmade catastrophes, and imagine the future. Readings include Nietzsche, Freud, Rilke, Musil, Brecht, Kafka, Doeblin, Benjamin, Juenger, Arendt, Musil, Mann, Adorno, Celan, Grass, Bachmann, Bernhardt, Wolf, and Kluge. Taught in English. Undergraduates enroll in 222 for 5 units, graduate students enroll in 322 for 8 units.

A number of faculty will present published work and discuss their research and composition process. We will read critical, theoretical, and literary texts that address, in different ways, "What is a World?" Taught in English.

This class will address major works by Franz Kafka and consider Kafka as a modernist writer whose work reflects on modernity. We will also examine the role of Kafka's themes and poetics in the work of contemporary writers. (Meets Writing-in-the-Major requirement)

A forum for German Studies graduate students to present their work and ndiscuss it with German Studies faculty and with their peers, and take first nsteps toward a successful career in and outside the academy.May be repeat for credit

Repeatable for Credit

Repeatable for Credit. Instructor Consent Required.

Focusing on literature that precedes three major events in German history- the Reformation, the Second World War, and German reunification- this course explores German cultural output leading up to moments of fissure. Beginning in 1930s Frankfurt, exploring a pre- and post- reunified Berlin, and returning to the Middle Ages, students will develop an understanding of the role of literature as a critical indicator of social and cultural paradigm shifts. Through the study of the diverse set of authors and literature under consideration, students will explore a variety of categorization issues such as medium, religion, ideology, gender and secularization.

Focus on influential theories of aesthetic experience as an autonomous cultural domain that supplements science and morality. How the discovery of beauty and sublimity in nature led to an unprecedented celebration of art as the highest form of human activity. The problem of the relation between aesthetic experience and conceptual understanding. Readings by Kant, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, Hegel, and more recent responses to their works. Taught in English.

Advanced study in the humanities faces changes within fields, the university and the wider culture. Considers the debate over the status of the humanities with regard to historical genealogies and current innovations. Particular attention on changes in doctoral education. Topics include: origins of the research university; disciplines and specialization; liberal education in conflict with professionalization; literature and literacy education; interdisciplinarity as a challenge to departments; education policy; digital humanities; accountability in education, assessment and student-centered pedagogies.

Working through the most systematically important texts by Martin Heidegger and their historical moments and challenges, starting with Being and Time (1927), but emphasizing his philosophical production after World War II. The philological and historical understanding of the texts function as a condition for the laying open of their systematic provocations within our own (early 21st-century) situations. Satisfies the capstone seminar requirement for the major tracks in Philosophy and Literature. Taught in English.

Working through the most systematically important texts by Martin Heidegger and their historical moments and challenges, starting with Being and Time (1927), but emphasizing his philosophical production after World War II. The philological and historical understanding of the texts function as a condition for the laying open of their systematic provocations within our own (early 21st-century) situations. Satisfies the capstone seminar requirement for the major tracks in Philosophy and Literature. Taught in English.