German (GE)

An introductory course of the spoken and written language. Aims at the acquisition of basic structures, vocabulary, and sound systems. For students with no previous study of the language.

Continuation of an introductory course of the spoken and written language. Aims at the acquisition of basic structures, vocabulary, and sound systems.

This course introduces German literature and culture while also serving as an introduction to the seminar method of instruction. The course is writing-intensive, with emphasis given to improving students' writing skills through the careful analysis of specific texts.

This course is taught as part of the Summer Berlin Program and is designed as an introductory course for students who have not acquired any formal knowledge of German before enrolling at the University Notre Dame. We will develop skills in the five areas of proficiency: aural comprehension, speaking, reading comprehension, written expression, and cultural competency.

In this course, students will develop written and oral communication skills useful for the German business world. They will become acquainted with various aspects of German business culture and will examine key cultural differences in business practices. The course will include readings and discussions on Germany's role as a global and EU business player.

In this course, students will build on and develop their communicative abilities acquired in Beginning German I and II. The four-skills approach (speaking, listening, reading, and writing) is centered on authentic texts, recordings, videos, and other images. The course includes grammar review, concentrated vocabulary expansion, and intensive practice.

In this bridge course, students will strengthen and refine the four linguistic skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing). Students will work toward greater fluency, accuracy, and complexity of expression. They will debate, analyze, and express opinions. Materials and class discussions will center on a cultural topic that will carry through the entire semester.

In this seminar we want to discuss the processes and historical contexts of creating, maintaining and challenging alterity in the European Middle Ages with a special focus on the lives of Jewish Europeans. We will also compare the relationship of Jews to societies ruled and dominated by Christians and Muslims with the experiences of other (supposedly or real) marginalized groups like so called heretics and "pagans".

This lecture course examines some of the most important events, ideas, and personalities that shaped late Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods of Russian history during the last one hundred years: from the outbreak of the First World War and the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 through the Great Terror of the 1930s, the experience of the Second World War and the emergence of the Soviet Empire, late Stalinism and post-Stalinist developed or mature socialism, the collapse of the communist rule and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, as well as Russia's uneasy transition "out of Totalitarianism" and into Putin's authoritarianism during the first fourteen years of the twentieth-first century. The course is designed for history majors as well as for students in other disciplines with or without background in modern Russian and East European history.

A vampire stalks you through a dark tunnel. A mad scientist gives human form to an android. Regimented masses march beneath monumental swastikas. Some of the most enduring images of the twentieth century were crafted by German filmmakers. They filmed in the shadow of the First World War, in the midst of economic turmoil, in the service of the Nazi dictatorship, and in a Germany divided by the Cold War. They used cinema to grapple with the legacies of military defeat, to articulate their anxieties about industrial modernity, to envision utopian futures, to justify the murder of millions, and to come to terms with these monstrous crimes. This course will integrate the disciplinary insights of history and film studies to examine how Germans confronted the upheavals and traumas associated with modernity, the utopian fantasies and cataclysmic horrors of the twentieth-century. Together, the class will pursue three major objectives. First, students will learn about the most important events and developments of modern German history. They will examine how shifting economic, cultural, and political realities shaped the German film industry, and how filmmakers used their work to understand and intervene in their social, political, and cultural issues of their day. Second, students will learn to critically analyze films. They will learn how the structural components of a film - choices in composition, editing, and sound-mixing - craft meaning through immersive spectacles that speak to audiences on multiple intellectual and emotional levels. Students will explore how filmmakers deploy these techniques to produce awe-inspiring entertainments, sophisticated instruments of propaganda, and radical social critiques. As historical artifacts, films reflect the society which created them. But students will also consider how films, as works of art, survive beyond their historical context, and are reinterpreted by new audiences with new priorities. Finally, students will practice the skills of historical literacy. They will digest, analyze, and criticize important scholarship (secondary literature). They will discern the relevance of particular interpretations for important debates. They will use sustained analysis of films as primary sources to develop, articulate, and defend their own historical interpretations and arguments.

In this class, we will consider existentialism as a European phenomenon that for our purposes begins in the early and mid-nineteenth century with Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and continues in the works of several German and French thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Simone Weil. We will consider some of the principal themes of existentialism - the primacy of authenticity, the pervasiveness of "dread" or Angst, the inescapability of the absurd - and explore them through a number of representative works of philosophy, literature and film.

In this class we will examine the relationship of philosophy and narrative and the impact of narrative on change in ourselves and in the outside world. Although western philosophy is seen as the primary apologist of pure rationality, it had a close relationship to literature throughout times, beginning with Plato and his dialogues. However, there has often been (and still is until today) a fight between philosophers engaging in literary style (think for example of Rousseau) and those who condemned this form of writing as a "pseudo-science" (as did Voltaire, Rousseau's arch-rival).Our goal is to take a close look at this quarrel, the different ways of philosophizing and the arguments around it, asking ourselves how knowledge comes about and what makes a rational argument different from a literary, especially narrative, form of discovery. During this journey we will discuss the how, what-for, and why of philosophy and of literature. For this we will take on an interdisciplinary perspective, which will include not only philosophical thinking but also psychology and literature itself. Students with a love of literature, prospective philosophers interested in the intersection of literature and narrative, and prospective majors in English, foreign languages and literatures, and psychology might find the course especially attractive.

What tortures us [...] is an opinion, and every evil is only as great as we have reckoned it to be. In our own hands we have the remedy. Let us [...] deceive ourselves". (Seneca) Is this good advice to take to heart in our lives? Does self-deception make us happy? Or does it pose dangers to our moral integrity, so that sincerity should always be our ideal? In this course, we will look at important answers to these questions. We will also discuss what other philosophical conundrums are associated with self-deception and what solutions to them have been proposed in the literature - by contemporary thinkers and by thinkers of the tradition.

This is the discussion section for GE 20410

Over the last decade or so, there has been a new and prominent wave of "New Atheism," often promoted in popular books that reach a wide and, apparently, appreciative audience. Yet, atheism is as old as religion itself, and in the Western tradition has roots that extend into the earliest recorded history. In this class we will consider atheism on its own merits - its arguments, values, and intentions - but also as a historical phenomenon, tracing its original expressions and especially its rise during the "modern" period beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries. We will thus focus on Spinoza, Hume, d'Holback, Ludwig Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and among the "New Atheists" Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchins. This course will be taught in English.

This course is taught as part of the Summer Berlin Program and is designed for students who have begun learning German on campus before attending the summer program. We will work intensively to further develop the five skills areas of proficiency: aural comprehension, speaking, reading comprehension, written expression, and cultural competency.

By calling into question the pervasive inequalities throughout history and within the dominant capitalist economic system, by challenging the very foundation of Western philosophy and culture, and by interrogating our psychological conception of ourselves, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud respectively have undeniably changed our world by revolutionizing the way we think about it. These three emerged from the intellectual and political tumult of the 19th century with new visions of humanity and its place in the world. This course will serve as an introductory guide for students to these revolutionary thinkers’ ideas as presented in their writing, placing it in its intellectual-historical context while also exploring its consequences for the present by looking at its resonance in contemporary culture. We will analyze these philosophers both in terms of their individual contributions to philosophical discourse as well as their collective position as the “masters of suspicion” in the words of the French philosopher Paul Ricœur, inaugurating a new age of skepticism toward the traditional underpinnings of Western culture from social organization, religion, and morality to human agency and the very act of thinking.

In consultation with the instructor the student will work on introductory German language grammar and syntax

Violence and bloodshed have long been central to the modern conception of the middle ages. In recent film and literature, the perceived "realism" of a given work tends, by and large, to correspond directly with the willingness of the creators to depict brutality. Even in the medievalism of popular fantasy, the depiction of violence in all its varied forms, from the battlefield to the bedchamber, has been justified and excused by claims of representing past realities of common experience. This course will question just how violent the middle ages were, and for whom. More importantly, it will seek to understand how the varied cultures and peoples of medieval Europe conceptualized and understood violence themselves, and what role it played in their lives and imaginations. In the course of our investigation, we will explore literary narratives of vengeance and crusade and farcical tales of household bloodshed. We will read law codes and sermons attempting to regulate and channel violence. We will read accounts, justifications, and repudiations of torture, execution, and mercy. We will read about peace-making and peace- breaking, and the stories that were told about it. We will question what constitutes violence, and how violence relates to shifting categories of gender, class, and group identity. In all of this, we will seek to identify the differences and similarities between their conceptions of violence and our own can teach us not only about them, but about ourselves.

A historical overview and critical analysis of the impact of selected, eminent women from the German-speaking world from the Middle Ages to the present including, among others, Hildegard von Bingen, Hannah Arendt, and Angela Merkel. The course analyzes how their contributions and actions have shaped cultural, political, scientific, and social discourse, structures, and institutions in Germany and beyond. While the emphasis is on German culture and society, the course work encourages students to explore and make connections to women from other cultures and societies who have shattered glass ceilings and made a mark on their world. Taught in English.

Why did one of the most cultivated European nations in a few years be transformed into probably the most murderous totalitarian system of history? Aim of the course is to study, first, several aspects of the Weimar republic that render the transition to National Socialism less enigmatic. We will read the Weimar constitution, study several of the works of the leading jurist Carl Schmitt, who both intelligently interpreted the constitution and later became a fanatic supporter of Nationalsocialism, and look at literary and filmic expressions of the slow dissolution of bourgeois morality. We will, secondly, read Joachim Fest's biography of Hitler, Hannah Arendt's classical study of totalitarianism, and Robert Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism, which offers a comparative perspective. Students will be encouraged to reflect on the question of whether a repetition of the events in 1933 is possible.

The years between the First and Second World Wars in Germany, 1918-1933, was a period of tremendous cultural and social experimentation. All of the arts—literature, painting, music, film, architecture—experienced radical transformations, in which artists broke with centuries of traditions and explored new ways of expression and shaping the environment. Politically it was a time of great change as well, with competing ideologies transforming the way people thought of themselves in relation to each other and to society and the state at large. In this class, we will explore some of the major movements, works, and people that characterize this extraordinary decade and a half of transition and upheaval. Topics and figures we will consider are Expressionism, Bauhaus, New Objectivity, Atonal music, Fritz Lang, Bertolt Brecht, Klaus Mann, Irmgard Keun, Marlene Dietrich, Hermann Hesse, Christopher Isherwood, Käthe Kollwitz, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix. Taught in German.

Film festivals are pivotal in shaping film history, curating (trans)national film canons (Vallejo 2020), and discovering new filmmakers. They foster industry networks and cultural dialogues and serve as platforms for negotiating identities and experiences. The rapid growth of film festivals and their increasing function within the production, distribution and exhibition of film has led to the rise of film festival studies (De Valck & Loist 2009; Iordanova 2013). This seminar introduces students to key theories and methods in film festival studies (de Valck, Kredell & Loist 2016; Ostrowska & Falicov 2024). The first part covers the history and theories of film festivals, examining them as networks and ecosystems. This section will also cover methodological approaches in the study of festivals. The second part focuses on specific festivals, analyzing their role in negotiating identities and shaping film history, the formation of audiences and communities through curation and exhibition practices. Attendance at film festivals during the semester is encouraged.

According to the stereotype of Medieval Europe this was a uniform, purely Christian society, but of course the reality was much more complex. During the 1,000 years of history under consideration, ‘Europe' needs to be reframed as part of the ‘Eufrasian world zone', as at least Europe, Western Asia and North Africa were closely connected through migrations, trade and expansions. For example: We know for sure that Jewish people from Israel/Palestine already migrated to cities in the Western part of the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries A.D., but it is unclear whether these communities persisted throughout the so-called Barbarian Invasions north of the Pyrenees or Alps, respectively. From the 11th century onwards, Jewish life is well attested in most parts of the Euro-Mediterranean area. In this seminar we will mainly investigate the history of Jewish people living under Christian rule in Western Europe as well as under Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Eastern Mediterranean. Most written source materials, which are still extant today, were produced by Christians (or Muslims respectively) who either ruled over their Jewish subjects or who most likely recorded atrocities against their heterodox neighbors. Very often these sources are distorted through an inversion of perpetrators and victims. They therefore need to be read with greatest attention and care. It is one aim of the seminar to enable students to deconstruct these distortions and reconstruct the real power relations which shaped the events and their recordings. This of course also holds true for other individuals and groups which were presented as ‘others' to the respective mainstream society. As religion played an important role as a marker of identity and group formation throughout this period, we will also address the portrayal of alleged heretics and so-called ‘pagans' in Christian sources. But we will of course also listen to medieval Jewish voices and scrutinize their portrayal of the surrounding societies and their actions. We will use these medieval examples to critically analyze and discuss how these societies dealt with individuals and groups which they perceived and constructed as ‘other'. Finally, we will also discuss if certain forms and phenomena of anti-Jewish discrimination and violence might justly be understood as premodern forms of Anti-Semitism.

Germany is globally recognized as a leader in the fields of renewable energy, sustainable development, and environmental protection. But how did this come about? In this course, we will examine the roles that culture and history play in shaping human attitudes towards the environment. Our case studies will range over two centuries, from damming projects in the Rhine valley at the start of the nineteenth century to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster at the end of the twentieth. We will study novels, films, and philosophical essays alongside works by leading environmental historians. Over the course of the semester, students will develop a richer understanding of German environmentalism that also includes an awareness of its dark sides, such as the role that nature conservancy played within Nazi ideology. This course will be taught in English.

Gothic, the subject of this course, might be considered a distant relative of not only English but also modern German, Dutch, and the various Scandinavian languages. It is in fact the oldest recorded Germanic language, and was spoken, in one form or another, by related groups who spread southward, eastward, and westward across Europe from the first to the sixth centuries, remaking much of the political landscape but leaving a very small written record. Gothic survives primarily in a late-fourth-century translation of the New Testament, prepared by Ulfila, an Arian bishop of the Goths. This is primarily a language course, in which we will learn the grammar of Gothic and translate passages from the New Testament and the Skeireins (a fragmentary commentary on the Gospel of John). We will also ponder the peculiar purple manuscript with silver script in which Ulfila's translation survives (the Codex argenteus), speculate on the character of the Crimean Gothic recorded over a millennium after Ulfila's death, explore the structural relations among Gothic and the other Germanic languages, and discuss the conceptual roles the Goths have been made to play in the formation of European states, Germanic ethnicity, nationalism, horror fiction, and modern racial separatist movements. No prior knowledge of an older language is required, although, since this is a language course, curiosity and an agile mind are.

In the wake of the Holocaust, the German author Gunther Grass concluded that we now finally knew ourselves. The Holocaust changed everything. Nazi Germany murdered more than six million men, women, and children in a systematic effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Its shocking and spectacular barbarism shattered comfortable ideas about European civilization and called into question the essential goodness of humanity. It compelled scholars to search for new ideas about evil, new words like "genocide" simply to place and comprehend the scale of the slaughter and devastation. Politics, art, culture, and even religions would be fundamentally and irrevocably transformed by the Holocaust. This course will investigate why Nazi Germany attempted to systematically exterminate the Jews of Europe, explore why so many Germans either participated in or accepted this act of mass violence, and consider why other Europeans so often assisted them. It will investigate the legacies of the Holocaust; how survivors and their families attempted to rebuild their lives in the wake of horror, how Germans variously struggled to come to terms with what they, their countrymen, or their ancestors had done, and how various understandings of the Holocaust have shaped political, cultural, and social discourses around the world. Along the way, students will practice the skills of historical literacy. They will digest, analyze, and criticize scholarship (secondary literature). They will discern the relevance of particular interpretations for important debates. They will use sustained analysis of primary sources to develop, articulate, and defend their own historical interpretations and arguments.

In this course, students will learn to challenge the easy association of "German" with the contemporary country of Germany by considering the extraordinary diversity of what "German" meant before the modern country was founded. Students will examine German-speaking Central Europe from the Middle Ages until the beginnings of modern Germany, focusing primarily on literary works in their historical context. The course's historical outlook gives students the tools to critically examine today's discourses of national identity, race, and German tradition by understanding how the meaning of "German" has transformed over time. This course is taught in German.

This course offers an overview of major developments in the literary and cultural history of German-speaking Europe. The course explores significant figures and works of literature, the visual arts, music, and philosophy as well as their interrelationship and historical contextualization. Students read, discuss, and analyze selected texts in German representing all genres, and become familiar with fundamental techniques of interpreting literary works and cultural artifacts. This course is taught in German.

This course introduces students to the society, politics and culture of contemporary Germany. The main focus is on Germany after 1989, but we will contextualize our analysis by looking back as far as 1945 and by drawing comparisons to other German-speaking countries as well as the United States. Topics include social values and the German Basic Law, government and media, as well as issues currently in the news. We will also look at selected literary works, essays, and films in German in order to become familiar with fundamental techniques of interpretation. This course is taught in German.

Poisoned Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny, currently lying in a Berlin hospital for treatment, provides only the latest image of the nexus of Germany and Russia in matters relating to authoritarian oppression of minorities and opposition groups. Yet their intertwined history of racism, authoritarianism, and persecution of ethnic minorities has been the object of intellectual study for decades: Hannah Arendt, Ernst Nolte, Jurgen Habermas, and more recently, Timothy Snyder are some of the leading scholars who have elucidated the ways in which these cultures intersect in both promoting and confronting mono-ethnic authoritarianism. Part cautionary tale, part success story, this course examines select case studies from the polities of Russia and Germany (with shorter units on Poland, Hungary, and Belarus) in their ongoing struggles with authoritarian, racist, and anti-democratic legacies. Given notorious histories of oppression and persecution of ethnic, religious, and other minorities--haunting images of Soviet gulags, German concentration camps, and of the KGB and the Gestapo spring all too readily to mind--these countries provide potentially valuable lessons in thinking about racism and police brutality in our own time. In the postwar and post-Unification/post-Soviet periods, these countries continue to face these issues in stark and sometimes creative ways--with varying degrees of success. We will be concerned to respect both the historical and cultural particularity of these cultures, and to draw upon this material to enrich our thinking about anti-racist reform in the contemporary world. We draw upon a variety of materials: historical documents, constitutional studies, film and television, literature, political and sociological data, journalistic interventions, including social media.

This is a lecture course that will offer students an opportunity to delve into the dark history of Germany and Europe between the First World War and the Cold War. At the center of this course is the National Socialist movement, which dominated Germany from 1933 to 1945 and left its imprint on the world thereafter. The hope is that students become familiar with the movement's intellectual and cultural origins, the political contingencies that made it successful, and the policies that made it popular and feared in Germany and beyond. Topics will include Social Darwinism and racial pseduo-science, the Treaty of Versailles and Weimar Germany, the rise of National Socialism to power, and Nazi society and culture. In addition, we will look at how Nazi politics were received and imitated in central and Eastern Europe and how Adolf Hitler's international politics could appeal to peoples beyond Germany's borders. Students will also learn about the systematic and organized killing of peoples and groups in Europe under occupation, including six million Jews and the Holocaust. The course will conclude with the postwar occupation regimes in Germany and Europe, the erasure of complicity with Nazism in the subsequent histories of Europe, and the failed attempts at deNazification and justice for the regime's victims.Friday sections will consist of smaller discussion groups that will discuss the content of the lectures in part. Most importantly, students will read primary source material, including laws, witness statements, memoirs, and important scholarly debates. The Friday sessions will thus give students the opportunity to directly analyze accounts and sources. These skills will then be assessed in a document analysis paper and on our midterms and final exams.

Catholic Great Power. Medieval Holdover. Sick Man on the Danube. Prison of the Peoples. Laboratory of the Apocalypse. The Habsburg Empire has been called many things, but I bet you never have heard of it. But I bet you have heard about the Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination sparked the outbreak of the First World War; or maybe your parents made you listen to Mozart as a child in the hopes that you'd be brilliant. What you probably don't know, because historians have generally forgotten it, is that the Habsburg Monarchy stood at the center of Europe and European politics and culture for nearly four hundred years. Germans, Croatians, Slovenes, Poles, Jews, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Bosnians, Romanians, Italians, Ukrainians and (last but not least) Hungarians all played a role in the longevity and vibrancy of this multinational Empire. In this course, we will explore the history of this great continental empire from its modern origins during the reign of Maria Theresia (1740-1780) to its collapse and dismemberment in the First World War. In the process we will learn much about the history of Europe itself and about what becomes common knowledge and what does not. Our topics will include Enlightened Absolutism, the French Revolution, Liberalism, German Unification, Music and Culture, modernity, economic development, Jewish emancipation and identity, and finally the First World War.

This course begins with Prussia's initial challenge to Austria's dominance in central Europe; it ends with the unification of Germany under Bismarck's Prussia--and Austria's exclusion from it. In addition to covering the on-going Austro-Prussian rivalry in Germany, the course will consider German History in a broad central European perspective that covers the variety of what was German-speaking Europe. We will cover the cultural, social, and political transformations of the period. Specific topics may include Enlightened Absolutism and the emergence of the 'enlightened' police state, the influence of the French Revolution in the German-speaking lands, as well as the revolutions of 1848 and the struggle for German Unification. Additionally, we will cover larger long term processes such as the emergence of civil society, political transformations such as the growth of German Liberalism and Nationalism and the emergence of Socialism, and German contributions to larger cultural and intellectual fields such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism.

This course examines modern Germany from national unification in 1871 to the recent unification of the two Germanies and beyond. We will investigate cultural, political, and social dimensions of Germany's dynamic role in Europe and in the world. Topics include Bismarck and the founding of the Second Reich, World War I and the legacy of defeat, challenge and authority in the Weimar Republic, the National Socialist revolution, war and Holocaust, collapse of the Third Reich, conflict and accommodation in East and West Germany, and unification and its aftermath. Class format will combine lectures with discussion of readings from political, social, literary, and diplomatic sources.

This course is designed to teach practical and useful German conversation for everyday life. Learn how to navigate situations such as ordering a beer, shopping for food, buying concert tickets, introducing yourself to your roommate in Berlin, negotiating with a landlord, or just everyday conversational skills. We´ll invite native speakers of German from all over campus to talk about Germany, Austria, Switzerland; political and cultural issues; as well as topics concering business and economics. We´ll watch German news and discuss current events, such as the recent European refugee crisis. All levels welcome, see instructor with any concerns or questions.

In this special course designed for inquisitive international economics / romance language majors, students will attend a number of lectures, panels, and seminars on campus during the semester, with a follow-up discussion for each led by either a visitor or a member of the economics or romance languages faculty. Before each session, students will be expected to complete a short reading assignment. At each follow-up session, the students will submit a 1-2 page summary and analysis of the talk, with a critical question for discussion. The goal is to encourage students to enrich their major experience by participating in the intellectual discussions that occur amongst ND and visiting scholars across the campus, distinguished alumni, and professionals in the field.

How did the medieval Church’s great women mystics create a space where they could connect with God? Despite enclosure in convents, many medieval nuns held religious authority and contributed to the life and literature of the Catholic tradition. Paradoxically, the convent was a privileged space of female culture, where women authors and mystics flourished. This course will explore the spaces, both architectural and spiritual, where medieval nuns explored their relationship with God and wrote to help the souls of others. Focusing on Germany and on remarkable women such as Hildegard of Bingen, students will contextualize medieval women's mysticism in its historical milieu, including the realities of female enclosure, the daily round of convent life, and liturgical worship. We will compare mysticism in the convent to the writings and social context of women mystics in the city or at noble courts. In Spring 2025, this course will make a class trip to Germany during Spring Break to visit the sites of medieval convents and continuously active communities of nuns. Students must apply to the instructor to participate in this course through this link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScWLeIUFi2zg62YPv5LJnrrrFZjr56zztYaq_eC2zZxL3AB7A/viewform?usp=sf_link

Although occupying a central position in the cultural, legal, literary, and political history of Europe, the Holy Roman Empire remains far too frequently sidelined within Anglophone surveys of the medieval period. This course is designed to serve as a corrective to this tendency, repositioning the Western Empire in all its diversity and geographic range at the heart of European development during the crucial millennium of the Middle Ages and its aftermath. Using a combination of primary and secondary sources, we will follow the development of the Empire in conception and reality from its Carolingian beginnings, through the heights of the Ottonian Renaissance, the fraught Salian age, and up through the great conflicts of the Staufer period, ending with the interregnum of the late-thirteenth century, during which an empire without an emperor was forced to both redefine and reinvent itself. In this course we examine what the empire was and was not during the early centuries of its existence. To what extent was the empire understood to be a revival or extension of the Western Roman Empire? To what extent was Voltaire's 18th-century indictment of the empire as "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" an accurate assessment? What relevance does the early history of an institution long famed as a political anachronism have for us today? Focusing on primary sources, we will trace both the institutional and cultural development of the empire and its varied peoples over the course of the Early and High Middle Ages, comparing our own interpretations with those of scholars both past and present. In so doing, we shall also seek to contextualize the history of the Holy Roman Empire alongside the contemporary kingdoms of France and England, while consciously eschewing normative models of institutional, legal, and (proto-)national development.

The epic narrative poems produced in Middle High German around the beginning of the thirteenth century stand amongst the greatest literary monuments of the Middle Ages. These tales have served as the inspiration for countless great works across the centuries, including the great operas of Richard Wagner, the films of Fritz Lang. What is more, the rediscovery of these narratives during the 18th and 19th centuries played a crucial role in the development of modern Philology and Medieval Studies as academic disciplines. Even divorced from their later legacy, these tales have lost little of their narrative power as entertainment and continue to be read for enjoyment to the present day.

Fairy tales are a staple of popular culture with roots in the folklore tradition. In this course we will investigate the enduring transnational popularity of the fairy tale and the extent to which they reflect child-rearing, political or social norms across cultures. We will read and analyze classic European fairy tales in their historical and cultural context, as well as discuss the theoretical function and meaning of fairy tales. Taught in English.

As soon as Europeans began exploring and colonizing the so-called New World, Germans were there. Germans came to the Americas as conquistadors, settlers, refugees, missionaries, and merchants. The German colony in Venezuela was disastrously short-lived, but Germans came to play a significant role in the colonization of North America through the settlement of Pennsylvania. This course introduces students to the varieties of German presence in the Americas from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Topics may include the colonization and conquest of South America, German interactions with Indigenous communities, German missionaries to the enslaved peoples in the Caribbean, the role of German immigrants in early anti-slavery and pacifist movements, and the origin and afterlife of the language called Pennsylvania Dutch. This course will be taught in English.

This course will provide an opportunity for students and faculty to explore various aspects of Germany's current policies toward refugees and immigrants. It includes a one-week trip to Berlin prior to the start of the semester. In Berlin, the group will meet with federal, state and local governmental officials, civil society groups, and representatives of international organizations. The issues to be explored include: Germany's policies toward asylum-seekers, the relationship between these policies and the European Union, policies to integrate refugees and migrants into German society, and the political impact of these policies. The on-site Berlin seminar is designed to assess the efficacy of current policies, and identify best policy practices going forward. Includes two pre-departure sessions (one planning session, one webinar), and 5-7 follow-up sessions during the first half of the semester, culminating in a poster exhibit to disseminate our findings.

In this course we will use the City of Berlin as our classroom to explore German history since the end of World War II. Major historical and political moments will include the Cold War, Confronting National Socialism and the Holocaust, Reunification, and Multi-Ethnic Germany.

The course provides a comprehensive overview of the Energiewende - Germany's effort to reshape its energy system, industry, and building sectors into a nuclear-free, low-carbon economy. We will apply a range of analytical methods (economic assessment tools, legal analyses and political science) to shed light on different facets of the Energiewende, and to help understand the public and academic debates around it. We will discuss the technological, social, ethical, legal and political implications in the German context.

In this course we will sample from Berlin's great theaters—the Staatsoper, the Komische Oper, the Berliner Ensemble (the "Brecht theater"), the Maxim Gorki, the Grips, as well as other venues. The pre-departure assignment will involve reading the plays we will see. We'll meet in advance of each production to discuss staging, text adaptations, acting, dramaturgy, etc. Right after each performance we'll meet again briefly to discuss any issues that require clarification or comment. Then we'll have a follow-up classroom session later in the week to discuss selected matters performance, theme, etc. We'll take advantage of special back-stage tours and meetings with actors and directors. Students write a targeted 1-2 pp. review of each performance.

Berlin is the ideal place for studying the development of architecture and design and their interrelationship. The city houses famous museums like Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge, Bauhaus Archiv, Kunstgewerbe Museum (Museum of Applied Arts) and Bröhan-Museum (Museum of Art and Design). The urban landscape is marked by an architecture created by great architects like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who also designed the famous Barcelona Chair. The historical overview starts with the 19th century and continues via Deutscher Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen) towards the 20th century with the Bauhaus, and finally the latest developments in architecture and design in the 21st century.

In this course, taught as part of the summer abroad programs, we will explore topics related to post-1945 history and politics as they affected European society. In addition to assigned readings and coursework, we will use what we learn at the abroad sites and on excursions to inform our understanding of and discussion of contemporary European issues.

Offered at the International Study Center in Heidelberg University, Germany, this course consists of advanced language study abroad at the C1 level. This course is designed as a language course for international students taking regular coursework at the University Heidelberg. In addition to advanced topics in German grammar, vocabulary enhancement is one of the principal goals of the course.

Intensive study with a faculty member in the student's area of interest. Normally, only available to majors.

The years between the First and Second World Wars in Germany, 1918-1933, was a period of tremendous cultural and social experimentation. All of the arts—literature, painting, music, film, architecture—experienced radical transformations, in which artists broke with centuries of traditions and explored new ways of expression and shaping the environment. Politically it was a time of great change as well, with competing ideologies transforming the way people thought of themselves in relation to each other and to society and the state at large. In this class, we will explore some of the major movements, works, and people that characterize this extraordinary decade and a half of transition and upheaval. Topics and figures we will consider are Expressionism, Bauhaus, New Objectivity, Atonal music, Fritz Lang, Bertolt Brecht, Klaus Mann, Irmgard Keun, Marlene Dietrich, Hermann Hesse, Christopher Isherwood, Käthe Kollwitz, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix. Taught in German.

Having led the European response to the refugee crisis instigated by the Syrian Civil War, Germany provides an instructive though by no means typical case study. This course provides an opportunity for students to explore various aspects of Germany's current policies toward refugees and immigrants and to place them within a wider European context. Via Zoom, the group will meet with federal, state and local governmental officials, civil society groups, and representatives of international organizations. The issues to be explored include: Germany's policies toward asylum-seekers, the relationship between these policies and the European Union, policies to integrate refugees and migrants into German society, and the political impact of these policies. The seminar is designed to assess the efficacy of current policies, and identify best policy practices going forward. At regular intervals, we will have the opportunity to place our findings within a broader comparative context that includes U.S. refugee policies.

German political thought is more rooted in philosophy than the Angloamerican tradition; at the same time it was involved in, and reacted to, the most horrific experience of 20th century totalitarianism, National Socialism. We will read books by the three greatest political theorists of the Weimar republic, Hans Kelsen, Hermann Heller, and Carl Schmitt, study Martin Heidegger's rectorate speech, look at Hannah Arendt's totalitarianism theory, and read two political philosophies from the Federal Republic, Habermas' Between Facts and Norms and my own Morals and Politics.

What will money look like when our society is fully cashless? How will we pay for services, and what will we exchange? How will we work - or will we work at all - when most tasks are automated, and how will we earn a living? When AIs develop self-awareness, could they get baptized? And what on earth are we going to do with all of our trash? In this course, students explore questions like these through recent science-fiction short stories. The course examines the ways in which German-language authors are imagining the world of the (fairly) near future. Taught in German.

“Saget mir ieman wâz ist minne?” (Can anyone tell me: What ist love?) – that is a question not only Minnesänger Walther von der Vogelweide asks himself. “Flugzeuge im Bauch” (Airplanes in your tummy) is what German songwriter Herbert Grönemeyer might offer for an answer. The course will introduce you to German love songs from about the 12th century until today. Get to know different historical concepts of what love might be and how tricky emotions can be turned into speech and song. Our discussions will cover formal aspects (rhymes, metre, strophes), stylistic and rhetorical devices, speech roles, gender stereotypes, and of course: concepts of love and how we can sing and talk about them. We will also cover medial aspects of these songs and will embark on several excursions to places like the Hesburgh Library and the Raclin-Murphy Museum. Please note that the course is being taught in German.

This seminar taught in German centers on a close reading of Thomas Mann's novel "Doctor Faustus", considered one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century. Doctor Faustus alludes to a wealth of other materials, and our discussions will thus also cover the history of the Faust myth, the origins of Nazism, the philosophy of Nietzsche, and other topics.

This course explores how and why German-speaking authors of the 20th and 21st century, respectively, have adapted Middle High German texts for their contemporary audiences. We will discuss representative texts from a variety of literary genres ranging from a children's book (Hoppe) to young-adult/all-ages fiction (Grzimek) to literature for an adult readership (A. Muschg) and compare them to their source texts.

German literature, which is deeply interwoven with philosophy and religion, offers abundant challenges to our understanding of self, society, and the sacred. Together we will analyze prose works that offer students a range of genres and styles. Three or four works will be chosen from among the following: Hölderlin’s Hyperion, a novel of despair and reconciliation that is both lyrical and philosophical; Heine’s brilliant and witty essay Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland; Büchner’s absorbing novella fragment Lenz; Stifter’s gripping and perplexing tale Abdias; Storm’s dramatically compelling frame narrative Der Schimmelreiter; Theodore Fontane’s Effi Briest, a beautiful novel of character that indirectly confronts the social norms of late nineteenth-century Prussia; and Kafka’s Der Prozess, a work that interweaves comedy, horror, and complexity. We will spend considerable time on literary aspects of the works and will engage in comparison and contrast of diverse themes, including identity crises, concepts of social critique and historical change, and challenges to our understanding of God.

How can we work for a more just world? Major works of German film and literature insightfully depict a variety of paradigmatic scenarios of social injustice, suggesting ways these conditions might be ameliorated and perhaps even overcome. Topics include: misogyny; child-murder; prostitution; poverty; workers’ rights; just distribution of resources; wealth and income inequality; the status of minority, migrant and refugee populations; religion and the state (Jewish emancipation and oppression); and the individual’s striving for freedom within an authoritarian regime. This upper-level course taught in German, surveys major works of German literature and film from the 18th to the 21st centuries that prominently engage themes of social engagement.

Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have one of the world’s richest traditions of drama as well as arguably the greatest theorists of drama. We will discuss selected masterpieces of German drama (and film), paying particular attention to the ways in which each of our works breaks expectations and advances what we might call an inverted world. The course will explore historical developments, but our primary focus will be close analysis of the works, including their ambiguities and their wrestling with tragic and comic modes of understanding the world, including interpersonal and social conflicts. Likely authors include Lessing, Schiller, Büchner, Hofmannsthal, Brecht, and Dürrenmatt. Some attention will also be given to distinctive German theories of tragedy and comedy, including the singular contributions of Hegel. The seminar will be taught entirely in German.

The topic of this team-taught graduate seminar (crosslisted for qualified advanced undergraduates) will be the thought and work of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche and their complex relationship. Neither figure needs an introduction: they both exerted extraordinary influence in their respective realms, reaching far into the twentieth century and beyond, and both left legacies that became entangled in some of the worst developments of the past one hundred years. We plan to focus, however, on the works themselves: Wagner's operas, particularly Der Ring des Nibelungen, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal; some of Wagner's musicological and cultural-critical writings, such as Opera and Drama and Religion and Art; Nietzsche's own books, beginning with his very first one, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1871), which was inspired by and dedicated to Wagner, and concluding with the scathing denunciation of him in The Case of Wagner, written in 1888, the last frenzied year before Nietzsche's mental breakdown. The course materials will all be in English. We will also offer a one-credit companion reading course on selected texts in the original German, discussing them with particular emphasis on their grammatical and stylistic qualities. This reading is intended to help students who already know some German to develop their capacities and to encourage those who have not yet begun studying German to do so.

In this seminar, students will examine the intersection of various disciplines and topics depending upon the instructor's specialty. In addition to language and literature, topics may include culture, history, politics, film, feminist studies, music and other related disciplines. The course may be repeated.

Intensive study with a faculty member in the student's area of interest. Normally, only available to majors.

Intensive study with a faculty member in the student's area of interest. Normally, only available to majors.

Intensive study with a faculty member in the student's area of interest. Normally, only available to majors.

Spring semester course for the 2-semester senior thesis in German Studies. Students will receive a letter grade

German majors who wish to graduate with honors may write a senior thesis. For those German majors who elect to write a thesis, several requirements must be met: (1) The student must have a GPA of 3.5 or higher in the major, (2) the thesis must be at least 30 pages long, and (3) the thesis must be written in German. The student writing a thesis enrolls in GE 48499 and receives one course credit (three credit hours) for the course. Although the thesis is graded by the advisor (to receive honors, the thesis must receive a grade of B+ or higher), a second faculty member reader acts in advisory role to the advisor. The thesis is due the week after spring break, and the student is strongly advised to begin thinking about it and start conferring with the advisor before the October break of the fall term.