GERMAN

The German Immersion program will be offered in the Spring 2002 semester, therefore Basic German (101-102) will not be offered in the fall of 2001. Contact Professor Kempf early in the fall if you are interested in participating in the spring Immersion course.

German Immersion:

Intensive study (12 credits) of a foreign language helps to create a highly effective and exciting learning environment for those who wish to achieve a high degree of proficiency in the shortest possible time. German immersion is designed to enable students with little or no previous experience in German to complete two years of college German within five months (spring semester at Bard, plus June in Germany for 4 additional credits). To achieve this goal, students take fifteen class hours per week during the semester at Bard, and twenty hours per week during June at Collegium Palatinum, the German language institute of Schiller International University in Heidelberg. Each participant will be able to enroll concurrently in one other course at Bard. This will allow the student to pursue a more balanced study program or to fulfill certain requirements (e.g., Freshman Seminar).

CRN	90054	Distribution	D
Course No.	GER 110
Title	Transitional German
Professor	Stephanie Kufner
Schedule	Mon 11:30 am - 12:30 pm LC LAB Tu Th Fr 11:30 am - 12:50 pm LC 208

This course is for students with some background in German, but whose proficiency is not yet on the level of Ger. 201. While the emphasis will be on a complete review of elementary grammar, all four language skills (speaking, reading, writing, listening), as well as cultural proficiency, will be honed. Extensive language lab work will be combined with conversational practice, writing simple compositions, reading and dramatization of modern German texts. Successful completion will allow students to continue with German 202 in Spring 2002.

CRN	90055	Distribution	D
Course No.	GER 201
Title	Intermediate German I
Professor	Matthias Goeritz
Schedule	Tu Wed Th 11:30 am - 12:50 pm LC 120

For students who have completed German 101-102 or have had some previous instruction (two years of high school or one year of college). This course is designed to increase the student's command of all four language skills (speaking, comprehension, reading, writing). Provision is made for complete grammar review, conversational practice, and language lab work. Selected readings from modern authors, introducing students to various styles of literary German, are discussed.

CRN	90378	Distribution	D
Course No.	GER 250
Title	Verdi, Opera, and Politics: The German Connection
Professor	Franz Kempf
Schedule	Th 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Italian Studies, Literature

Verdi's third favorite author, after Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, was the German dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). The operas Giovanna d'Arco, Joan of Arc (1845), I masnadieri, The Robbers (1847), Luisa Miller (1849), and Don Carlo (1867) are more or less loose adaptations of four of Schiller's historical dramas. Verdi (in his own times) and Schiller (in the nineteenth century) became immensely popular symbolic figures in their countries' politics, especially for the blend of liberalism and nationalism that lead to unification. We will compare the libretti of the operas and the texts of the dramas against this political background, and examine features of the dramas that may have drawn Verdi to Schiller, the high rhetoric, for instance, the seemingly disjointed (in the Brechtian sense) epic structure, the intertwining of idealism and realism, the hauntingly tragic situations that arise when great powers (society, state, church, destiny) clash with private passions of the revolutionary individual. While expert knowledge of opera is neither expected nor provided, we will also explore issues related to the adaptation of one artistic medium, drama in words, to another, drama in music. A conflict of a different kind occupies center stage in Verdi: A Novel of the Opera (1924) by the Austrian writer Franz Werfel (Prague, 1890-Beverley Hills, 1945). Woven into the narrative fabric is a fictional encounter between Verdi and Wagner in Venice in 1883. Werfel introduces the two as antithetical figures in musical and cultural terms, representing (roughly) the natural simplicity of the South as opposed to the cerebral sophistication of the North. The splendidly written novel became an immediate bestseller and Werfel, who also translated Verdi libretti into German, helped usher in a Verdi renaissance in Germany in the twentieth century. Taught in English. Tutorial in German can be arranged.

CRN	90379	Distribution	B
Course No.	LIT 3323 / GER
Title	Poetics of the Self: On Ethics and Narration in Literature
Professor	Matthias Goeritz
Schedule	Th 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm LC 120

How should one live? This question has been posed since ancient times in philosophy as well as literature. This course will compare actional conflicts as represented in literature with several ethical systems in philosophy. Taking as our starting point the notion that certain moral views can best be expressed through novels, poetry, and dramas, we will read and discuss exemplary works of Greek tragedy, Goethe's Iphigenia on Tauris, selections from Musil's The Man Without Qualities, some of Kafka's late stories, and Heiner Mueller's "bricolage" texts. In understanding narrative as ethics, we assume an intrinsic and necessary connection between the two. Stories are not ethical because of the morals they present, but because they forge a link between perception and communication, because they bind the story teller, the witness and the reader to one another. The course will probe the question of what we gain- and what risks we run - in telling stories. Careful reading and rereading of the seminar materials is required, as is active participation in class discussions, a minimum of one short presentation and written assignments. Creative work is also encouraged.

Taught in English.

CRN	90426	Distribution	B/D
Course No.	GER 405
Title	19th Century German Literature: "Exit Metaphysics, enter Sauerkraut"
Professor	Franz Kempf
Schedule	Tu Fr 11:30 am - 12:50 pm LC 118

Cross-listed: Literature

"Exit Metaphysics, enter Sauerkraut" is the phrase frequently used to describe the development of nineteenth-century German literature from "Romanticism" to "Naturalism". The phrase also alludes to the overwhelming experience shared by the majority of intellectuals and writers at that time: the awareness of the loss of security that idealistic philosophy had provided and the attempt to find new absolutes. We will investigate the evolution and the various facets of this experience as it manifests itself in literature through a close reading of selected works (novels, novellas, poems, and plays) by Grillparzer, Nestroy, Grabbe, Hebbel, Heine, Morike, Droste-Hulshoff, Keller, Stifler, C.F. Meyer, Fontane, Schnitzler, Wedekind, Hauptmann. Conducted in German.