The German Immersion program will be offered in the Spring 2012 semester, therefore Basic German (101-102) will not be offered in the fall of 2011.  Students interested in the Immersion course should contact Professor Florian Becker early in the fall semester.

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., First Year Seminar).

 

91273

GER 110   Transitional German

Stephanie Kufner

. T W Th .

11:50 -1:10 pm

OLINLC 208

 

This course is for students with varied backgrounds in German 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, comprehension, reading, writing), as well as cultural proficiency, will be honed. Extensive comprehension, speaking and vocabulary training exercises in the Language Lab as well as at home will be combined with conversational practice, reading, writing simple compositions, and the dramatization of modern German texts. Successful completion of this accelerated course (covering 3 semesters’ worth of material) will allow students to continue with German 202 in the Spring of 2012.  Optional: additional tutorials.  Class size: 15

 

91115

GER / LIT 199   Kafka: Prague, Politics

and the fin-de siecle

Franz Kempf

. T . Th .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLINLC 118

ELIT

Kafka can be read as the chronicler of modern despair, of human suffering in an unidentifiable, timeless landscape.  Yet he can also be read as a representative of his era, his “existential anguish” springing from the very real cultural and historical conflicts that agitated Prague at the turn of the century (e.g. anti-Semitism, contemporary theories of sexuality).  The course will cover Kafka’s shorter fiction ranging from fragments, parables and sketches to longer, complete tales (e.g. The Judgment, The Metamorphosis), as well as the novels The Trial and The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika) and excerpts from his diaries and letters. Together they reveal the breath of Kafka’s literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought. Taught in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in German can read selections in the original for extra credit.  Class size: 18

 

91116

GER 201   Intermediate German I

Franz Kempf

M . W . F

8:50 -9:50 am

OLINLC 118

FLLC

For students who have completed a year of college German (or equivalent). The course is designed to deepen the proficiency gained in GER 101 and 102 by increasing students’ fluency in speaking, reading, and writing, and adding significantly to their working vocabulary. Students improve their ability to express their own ideas and hone their strategies for understanding spoken and written communication. Selected 20th-century literary texts and audivisual materials, including an unabridged comedy by Friedrich Dürrenmatt.   Class size: 18

 

91275

GER 456   Neo-Avantgarde  and Student Movement in 1960s Germany

Florian Becker

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLINLC 118

FLLC

An interdisciplinary examination of the aesthetic and intellectual shifts that transformed West German cultural and political life in the years leading up to the student rebellion of 1968. The aesthetic production on which we will focus creatively re-appropriated many of the strategies of the historical avant-garde (especially those of Dadaism), often in the hope to subvert the “spectacle” of consumer capitalism and to transform everyday life. We will engage closely with a variety of texts and projecs, seeking to attain a theoretically informed understanding of these now historical ambitions, and of their relation to wider processes of societal change. Topics will include: experimental poetry (“Wiener Gruppe,” Heißenbüttel, Enzensberger); theatre and anti-theatre (Handke, Weiss); “New German Cinema” (Fassbinder, Kluge); visual art (Beuys, Fluxus, Pop and Capitalist Realism); pronouncements and manifestoes of the student movement (Dutschke, Baumann, Gruppe SPUR). Theoretical essays by Adorno, Bürger, Schneider, Enzensberger, Mayer, Habermas.  All readings and classroom discussion will be in German. Short seminar presentations and sustained work on writing skills.  Class size: 15