Cross-Listed Courses

German 110

Proficiency through Culture


Designed for students who need a thorough review of elementary grammar, the purpose of this course is threefold: to increase reading knowledge, enlarge vocabulary, and improve speaking and writing skills; to gain familiarity with current political, social, and economic conditions in Germany; and to increase sensitivity to cultural phenomena in Germany that leads to a deeper cross-cultural understanding. Class activities are based on satellite TV and Internet radio news reports, as well as articles from major online dailies and weeklies, such as Süddeutsche Zeitung or Spiegel. The course includes weekly online quizzes. Students work on a portfolio reflecting individual cross-cultural interests.




German 199 / Literature 199

Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle


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




German 213 / Literature 213

German Opera and Ideas


Opera is not just about a tenor and a soprano who want to make love, and a baritone who won’t let them. It is also about liberty, redemption, tyranny, injustice, humanity, and decadence. This course traces German intellectual history from the Enlightenment to modernism and beyond, through the study of major operas and the literary works that spawned some of them. The operas studied are Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Richard Strauss’s Salome, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, Hans Werner Henze’s Der Prinz von Homburg, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten. The literary works studied are Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s Die Soldaten, Heinrich Heine’s Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski, and Heinrich von Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. The course is taught in English. Musical expertise is neither expected nor provided. Students with an advanced proficiency in German can read selections in the original for extra credit.




German 250 / Italian Studies

Verdi, Opera, and Politics: The German Connection


Verdi’s third favorite author, after Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, was German dramatist Friedrich Schiller. The operas Giovanna d’Arco, I Masnadieri, Luisa Miller, and Don Carlo are loose adaptations of Schiller’s historical dramas. Verdi and Schiller were popular symbolic figures in their countries’ politics, especially for the blend of liberalism and nationalism that led to unification. Study includes comparison of the libretti of the operas and the texts of the dramas in a political context; features of the dramas that may have drawn Verdi to Schiller; issues related to the adaptation of one artistic medium to another; and Verdi: A Novel of the Opera by Franz Werfel, the Austrian writer who also translated Verdi libretti into German and helped usher in a 20th-century Verdi renaissance in Germany. Expert knowledge of opera is not expected or provided. Taught in English. A tutorial in German can be arranged.




German 270 / Literature 270

Rebels with(out) a Cause: Great Works of German Literature


Students in this course undertake a survey of representative works of German literature from the 18th century to the present. Readings include Goethe’s Weltschmerz bestseller The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774); Mother Tongue (1990), a collection of stories by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, a Turkish-German woman writer; and works by Schiller, Eichendorff, Heine, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, and Jelinek. The course is conducted in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in German are expected to read the works in the original.




German 303

Grimm’s Märchen


Close readings are made of selected tales, with emphasis on language, plot, motif, image, and relation to folklore. This study includes critical examination and application of major theoretical approaches: Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, and feminist.




German 316

The German Stage


War, revolution, street riots, terrorism—it is no coincidence that many of the most radically experimental works of German-language theater followed moments of national and international crisis. What does aesthetic revolution have to do with revolution on the streets? How can “die Bretter, die die Welt bedeuten” (Schiller) influence the course of world events? When is comedy an appropriate response to tragedy? What is the role of censorship? These and other questions are addressed in this survey of major German, Swiss, and Austrian dramas of the last two centuries. Works studied include comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies by Schiller, Kleist, Büchner, Brecht, Max Frisch, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Christoph Schlingensief, written in the aftermath of events ranging from the French Revolution to September 11. The course is offered simultaneously on the 300 and 400 levels (with 400-level credit requiring supplemental readings and an additional fortnightly class meeting). Conducted in German.




German 320

Modern German Short Prose


This course offers a survey of Novellen, Erzählungen, parables, and other short forms of mainly 20th-century prose. Students combine detailed literary analysis with an examination of social/political/historical contexts. Readings include Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Heinrich von Kleist, Jeremias Gotthelf, Walter Benjamin, Hans Erich Nossack, Ingeborg Bachmann, Max Frisch, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Ilse Aichinger, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Yoko Tawada. The course is conducted in German.




German 3323 / Literature 3323 German Studies

Poetics of the Self: On Ethics and Narration in Literature
See Literature 3323 for description.



German 387 / Literature 387

The Ring of the Nibelung


A study of Richard Wagner’s cycle of four immense music dramas about gods, dwarves (Nibelungs), giants, and humans. The story has been read as a manifesto for socialism and as a parable about the new industrial society of Wagner’s time, among other interpretations. In this course, students are guided by the works of Heinrich Heine, the Brothers Grimm, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the anonymous author of the medieval epic, the Nibelungenlied. Musical expertise is neither expected nor provided. Taught in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in German are expected to read the libretti in the original.




German 395

Poetry Workshop


The rich modern tradition of 20th-century German-language poetry from Rilke, Trakl, and Benn to Celan and the best young contemporary writers serves as the basis for a study of the poetic process. Both analytic and creative approaches are taken: participants write verse of their own in German (with the aid of in-class exercises), and translate poems both into and from German. The course is designed to develop students’ skills as readers and writers of poetry and continue their training in German as a foreign language. The course, which includes guest readings by German poets, is conducted in German.




German 405 / Literature 405

“Exit Metaphysics, Enter Sauerkraut”: 19th-Century German Literature


“Exit metaphysics, enter sauerkraut” is the phrase frequently used to describe the development of 19th-century German literature from romanticism to naturalism. The phrase also alludes to the overwhelming experience of most intellectuals and writers at that time: awareness of the loss of security that idealistic philosophy had provided and an attempt to find new absolutes. The focus is the evolution of this experience as it manifests itself in literature. Close readings are made of works by Grillparzer, Nestroy, Grabbe, Hebbel, Heine, Mörike, Droste-Hülshoff, Keller, Stifter, Fontane, C. F. Meyer, Schnitzler, Hauptmann, and Wedekind. The course is conducted in German.




German 415

Kreatives Schreiben


What is writing? How many different things can be made with words? In this class, students are introduced to German writing in different genres and forms (including poetry, essayistic and narrative prose, experimental fiction, literary and art criticism, and philosophy) and are asked to experiment with many writing styles themselves. This course is intended to build vocabulary, reinforce grammar skills, and deepen students’ understanding and mastery of the expressive potential of the German language. The course is conducted in German and involves workshop-style discussion of student work. Students are required to complete frequent short writing assignments.




German 420

Growing Pains


More than a century after Goethe’s suffering Werther, and long after the establishment of the bildungsroman as a crucial genre in German literature, the young man struggling to find his place in society reappeared as a dominant motif in the work of a number of important modernist writers. Students investigate what this renewed interest had to do with the turn of the 20th century, the excitement of technological advances, and the explosive arrival of World War I. Students also examine a selection of short novels and long stories as examples of the modernism that would come to define early 20th-century writing and art in Europe. Authors include Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, Christa Wolf, Elfriede Jelinek, Hans-Ulrich, and Jenny Erpenbeck. The course is conducted in German.




German 425

Culture and Society in Weimar Germany


A critical exploration of German literature, theatre, visual arts, architecture, and film in the period from 1918 to 1933. The Weimar Republic witnessed the emergence of a distinctive brand of modernism, characterized by an unprecedented openness to mass culture and to the use of new technologies of reproduction. Much of the cultural production we shall examine does not simply seek to refashion aesthetic practice; it aims to reconfigure the human sensory and cognitive apparatus, in an attempt to transform the basic structures of social life. We shall analyze works of literature and art in their relation to the rapid technological and social modernization that shaped the period, and to the profound socio-political conflicts to which this process gave rise




German 456

The Student Movement and the Neo-Avant-Garde in 1960s Germany


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 the course focuses creatively reappropriated many of the strategies of the historical avant-garde (especially those of Dadaism), often in the hope of subverting the “spectacle” of consumer capitalism and transforming everyday life. Topics include experimental poetry (“Wiener Gruppe,” Enzensberger), theater, and antitheater (Handke, Weiss); “New German Cinema” (Fassbinder, Kluge); visual art (Beuys, Fluxus, Pop, and Capitalist Realism); and pronouncements and manifestos of the student movement (Dutschke, Baumann, Gruppe SPUR). All readings (which also include theoretical essays by Adorno, Bürger, Schneider, Enzensberger, Mayer, and Habermas) and classroom discussions are in German.




German T200

German Theater Scripting and Production


This course is for students with an interest in the conception, practice, and production of a bilingual play based on works by Brecht, Kafka, or other authors. This tutorial is open to anyone from the Bard community and involves scripting, acting, stage management, and music. Students may choose which of these elements they wish to focus on. Some German language skills preferred but not required.

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