Language Courses

These courses need not be taken in sequence, three-six are required for a minor or major in Germanic Studies as a college student. Third-year language courses serve as preparation for seminar-style classes conducted in German, including those offered in the department (see undergraduate courses). Students work with a variety of texts and learn to present and participate in instructor- and student-led discussions. Assignments specifically related to grammar, structure, and vocabulary moves students toward more idiomatic use of German. Writing short texts and longer research papers is also part of these third-year language courses.

Arbeitskulturen
GRMN: 21803
Autumn
Instructor: Nicole Burgoyne (burgoyne@uchicago.edu)

PQ: GRMN 20300 or 20301 or placement using the online language assessment Canvas site.

In this course we explore contemporary issues in German culture and society through the lens of working life. We examine the issues surrounding the notoriously high taxes that workers pay in German-speaking countries and the social services that these taxes fund, including socialized health care, unemployment insurance, and pensions. After a brief introduction to the post-war history of the democratic socialism as a governmental type in German-speaking countries, students will explore the issues surrounding working life by reading texts from online newspapers, journals, social media and other sources. Students will also practice listening skills using a variety of streaming media: newscasts, talk shows, comedy shows, and narrative television series. In our examinations and discussions of these materials, though, we will focus not only on the issues surrounding working life itself, but also, and especially, the balance that arises in regards to such personal choices as holidays, hobbies, and family choices. The American corporate world will be our primary basis of comparison. We will also review the current political landscape in German-speaking Europe to contextualize the existing cultural norms. Students will choose the topic and reading for the final week of class. Assignments for this course are designed to practice skills such as effective digital communication, presenting one's professional biography and opinion, as well as interviewing strategies. All reading and assignments in German.

Erzählen: German Monsters
GRMN 21103

PQ: GRMN 20300 or placement. No auditors permitted. Third-year German courses (GRMN 21103-21803) need not be taken in any particular order; for more information, please contact the instructor.

What is a monster? Something we fear, something we refuse to classify as human, something deformed? What is the monstrous body? Can we read monstrosity as an expression of anxiety about gender, race, death, sex or illness? From religious and mythic iconography to the present popularity of Marvel films, Western society has always been accompanied by the threat of monsters. Anglophone literary texts such as Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein and Dracula have made a permanent place in the popular imagination for the monsters they created. This course will explore representations of monstrosity in German-language narratives, from nineteenth-century fairy tales as they were collected by the Brothers Grimm to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann and Tieck’s Der Blonde Eckbert, two lasting pillars of German Romanticism, and conclude with early twentieth-century Modernism in the texts of Kafka and Schnitzler, from texts where monsters are often physically present in texts as antagonists to texts where the monsters emerge from within human protagonists, and where the world itself is monstrous and unbearable.

Readings and discussions in German. This course requires two years of prior experience in German and bridges the gap between language courses and undergraduate literature classes, providing practise in reading, discussion, interpreting, and writing.

Fokus: Drama und Film
GRMN 21203

Section 1 (T/Th 11:00-12:20)
Winter
Instructor: Charles Campbell-Decock

Expressionism was a brief, dominant, and yet amorphous avant-garde artistic movement of the late nineteenth century (1890s) into the early twentieth century (1930s) that arose in response to a number of social tensions and sociopolitical and economic shifts that emerged primarily in Germany. This course will serve as an introduction to German Expressionism through its films (e.g. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu) and dramatic works (e.g. Frühlings Erwachen, Von morgen bis mitternachts), as well as to the broader landscape of intellectual, political, and social ideas and conditions these artistic innovations reflected during this time period, including but not limited to gender, sexuality, patriarchy, generational conflict, psychoanalysis, utopianism, and xenophobia/anti-semitism. The requisite vocabulary for analysis of both film and drama will be introduced and utilized in order to facilitate discussions of the technical aspects of these works and relate them to sociopolitical and cultural phenomena in Germany during this time. All discussion, content, and assignments will be in German.

Section 2 (T/Th 3:30-4:50)
Instructor: Nat Modlin
Uncanny Gender(s) in German Film, 1920–2020

While early German films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis were famous for their androgynous monsters and sexualized automata, the uncanny Other – and its uncanny gender(s) – seems to disappear in later German film history. The questions motivating this course are thus: What new kinds of uncanny gender(s) take their place? This course focuses on the question of gender(s) to trace the evolution of the “uncanny” from the Weimar period to the present. While we start with Weimar film and Freud’s analysis of das Unheimliche in fairy tales, the core of this class involves thinking about the afterlives of uncanny gender(s) in a range of fiction films, documentaries, animation, and television shows, stretching from 1920 to 2020. Directors may include Ernst Lubitsch, Lotte Reiniger, Kurt Maetzig, Ulrike Ottinger, Monika Treut, Rosa von Praunheim, and Christian Petzold. This course will also introduce students to German-language vocabulary around gender, sexuality, and queerness, as well as vocabulary specific to film analysis. Films, discussions, and readings in German.

Fokus: Philosophie (Spring)
GRMN 21403

Instructor: Colin Benert (cbenert@uchicago.edu)
(Tu/Th 9:30 - 10:50)
Awesomeness: The Aesthetics of the Sublime in German Philosophy

The 18th century witnessed a renewed interest in aesthetics – the philosophical reexamination of the entire realm of perception and sensation, whose general aim was to mediate between feeling and reason, sensation and ideation, body and mind. A special place in this philosophical tradition is occupied by reflections on the sublime, or das Erhabene – sensuous experiences of boundlessness, of the infinite, of overwhelming otherness that exceed the human capacity for comprehension. In this course we will examine a variety of ways in which German philosophy, from the Enlightenment into the 20th century, has sought to comprehend this incomprehensibility. In particular, we will retrace the shifts in how aesthetic thinkers register and contextualize the sublime in accordance with shifts in the philosophical understanding and appraisal of the body, or the corporeal dimension of human experience. We will link our textual investigations to key aesthetic referents from music and the visual arts as well as to the social and political valencies of the experience of the sublime in each period. Texts by Edmund Burke, J.W. Goethe, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. 

Philosophie is a third-year German language course, and we will also continue our review of advanced German grammar through reference to the texts under study. All texts will be read in German; all discussions and writing assignments will be in German

Fokus: Medien und Gesellschaft
GRMN 21703
Instructor: Colin Benert (cbenert@uchicago.edu)

PQ: GRMN 20300 or placement. No auditors permitted.
This course develops advanced German skills through the study of media from different periods.

In this course we explore contemporary issues in German culture and society through the lens of contemporary media. This Spring we examine the issues surrounding immigration in German-speaking countries, with special focus on the 2015 refugee crisis and its aftermath, including efforts at integration and the rise of the AfD. After a brief introduction to the post-war history of the media in German-speaking countries, students will explore the issues surrounding immigration by reading texts from online newspapers, journals, social media and other sources. Students will also practice listening skills using a variety of streaming media: newscasts, talk shows, comedy shows, and narrative television series. In our examinations and discussions of these materials, though, we will focus not only on the issues surrounding immigration itself, but also, and especially, the media treatment of these issues. In particular, we will analyze the particular symbolic and discursive frames (e.g. “refugee crisis”) within which immigration issues are presented. In the latter part of the course students will have the opportunity to pursue group research projects, and the content of course assignments will be student-generated.

Fokus: Gedichte (Spring)
GRMN 21303 
PQ: GRMN 20300 or placement. No auditors permitted.
This course develops advanced German skills through the study of poetry of various authors from different periods.

Section 1: Tu/Th 11:00 - 12:20 
War and Poetry 
Instructor: Peter Metzel

This class will explore the history and formal variety of German poetry through the lens of one of its most prominent themes: war. It has often been said that we are at a loss of words when trying to grasp the violence of war. And yet, there is no war without us speaking about it. The thesis of this class is that the difficulties of expressing in words our attitudes towards war are heightened and reflected in lyric poetry. We will, therefore, focus on a different mode or aspect of poetic representation of war every week. Some of our guiding questions will include: is war representable (darstellbar)? What formal features have been employed to represent war? How do poems develop a political stance towards war? What, exactly, is war? What is its opposite? Which cultural norms, such as gender, are reflected in poetic discourses on war? How have poems shaped our understanding of war? How did representations of war change historically and how did they incorporate other media? We will use this focus on questions of representation to deepen German-language skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Course readings, which are in German, will range from 17th-century poetry to contemporary debates surrounding literary responses to recent political conflicts.

Other courses not offered this year:

Fokus: Drama (Winter)
GRMN 21603
PQ: GRMN 20300 or placement. No auditors permitted.
This course develops advanced German skill through the study of dramas of various authors/directors from different eras.