GRST101 Elementary German

This course is an introduction to German and leads to communicative competence in German by building on the four primary skills--speaking, listening, reading, and writing--while developing participants' awareness of life and culture of German-speaking countries. Learning German and its structure will also enhance students' awareness of commonalities between the English and the German languages. The GRST101/102/211 course sequence will help students appreciate that contemporary Germany is economically and politically the leading country in the European Union and has a dynamic, multicultural society. The German language opens vistas into a world of ideas that is as complex as it is elemental. It provides access to many fields, from philosophy to the natural sciences and many disciplines between: history, musicology, art history, and environmental studies. These three courses prepare students to study abroad in Germany, on one of the two Wesleyan-approved programs in Berlin and Hamburg or continue with GRST212 here at Wesleyan.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: None

GRST102 Elementary German

This is the second part of the two-part sequence in Elementary German (see GRST101). Students will continue their study of the four primary skills--speaking, listening, reading, writing--plus German grammar and culture. They will read a variety of authentic texts, listen to native speakers, handle everyday conversational situations, and write short compositions. At the end of the semester, students will write, perform, and videotape a skit based on the material learned this semester. GRST211 is the course following GRST102. Students who take GRST211 can apply to study abroad in Germany on one of Wesleyan's approved programs in Berlin and Hamburg or continue with GRST214 here at Wesleyan.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: GRST101

GRST211 Intermediate German

This course typically follows GRST101 and 102 and increases students' proficiency in the German language while they learn about different cities and regions in the German-speaking world. Working collaboratively, students engage in cultural activities with authentic readings and contextualized grammar in a unifying context. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration, as well as discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Classes focus on active use of the language. Film, music, and other audio clips are regularly integrated into the course to increase students' listening comprehension. Through regular writing assignments, students expand their vocabulary and practice varied styles and techniques. Among the course goals are improved communication and reading skills, an expanded vocabulary, more accurate and nuanced written expression, and increased insight into historical and cultural features of the German-speaking world. After the successful completion of this course, students can study abroad through Wesleyan's approved German programs in Berlin and Hamburg or continue with GRST212 at Wesleyan.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: GRST102

GRST212 Practice in Speaking and Writing German

This course is designed to build and strengthen skills in oral and written German. It functions as a bridge between the basic language series (GRST101&102 and 211) and the more advanced literature/culture courses. This course extends the focus on language and culture through reading, interpreting, and discussing longer German texts (including poems and short stories) begun in GRST211. Moreover, students will research various aspects of the history and culture of Germany and gain practice writing about and presenting the results of their research. Grammar instruction and review as well as vocabulary-building are integral parts of this course, since mastery of the structures of German will facilitate students' ability to express more complex ideas. We will supplement the textbook with additional readings, music, and films. Class discussion will be conducted in German.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: GRST211

GRST213 German Culture Today

Readings, class discussion, and written work will be based on current and recent events and developments in Germany. Topics will include Germany's place in the new Europe and the world, Germany as a multicultural society, and German contemporary culture. The course will provide extensive practice in speaking, reading, listening, and writing in German and using literary and nonliterary texts, as well as audio and visual materials. Structured conversation, debates, and analysis of different types of texts, along with writing assignments in a variety of genres, will strengthen proficiency in German and prepare students for 300-level courses. This course can be taken either before or after study in Germany.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: GRST212

GRST221 Moscow/Berlin: Dreamworld and Catastrophe

The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia and the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany ushered in an era of imagining and building an anti-capitalist world based on the ideals of universal equality, freedom, and comradeship. Between World War I and World War II, Soviet Moscow and Weimar Berlin developed into centers of the international leftist movement that was committed to the cause of global proletarian revolution. While the revolutionary cause proved to be unattainable and costly, the period's artistic and intellectual achievements, known as the avant-garde, offer an extraordinary archive of utopian experimentation across borders.



Focusing on Moscow and Berlin, this course maps the socialist modernist aesthetic in interwar Europe and provides a comparative review of the transnational circulation of leftist and reactionary ideas registered in a variety of -isms: dadaism, expressionism, futurism, suprematism, and constructivism, as well as the New Objectivity, Bauhaus, and the practice of factography. The alignment of art and ideology will be explored through literature, art, and film and will consider the entanglements of egalitarian aspirations with nationalist agendas and emancipatory ideals with patriarchal residues. The course will also review the cultural production of Russian exiles living in Weimar Berlin and their conception of an "off-modern" path. The course will conclude with a discussion of the revolutionary avant-garde's legacy in the East Berlin underground and post-Soviet Moscow.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES321, RUSS321, RULE321, WLIT341
Prereq: None

GRST224 The Holocaust in Contemporary Popular Culture

How to describe the indescribable and to speak the unspeakable? Long after the end of World War II, filmmakers still grapple with these questions, and their answers vary ethically and aesthetically. This course will discuss depictions of the Holocaust in contemporary popular culture. We will touch on graphic novels, TV sketches, and social media, but mainly focus on film. While the time frame will be limited to mainly the last two decades, we will explore a vast range of texts including: Hollywood fare and East European art-house movies; gritty dramas and dark comedies; reenactments of real-life events and alternative history. From Hipster Hitler to the Jojo Rabbit, from "Inglorious Basterds" to "Son of Saul," what all these examples share is an artistic and thematic audacity. We will examine how they try to propose new and unsettling answers to old but ever-vital questions: How did the Holocaust happen and might it happen again?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CJST
Identical With: CJST224
Prereq: None

GRST227 Criticism and Psychoanalysis

This course introduces some classical psychoanalytic methods of reading and interpretation, with accent on the four concepts Jacques Lacan identified as foundational: the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive. We will approach psychoanalysis as a style of close reading whose influence on forms of interpretation--especially literary interpretation--has been immeasurable. One central concern will be the capacity of psychoanalysis to enable us to read ourselves reading, to make the interpretive situation itself the object of our analysis. Students with an interest in literary-critical methods will benefit from the course, as will students with an interest in the internal logic of an important body of thought.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL327, RL&L327
Prereq: None

GRST228 Going Green, German-Style: The Relationship to Nature, 1800--Today

Few countries display as active a commitment to protect natural resources and the environment as Germany. Its focus on renewable energies, recycling, and conservation in general is unique even by European standards, and in the U.S., Germany's policies on sustainability and environmental preservation are often held up as models. It is important to recognize, however, that Germans did not achieve this degree of environmental awareness overnight. Rather, it represents the result of centuries of contemplating, controlling, and conserving nature and cannot simply be transferred to other cultures. In this course, we will examine the German (and European) cultural tradition by analyzing artworks and texts from the past two centuries that have both expressed and shaped salient attitudes and emotional responses. The goals of the course are to provide insight into Germany's long and complicated history of defining and relating to nature and to allow you to reflect critically on your own attitudes toward nature and the environment.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GELT228, ENVS228
Prereq: None

GRST230F The Simple Life (FYS)

As the human population grows toward nine billion and our planet's carrying capacity comes under increasing pressure, many observers believe the human project itself is at risk. What human beings have accomplished is probably unique in the history of the universe; once lost to war, famine, and ecological collapse, the understandings and physical creations of our cultures will be irrecoverable. We must ask ourselves, with considerable urgency, the following questions: How do our values, our economic systems, and our behaviors--as individuals, groups, societies, and cultures--affect the conditions under which we, future generations, and the plants and animals with which we share the earth might live in the future? To what extent and at what cost can technology enable us to adapt to changes already under way? Should we take an "après moi, le déluge" attitude or try to prolong the life of our species, and if so, in what form? Does the so-called simple life, as conceptualized in different times and places, offer any useful models? Does living "green" make sense? What about environmental (in)justice? This course will draw on texts from a variety of periods and disciplines, written in a range of styles and from many perspectives, to examine how these questions and others can be approached. Creative thinking will be strongly encouraged. We will pay particular attention to contemporary sustainability initiatives and threats to the environment in the present moment.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: ENVS230F, GELT230F
Prereq: None

GRST231 Reading Theories

In this survey of theories that have shaped the reading of literature and the analysis of culture, emphasis is on key concepts--language, identity, subjectivity, gender, power, and knowledge--and on key figures and schools such as Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure, Barthes, Gramsci, Benjamin, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Jameson, Berlant, Moten, postmodernism, and U.S. feminism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: COL339, CLST393, CEAS340, RL&L290, RUSS340, RULE340, REES340, ENGL295
Prereq: None

GRST232F Marxism and Abolitionism (FYS)

This course explores the historical encounter of Marxist revolutionary theory, with its roots in German idealism (Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel), and abolitionist causes. How have abolitionist movements historically informed, expanded, and challenged Marxist theory and its tactical playbook? What made Marx a touchstone for so many black revolutionary thinkers, including W.E.B. du Bois, Franz Fanon, C.L.R. James, and Angela Davis? How have anticommunist, racist, security-statist ideologies been mobilized to undermine and defeat transformative social movements? We will begin with the Haitian Revolution and work our way through the abolition of slavery in the US and the anticolonial and civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century to the prison abolition movement today. In addition to the above mentioned authors, readings will include Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Ottilie Assing, V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, Max Weber, Martin Luther King, Jr., Herbert Marcuse, and the Combahee River Collective.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: AFAM230F, AMST132F
Prereq: None

GRST233F Holocaust Remembrance in Germany: The Third Generation (FYS)

Remembering the Nazi past is a fundamental aspect of postwar German culture. In this course, we will trace the Holocaust's aftermath in contemporary German literature and thought. We will pay close attention to the socio-cultural and historical-political changes in attempts to glean new meanings from a past that is both omnipresent and highly evanescent. It will be our particular concern to encounter versions of Jewish identity and attempts to prescribe different narratives. We will focus especially on contrasting the creative works of the immediate postwar period and "the third generation." These contemporary writers explore a historical trauma that has become an integral part of specific Jewish-German identity. At the same time, their temporal and personal distance to the actual events necessitates new imaginative approaches to the past. Careful readings of literary, theoretical, journalistic, and historical texts, as well as personal discussions will enable us to critically think about the challenges and limits of how to write about the Holocaust 70 years after it occurred, and how the difficulties in doing so might inform other kinds of writing about historical and personal trauma. Students need to read Olga Grjasnowa's "All Russians Love Birch Trees" prior to the start of the course. Students will have Zoom class discussions and intensive peer-feedback-driven writing practice.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: CJST233F
Prereq: None

GRST234F Instances of Collective Memory (FYS)

Both history and fiction tell stories. They evaluate facts, construct contexts, and foreground patterns and associations--all using language as their primary tool. In this course, we will analyze key moments in the formation of collective and cultural memories in 20th-century history, philosophy, and literature. We will think about how individual memory and collective remembrance connect, how larger stories are built up from archives and personal stories, and how these narratives are shaped by changes in the world around them. We'll pay special attention to how the World Wars and the Cold War are memorialized and to the importance of these narratives to contemporary Jewish identity and remembrance in Germany, Israel, and the United States.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT117F, CJST234F
Prereq: None

GRST238 Bauhaus: Art, Craft, Design

This seminar examines the theory and practice of the Bauhaus, the most influential art school of the 20th century. The Bauhaus proposed a radical concept: to reconstruct the material world of war-torn Europe to reflect principles of unity in the arts and within all world cultures. In the 15 years of its existence, from 1919 until 1933, the Bauhaus underwent many changes, including moves from Weimar to Dessau and Dessau to Berlin, as well as the reorientation of its curriculum from craft to industrial production. Nevertheless, its core principles persisted: the coordination of fine with applied arts and form with function; a commitment to de-hierarchized, experimental learning in workshops; and the desire to unite art with life and to make art accessible to the broader population. Attracting men and women from Western and Eastern Europe, the Americas, and East Asia, the Bauhaus adopted an international and gender-inclusive orientation from the beginning. After the school's forced closure in 1933 by the National Socialists, many of its teachers and students left Germany to found art schools throughout the globe, and its core principles continue to shape art pedagogy and practice today. This course will examine the origins, core products and theories, and afterlife of the Bauhaus in Germany, America, and East Asia.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA338
Prereq: None

GRST239 Modernism and the Total Work of Art

The term "total work of art" refers to the German concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which took on new urgency in the 19th century amid social upheaval and revolution. Understood as the intention to reunite the arts into one integrated work, the total work of art was tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. While there exist many approaches to totality in the modern era, this course focuses on modernist theories and practices that simultaneously critiqued existing society and posited a utopian alternative. We will begin by studying formulations of totality in response to a cultural crisis initiated by the 1789 French Revolution. From there, we turn to German idealism and to an analysis of composer Richard Wagner's ideas and compositions that made the idea of the synthesis of the arts a central focus for European modernism. Yet if Wagner's works and writings provided the dominant reference for subsequent developments from the 1880s onward, these most often consisted of a search for alternatives to his own theory and practice, particularly in the visual arts. We will examine attempts to envision totality after Wagner in Impressionist painting and German Expressionism. Ideas of totality and utopia continued to carry positive associations for modern artists until the 1930s, when they became co-opted by totalitarian governments. The course concludes by examining the perversion of modernist dreams in Nazi festivals and art exhibitions.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA339, GELT239, RL&L339
Prereq: None

GRST241 Introduction to European Avant-Garde, 1880-1940

This course will introduce students to the major avant-garde art movements from the first half of the 20th century as they took root in France, Germany, Italy, Holland, and Russia. Our focus will be on painting, but we will also look at attempts to go beyond painting in an attempt to gain greater immediacy or social relevance for art. Topics that will receive special emphasis include the relationship between abstraction and figuration, the impact of primitivism and contact with non-Western arts, modernism's relationship to mass culture, war and revolution, gender and representation, art and dictatorship, and the utopian impulse to have the arts redesign society as a whole.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA241, RL&L241
Prereq: None

GRST249 Catching Glimpses: Perceiving Infinitesimals in the Scientific Revolution

The rise of mathematical natural science in the early modern period marked the dissolution of objective reality as it had previously been known. Since Aristotle, perceptible objects had been understood to be enduring substances whose identities were inscribed in their very being and which retained these identities through change. The mechanistic worldview of the 17th and 18th centuries exploded this stable order into a telescoping multiplicity of material systems, from the infinitesimally small to the infinitely large. Rather than encountering a world of enduring and identifiable substances--animals, vegetables, and minerals; people and artifacts--the perceiver was instead confronted with fleeting constellations of homogeneous matter in a perpetual flux, no sooner glimpsed than gone. This metaphysical picture of infinitary flux was complemented by a new branch of mathematics, the infinitesimal calculus, which proved immensely successful both in uncovering new theorems and in modeling empirical phenomena.



Both the metaphysics and the mathematics of the new science were, however, rife with paradox. If material objects not only harbor a microscopic substructure but are, in fact, divisible without end, then we are faced with pluralities of pluralities without any underlying unities--parts of parts of parts...and not a whole among them. Conceptual instability afflicted the infinitesimals used in calculus, as well. In some contexts they were treated as very small but non-zero quantities, in others as strictly zero--provoking one critic to call them "ghosts of departed quantities."



In conjunction with the CHUM theme "Ephemera," this class will study the philosophical turbulence induced by the new science--in particular, by the mechanical philosophy and infinitesimal calculus. We will pay special attention to its consequences for the philosophy of perception. Aristotle compared perceptible objects to signet rings impressing their distinctive forms on the receptive wax of the human sensorium. But if there are no enduring substances or determinate forms, how are we to understand our perceptual relation to the world? How must perceptual experience be reconceived so as to accommodate the fleetingness and flux of material phenomena? And how is it that, though we are awash in ephemera, we nevertheless enjoy an (illusory?) impression of endurance and stability?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM339, COL351, PHIL302, STS339
Prereq: None

GRST250 Cultural Criticism and Aesthetic Theory: Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno

This seminar introduces and explores the cultural criticisms and aesthetic theories of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, two of the 20th century's most notable Marxist thinkers and critics. Our aim will be to illuminate the intimate interconnections between cultural criticism and aesthetic theory taking place concurrently with the rise of the artistic avant-gardes (with which both thinkers felt deep affinities). We will study the intellectual origins, cultural contexts, methods, and critical aims of Benjamin's and Adorno's uniquely individual yet also closely related practices of cultural criticism. Further, we will examine the assumptions underlying their aesthetic writings and seek to reconstruct their respective contributions to aesthetics.



Over the course of the semester, we will study the works of our protagonists both on their own terms and in comparison to each other. Major thematic units will include (but are not limited to) their writings on literary aesthetics, narrative, and translation; architecture and the city (Naples, Moscow, Paris, Berlin); landscape and nature; mass culture and aesthetic autonomy. Our starting point will be Georg Lukács's Theory of the Novel, a work to which both Benjamin and Adorno were much indebted. On occasion, we will supplement our explorations with asides from the 1920s and 1930s (by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht, Asja Lachs, Ernst Bloch) as well as scholarship for optional reading (by Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, Fredric Jameson, Susan Buck-Morss, Miriam Bratu Hansen, Susan Ingram, Judith Butler, Esther Leslie).
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL302
Prereq: None

GRST251 Kafka: Literature, Law, and Power

Elias Canetti claimed that among all writers, Kafka was "the greatest expert on power." In this course we will focus on Kafka's narratives of power relations. We will read and discuss Kafka's sometimes painfully precise descriptions of how power is exerted in the family and in personal relationships and how scrutiny and discipline are exercised over the body. We will also consider Kafka's depictions of physical violence and of apparatuses and institutions of power and the ethical and political implications of these depictions. The working hypothesis of this course is that Kafka not only tells stories about power, but that his stories also contain an implicit theory of how power works in modern society.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL251
Prereq: None

GRST252 From Caligari to Hitler: Weimar Cinema in Context

This course offers a critical introduction to German silent and sound films from 1919 to 1932. It will test the thesis of Siegfried Kracauer's classic study that expressionist films in particular prepared the way for Hitler's rise to power. The focus will be on canonical films of the era including THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, NOSFERATU, and THE LAST LAUGH (Murnau); METROPOLIS and M (Fritz Lang); and THE JOYLESS STREET and PANDORA'S BOX (Pabst). Some attention will also be given to films made at the ideological extremes of Weimar culture: KUHLE WAMPE (with a screenplay by Brecht), Leni Riefenstahl's THE BLUE LIGHT, and Pabst's THREEPENNY OPERA. Readings will include screenplays, essays, and reviews from the period as well as selected literary works such as Brecht's THREEPENNY OPERA and Irmgard Keun's novel THE ARTIFICIAL SILK GIRL.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FILM
Identical With: FILM352
Prereq: None

GRST253 The New German Cinema

This course will investigate the aesthetics, politics, and cultural context of the new German cinema. Having established a critical vocabulary, we will study the influence of Bertolt Brecht's theoretical writings on theater and film, ambivalent positions vis-à-vis the classic Hollywood cinema, issues of feminist filmmaking, and the thematic preoccupations peculiar to Germany, for example, left-wing terrorism and the Nazi past. Attendant materials will include literary sources, screenplays, and interviews.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FILM
Identical With: FILM320, GELT253
Prereq: None

GRST255 Newest German (and Austrian) Cinema

This course examines the history and aesthetics of German cinema between the fall of the Wall and the present and also considers work by important Austrian directors of the same period. Topics include the ongoing response to World War II and the Holocaust, reactions to the reunification of Germany, and the problematic integration of German Turks and other minorities. We will look at films by Maren Ade, Fatih Akin, Dorris Dörrie, Michael Haneke, Christian Petzold, Ulrich Seidl, Margarethe von Trotta, and Tom Tykwer.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FILM
Identical With: FILM355
Prereq: None

GRST259 Criticism and Marxism

This course introduces students to the Marxist (or historical-materialist) tradition, with an accent on its centrality to interpretative methods in literary studies and to related fields in the human sciences. We will study foundations, beginning with Marx and Engels, and our reading will carry us through the range of Marxisms that inform contemporary critical practice. We will focus on historical materialism as a style of dialectical thought, uniquely equipped to grasp both our immediate objects of study (literary texts and other cultural productions) and the social forces through which those objects are determined. In the same dialectical mode, we will reflect often on the relation between our work in the classroom and our contemporary social and historical situation. Students with an interest in literary and social theory will benefit from the course, as will students who know a little bit about Marxism but want to understand the logic of this crucial body of thought.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL359
Prereq: None

GRST261 Reading Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche, trained philologist and self-proclaimed "free spirit," remains one of the most controversial figures in modern thought, a source of fascination and outrage alike. Best known as the philosopher of the "Dionysian," the "will to power," the "eternal return of the same," the "transvaluation of all values," and the "over-man," Nietzsche also proudly considered himself the most accomplished prose stylist in the German language. In this course, we will examine two closely interrelated issues: (1) the genesis of Nietzsche's major philosophical thoughts in the areas of epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and the critique of religion, from his earliest to his latest writings; (2) the cultivation of a philosophical style that, in its mobilization of highly artistic modes of aphoristic reduction, metaphorization, personification, and storytelling, aspires to turn critical thinking into a life-affirming art form.



The course will combine philosophical interpretation with textual analysis. No prior knowledge of Nietzsche's works is expected; however, a willingness to set aside significant chunks of time to dwell in Nietzsche's texts is required. Students with reading knowledge in German are encouraged to read at least some of the assignments in the original. Guidance in doing so will be provided based on individual need.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL297
Prereq: None

GRST263 Inside Nazi Germany, 1933--1945

This survey course seeks to give a firm historical grounding in the processes that led to Hitler's rise to power, the nature of the National Socialist regime, and the origins and implementation of policies of aggression and genocide. The basic premise of this course is that National Socialism was from the outset driven by a belligerent and genocidal logic. The course will therefore critically analyze the racial, eugenic, and geopolitical ideology of National Socialism and the policies of discrimination, conquest, economic exploitation, and extermination that followed from it. At the same time, the role of structural factors in explaining these outcomes will also be explored in great depth. We will analyze how German society was shaped by Nazism, considering conformity and opposition in the lives of ordinary people in both peacetime and war. The course seeks to impart an awareness of the complex of factors that produced a regime of unprecedented destructiveness and horror, and it aims to develop a critical understanding of the ongoing problems of interpretation that accompany its history. Just as importantly, we will consider the continued relevance of the legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust to our evaluation of national and international affairs in the 21st century.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST263
Prereq: None

GRST264 Crisis, Creativity, and Modernity in the Weimar Republic, 1918--1933

Born in defeat and national bankruptcy; beset by disastrous inflation, unemployment, and frequent changes of government; and nearly toppled by coup attempts, the Weimar Republic (1918--1933) produced some of the most influential and enduring examples of modernism. Whether in music, theater, film, painting, photography, design, or architecture, the Weimar years marked an extraordinary explosion of artistic creativity. New approaches were likewise taken in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, medicine, science, and technology, and new ideas about sexuality, the body, and the role of women were introduced. Nevertheless, Weimar modernism was controversial and generated a backlash that caused forces on the political right to mobilize to ultimately bring down the republic. This advanced seminar explores these developments and seeks to understand them within their political, social, and economic contexts to allow for a deeper understanding of Weimar culture and its place within the longer-term historical trajectory of Germany and Europe. This perspective allows for an appreciation of the important links between Weimar modernism and Imperial Germany, as well as an awareness of some of the important continuities between the Weimar and Nazi years.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST319, CJST319
Prereq: None

GRST266 Ethics After the Holocaust

The philosopher Theodor Adorno declared, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." The Holocaust is a challenge to our understanding of modern society, ethics, and what it means to be human after Auschwitz. In this course, we will investigate how the Holocaust orients contemporary discussions on questions of guilt, forgiveness, and evil. What does it mean to remember, to forgive, and to forget? Can one ethically represent the Holocaust in art? We will explore these questions using various sources, including works by Hannah Arendt, Adorno, and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as museums, memorial sites, and cinematic representations.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI272, CJST272
Prereq: None

GRST266F Ethics After the Holocaust (FYS)

The philosopher Theodor Adorno declared, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." The Holocaust is a challenge to our understanding of modern society, ethics, and what it means to be human. We will engage films, graphic novels, art, and philosophical works as we try and grapple with the contemporary presence and relevance of the Holocaust. Are comparisons of other genocides to the Holocaust helpful or offensive? Was the Holocaust a lapse into barbarism or a dark side to the logic of modernity? We will see how thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Buber grappled with these and related questions such as the problem of evil, the meaning of suffering, and the presence of God in the death camps.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI272F, CJST272F
Prereq: None

GRST267 Losers of World War II

This course explores the experiences of Germany and Japan in the postwar era. These countries faced the dual challenge of making political transitions to democratic government and recovering from the economic ruin of World War II. Japan and Germany both were occupied and rebuilt by the United States, and both were blamed for the devastation of the war. How did Japan and Germany respond to being cast as worldwide villains? How strong were the democracies that developed? This course explores these questions by comparing the culture, history, and institutions of these two countries.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GOVT
Identical With: GOVT285, CEAS280
Prereq: None

GRST268 Foundations of Critical Theory: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud

This course serves as an introduction to the main ideas of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, and their distinct yet similar techniques of interpretation. Michel Foucault once claimed that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud "have changed the nature of the sign and modified the fashion in which the sign can in general be interpreted" -- which means that they changed the way in which we interpret and make sense of the world and of ourselves. Marx did so by leading his readers, in Capital, to "the hidden abode of production" where "the secret of profit-making must at last be laid bare;" Nietzsche did so by inviting his readers, in his Genealogy of Morality, to "go down and take a little look into the secret of how they fabricate ideals on earth;" Freud did so by teaching that we cannot know ourselves and are hence "not the master in our own house."

This course is designed to make critical theory and contemporary discourses in the humanities and social sciences more accessible by providing the modern historical and philosophical foundations for key critical concepts such as interpretation, subject/agency, history, origin, society and social power, value, modernity, capitalism, socialism, and religion/morality. We will explore some of the most influential writings of the respective authors in a comparative manner and, thus, come to a better understanding of the genesis of critical modern thinking.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL248
Prereq: None

GRST269 Modern Aesthetic Theory

As a philosophical discipline, aesthetic theory initially coalesced around a cluster of related issues concerning the nature of beauty and the norms governing its production, appreciation, and authoritative assessment. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, both art and aesthetics undergo a conspicuous yet enigmatic shift, signaled by (among other things) Hegel's declaration that "art, in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past." Rather suddenly, classical accounts of beauty, genius, aesthetic experience, and critical taste are beset by anxieties about the autonomy and significance of aesthetic praxis in human life and, subsequently, by a series of challenges to the tenebility of traditional aesthetic categories--author, text, tradition, meaning and interpretation, disinterested pleasure, originality, etc. Our aim in this course is to track these conceptual shifts and to interrogate the rationale behind them. (This course complements, but does not presuppose COL 266: History and Limits of Aesthetic Theory.)
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL269, PHIL269
Prereq: None

GRST272 Introduction to History: Germany from Napoleon to the Berlin Republic

Germany witnessed more dramatic and radical changes in forms of government within the span of just 31 years (1918-1949) than any other modern society in history, yet today it is a model democracy and an anchor of peace and prosperity in the heart of Europe. Germans are credited for extraordinary achievements in the arts, sciences, and industry, yet they also produced some of history's darkest chapters. This introductory course surveys the fascinating and turbulent history of modern Germany to analyze the sources of these contradictions. We will begin by locating the birth of modern Germany in the massive social and political upheavals of the Napoleonic era that set the stage for the rise of German nationalism and rapid industrialization. We will study the unlikely processes that resulted in German unification in 1871 and how Germany's nationalism, growing industrial power, and its deep internal divisions led to a policy of aggressive imperialism that contributed to the outbreak of the World War I. The course will analyze the profound impact of that war and defeat on German society, situating both the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler in that context. We will subsequently study Nazism, the World War II, and the Holocaust, as well as the ultimate destruction of Germany as sovereign state with its surrender and military occupation in 1945. The remainder of the course explores the phoenixlike rebirth of two competing German states in the Cold War and the subsequent parallel development and divergence of two German societies. We will conclude the course by analyzing the process that led to German reunification in 1990 and the lines of development of the "Berlin Republic" since that time. The aims of the course are to introduce students to historical primary sources, the skills of historical analysis, and the questions of historiography through a coherent introductory survey of modern German history.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST172
Prereq: None

GRST273 Tatort - Window into Germany (CLAC.50)

Few television shows have become anchored in German cultural discourse as firmly as "Tatort," a weekly crime show produced and broadcast by public television since 1970. Watched by up to 40% of all potential viewers, new episodes are prominently reviewed in major daily newspapers and serve as a focus for discussions about German politics, culture, and society. Episodes have tackled questions of police brutality, immigration, gentrification, and the surveillance state, while also shining a light on Germany's changing conception of itself. Over the years, the show has attracted some of the major directors and actors from German-speaking regions, such as Wolfgang Petersen, Margarethe von Trotta, Dominik Graf, Sibel Kekili, and Götz George. In this course, we will watch current and canonical episodes of the show, using it as a way into discussions about Germany's past, present, and future.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: CGST273
Prereq: GRST212

GRST277 The Past is Our Present Problem: Post-1945 German Literature and Culture

The quarter century following Germany's unconditional surrender in 1945 saw a continued struggle between a desire to move on and rebuild a society and culture in ruins on the one hand, and efforts to own up to--and learn from--Germany's recent Nazi past on the other. Literature, in particular, became one of the driving forces trying to understand how the Third Reich was possible, what happened to the remnants of Nazi ideology in the new Germanies, and what avenues forward there were for a language and literature so thoroughly complicit in the horrors of genocide and Holocaust.



In this course, we will explore how writers (re)configure, but also ignore, questions of personal and national identity, the function of language, the role of tradition, individual agency and social norms, or gender roles. With a main focus on West Germany, we will read some of the most important works of the time, ranging from so-called "rubble literature" of the immediate post-war years (Wolfdietrich Schnurre, Wolfgang Borchert) to texts trying to find ways to confront questions of guilt and responsibility (Günther Grass, Heinrich Böll) and to more radical attempts to reconfigure what literary art in German is able and obligated to say (Paul Celan, Peter Weiss). To complement the focus on West Germany, we will also read select texts from the other German-speaking countries: Austria (Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann), Switzerland (Max Frisch), and East Germany (Christa Wolf). In addition to close readings, we will engage with larger questions and cultural movements of the time, from debates between authors who left Nazi Germany and those who stayed, to the Gruppe 47 (Group 47) and its attempt to change the literary landscape between 1947 and 1967, to the increased politicization of literature and resurgence of debates of Nazism's staying power surrounding the social movements of the late 1960s. We will combine our readings with looks at historically significant moments such as the founding of two German states, the so-called economic miracle in West Germany, the conservative "restoration" efforts under chancellor Adenauer, or the election to the chancellorship of Kiesinger, a former Nazi bureaucrat with the Propaganda Ministry.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: None

GRST279 Good, Evil, Human: German Fairy Tales and Their Cultural Impact

The collected folk tales of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm have had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Germany and beyond. Despite our sense that we already know these texts, it is worth taking a closer look at their messages. Deceptively simple, these little tales communicate and negotiate extraordinarily important and complicated messages about what it means to be human, to behave in acceptable ways, to have and control unwelcome desires, and to (be able to) imagine a better world. We will read selected fairy tales from the Grimm collection and other texts, investigate the historical context in which the Grimms undertook their ambitious project, learn about ways in which scholarship has framed fairy tales, and discuss adaptations of the fairy-tale tradition in films and texts of the 20th century.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL279, GELT279, WLIT251
Prereq: None

GRST279F Good, Evil, Human: German Fairy Tales and Their Cultural Impact (FYS)

The collected folk tales of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm have had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Germany and beyond. Despite our sense that we already know these texts, it is worth taking a closer look at their messages. Deceptively simple, these little tales communicate and negotiate extraordinarily important and complicated messages about what it means to be human, to behave in acceptable ways, to have and control unwelcome desires, and to (be able to) imagine a better world. We will read selected fairy tales from the Grimm collection and other texts, investigate the historical context in which the Grimms undertook their ambitious project, learn about ways in which scholarship has framed fairy tales, and discuss adaptations of the fairy-tale tradition in films and texts of the 20th century.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GELT279F, COL279F
Prereq: None

GRST284 Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Then and Now

This course serves as an introduction to Critical Theory as first envisioned and practiced in the 1930s and 1940s by a group of European refugee scholars in New York and Los Angeles associated with the "Institute for Social Research," which later became known as the "Frankfurt School" (the city of Frankfurt being the location of its European origin and post-WW2 abode). Drawing on the German philosophical (Kant and Hegel), sociological (Weber and Simmel), psychological (Nietzsche and Freud), and Marxist (Engels, Marx, and Lukacs in particular) intellectual traditions, "Critical Theory" was intended to shed light on the genesis of capitalist class societies' inherently antagonistic and irrational makeup. Uncompromisingly interdisciplinary, the critical theorists explored phenomena such as authoritarian movements, mass media, propaganda, and the culture industry, and in doing so championed the significance of art and radical thought for the prospects of liberation from authoritarianism and alienated social relations. For the first generation of Critical Theorists (who must be distinguished from their less radical heirs, such as Habermas and Honneth), critique was not a purely academic exercise, but was pursued for the sake of radical social transformation and thus was sparked by a utopian impulse.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL265
Prereq: None

GRST288 The Human Condition: Arendt, Nietzsche, Marx

"God is dead," the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote at the close of the 19th century, "and we have killed him!" Nietzsche presents these words as being proclaimed by "a madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly." Both the content of this famous quotation and its setting express a concern with the internal and external conditions under which modern humans live and make sense of their lives: without the certainty of divine guidance and order (internally), encountering one another only as impersonal buyers and sellers on the marketplace (externally). In this seminar, we will study three strikingly unique yet nonetheless intersecting ways of addressing the human condition after the death of god. We will start with Hannah Arendt's magisterial "The Human Condition" (1958), in which she presents the history of how in the Western philosophical tradition the active life (the vita activa, as distinguished from the vita contemplativa, the life of the mind) has been conceptualized. Drawing on Nietzsche's genealogical method, Arendt traces the genesis of concepts from their Greek, Latin, and Biblical origins to modernity. In doing so, she focuses on the activities of labor, work, and action: Labor is the "metabolism between humans and nature" (Marx), the process through which we appropriate the earth for our survival as a species; work is the transformation of the earth into a durable world; and plurality is the sharing of this world with others.



From Arendt's comprehensive conceptual history of the human condition, we will proceed in reverse chronological order to contextualize and challenge her claims. Arendt singles out Nietzsche and Marx as the paradigmatic modern "life and labor philosophers" and foremost representatives of philosophical "naturalism," and we will first examine Nietzsche's account of the devolution of European morality to nihilism and his critique of Western metaphysics as a "life-denying" death-cult, and will then, in the final third of the semester, investigate Marx's attempts to historicize and rethink the interdependence of humans and their natural environment in terms of an alienation of practice and the transformation (necessitated by the capitalist "law of value") of human labor into an abstract power of domination over humans and, eventually, the whole planet.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL259
Prereq: None

GRST289 The Enlightenment You Don't Know (And What It Can Tell You about the Digital World)

Who am I? How and what can I know? Is what I perceive of and present to the world the truth? What can and should I do? Who knows what about me? Such questions are asked with increased urgency as the sheer mass of information makes reliable orientation impossible, as social relations become unstable, as uncontrollable actors gather ever more information about us, and as the (neo)liberal sense of self starts to dissolve under the pressures of new media and accelerating social and political processes.



This course proposes that, to look for ways to navigate this situation, we ought to turn to the 18th century, a time when old certainties and assumptions collapsed under the emergence of modernity and new, "enlightened" views of humans and their world were developed. During that time, thinkers and artists set out to redefine the self, obsessively observing the individual, its cognition, and its role in the world. In doing so, they invented the modern self, one with rich inner lives, a keen interest in the observable reality, proud of its abilities, and aware of its role as a social being and its observation by others. They created elaborate modes of paying attention, of reading the human being in its complexity. Acquiring insight into their ideas can help us see what is being lost and gained today. We will focus largely on the German 18th century since it produced some of the final instantiations of Enlightenment thought in a variety of disciplines.



In the first part of this course, we will read from a variety of disciplines that either were invented in the 18th century or underwent significant changes during that time, ranging from legal theory and natural sciences to philosophy and literature. In the second part, we will jump forward to the dissolution of this modern self in our current moment. We will engage with theory and digital art of the 21st century, exploring what it means to constantly be distracted, to be the focus of attention of algorithms, and to be confronted with a world which is both always at the disposal of our attention and always out of reach.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: COL304
Prereq: None

GRST290 Nietzsche - Science, Psychology, Genealogy

This course offers an intermediate survey of Friedrich Nietzsche's mature philosophical writings. Nietzsche's thought is centrally concerned, throughout his career, with a cluster of classical philosophical questions--does human life have meaning? What makes an action right or wrong? Can we comprehend the true nature of reality? What undergirds our normative judgments (of beauty or justice)? We will be especially concerned with tracking Nietzsche's reflections on the impact of modern science (especially the advent of Newton's mechanical physics and Darwin's evolutionary biology) on our conceptions of value and meaning in human life.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL290, PHIL252
Prereq: None

GRST291 Directed Research in European Studies

This course is intended for students who wish to undertake a significant research project or get a head start on a senior essay or thesis devoted to any aspect of European civilization from 500 to 2021. The course will begin with three weeks of regular meetings devoted to the purpose of academic research in the humanities and social sciences, developing and refining a research topic, organizing one's research, bibliographies and sources, the construction of an argument, and the organization of a research paper. Students will work on their research projects individually during the rest of the semester, although the class will meet as a group from time to time so students can present and discuss the state of their work. Students will also have weekly tutorials with the instructor to discuss their progress and plan their next steps. Students who are able to do so are encouraged to engage with research materials in languages other than English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L390, COL393, MDST390, FREN390
Prereq: None

GRST292 Reason and Its Limits

This course offers a close study of Immanuel Kant's magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason, supplemented by related writings by Kant and some secondary literature. Kant observes that the history of philosophy is rife with disagreements, even though philosophers purport to traffic in necessary truths disclosed by reason alone. This scandalous fractiousness calls into question reason's ability to offer substantive insights into necessary truths. Kant's "critique" aims to vindicate reason by distinguishing, in a principled manner, the sorts of things we can know with certainty from those that lie beyond the limits of human understanding. His central thesis, "transcendental idealism," holds that "reason has insight only into what it produces after its own plan" (Bxiii). In other words, we can indeed be certain of key structural features of reality such as its spatiotemporality and causal interconnectedness--but only because those features are, in some crucial sense, mind-dependent. This class will explore in detail the arguments for these claims as well as prominent interpretations of their philosophical upshot.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-PHIL
Identical With: COL292, PHIL291
Prereq: None

GRST294 Civic Responsibility and Places of Remembrance: Historical Consciousness in Germany and Beyond

The Holocaust, Germany's STASI terror, resistance to dictatorships, debates about Germany's war memorials, and colonial history come to mind when we think of 20th-century Germany. In this seminar we will pursue the questions: What do we remember? How do we remember? What are places of remembrance, how are they created, and what functions do they have in our society and for us personally? The term "places of remembrance" comes from the French (lieux de mémoire, literally, places of memory). This term was coined by the French historian Pierre Nora. For him, places of remembrance are not only material places, but also the so-called 'immaterial' places such as people, data and concepts that are anchored in people's collective memory and have an identity-forming function. In relation to Germany, places of remembrance can be specific places (like Weimar) or memorial sites (the Auschwitz concentration camp), but also buildings (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin), monuments (Bismarck Monument in Hamburg), people (e.g., names of people on street signs), events (Fall of the Wall), customs (Christmas) or symbols. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who was murdered at Buchenwald, described memories as a connective structure. They connect people socially and temporally. But not only individuals, also societies, nations and cultures remember (= collective memory). According to Halbwachs, crystallization points or places of memory are needed for this process. Like pieces in a mosaic, these form the identity of a culture, a nation, or a society. Their meaning and their perception can change over time. Some things can also be forgotten, but places of remembrance can help us avoid forgetting. With this caveat in mind, we want--among other things--to explore, discuss, and present "places of remembrance" and the role of memory culture in Germany and beyond.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL194
Prereq: None

GRST298 Marxism and Climate Crisis

Since the Communist Manifesto of 1848, the notion of "crisis" has played a prominent role in Marxist theorizing. Today's intensifying climate crisis is lending new theoretical and political weight to the Marxist critique of extractive and consumptive capitalist actions that transform nature into a means of production for ensuring ceaseless economic growth through the accumulation of capital. The consequences of this are not only the exhaustion of human labor-power but also of non-human nature (fossilized carbon, wild animal biomass, top soils, clean water, etc.). Our perspective for studying and understanding this transformation of nature will primarily be informed by a set of recent "eco Marxist" writings that break with traditional Marxist productivism in favor of an eco-critical analysis that reconceptualizes capitalism neither as an economic nor social system but rather as "a way of organizing nature" (J. Moore). In light of the Center's semester theme of Energy and Exhaustion, we will ask three sets of questions: historical (about the origins of the Capitalocene and of "fossil capital"); theoretical (how is Marx's "general law of accumulation" also a law of environmental depletion and planetary limits?); and political (traditional "Promethean" Marxism envisioned revolution as the full actualization of productive forces; what is the meaning of revolution in the age of natural exhaustion and climate crisis, when the limits of human historical agency are drawing closer with each new tipping point?).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM398, COL398, STS398
Prereq: None

GRST301 Advanced Seminar in German Literature: Poetry as a Way of Life

Who am I? What is the world? And what can language (not) do? Throughout its history, German poetry has returned, time and again, to asking these fundamental questions about a self, its relation to the world, and language's capacity to represent, influence, and constitute an I. Poetry serves as one of the central sites where the epistemological, moral, social, and aesthetic potential of mankind is negotiated. Lyric texts play a fundamental role in the creation and exploration of the promises, problems, and paradoxes of modern notions of subjectivity, society, and art. Almost all of the most canonical German poems pick up on some or all of these issues, and we will read a selection from the 18th to the 21st centuries. The goal of this class is to provide students with an overview of German poetic traditions and to give students the tools to talk about poetry in German. We will explicitly engage with analytic terminology as well as aesthetic discourses. All readings, writings, and discussions in German.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: GRST213 OR GRST251S OR GRST252S

GRST302 Forward, Without Forgetting: The GDR in Literature and Film

In 1949, postwar Germany officially split into two separate countries with the formation of the German Democratic Republic. Also known as East Germany, the GDR was isolated from the Western world for four decades, and it developed its own, equally rich, literary and cinematic cultures. By looking at a range of textual and visual sources, students will engage critically with ways of understanding this "other" Germany and its distinctive cultural expressions, ideology, and history, including the role of the government and the Stasi. The course also explores phenomena like the "Ostalgie" and retro-chic that manifested themselves after the Fall of the Wall in 1989. The readings include short stories, songs, and excerpts by and among others: Wolf Biermann, Johannes Becher, Günther de Bryn, Stefan Heim, Rainer Kunze, Brigitte Reimann, Claudia Rusch, Susanne Schädlich, Maxi Wander, Christa Wolf. Participants will view and discuss films and TV series produced before and after unification.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL291
Prereq: GRST213

GRST303 German-Language Theater After 1945: Show, Teach, Remember

Theater has played an integral role in the development of German culture since the 18th century. Playwrights, directors, and producers have been able--indeed compelled!--to constantly negotiate and define theater's pedagogical role vis-à-vis the public and the political sphere. They had to ask how theater can and should (re)present the world on stage, and how the world on stage can and should relate to the audience and its world. German-language theater after 1945 additionally had to tackle questions about Germany's past, as well as the past of (its) theater traditions, the connection between visuality, aesthetics, and the power that had played such an immense role during the National Socialist era. In this course, we will read some of the most important and influential plays written and produced in the German-speaking countries since 1945, as well as influential theoretical texts. We will discuss such performance aspects as set designs, language, and acting techniques, and we will ourselves stage short excerpts in various styles as a way of gaining first-hand experience with the range of possibilities in this infinitely flexible genre.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: GRST213

GRST304 Punk, Pop & Politics in Cold War Germany

This course introduces artistic responses and positions developed in the face of social and political realities in a divided country after WWII until its reunification and subsequent rapprochement. We will explore this period through works by artists, musicians, and young German authors, including Joseph Beuys and his concept of society as a social sculpture; bands of the Neue Deutsche Welle, who paired German lyrics with punk and new wave music; and the representative painting styles of the Neue Wilde, young painters who left abstraction and conceptual art behind to give expression to their observed reality. We will read contemporary texts that accompanied these developments in the form of literary writing (Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Peter Glaser, Rainald Goetz) or as critical responses in newspapers, art journals, and pop magazines (Diedrich Diederichsen, Jutta Koether, Peter Bömmels), supported by excerpts from influential theoretical texts. Students will develop skills to critically engage these works and will apply these skills by preparing their own responses to works of art and cultural events.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: GRST213

GRST305 Oppression, Resistance, Despair: Attempting Change in Pre-Revolution Germany, 1830-1848

The 1830s-40s were a volatile moment in the history of German democracy and literature. After the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the old political order in 1815, authorities started rigorous and increasingly violent campaigns to oppress and destroy the budding (proto-) democratic and early nationalist movements. At the same time, the beginning of industrialization in the German-speaking world led to massive social upheavals, increasing poverty, famines, and the loss of entire economic sectors. In this context, authors of the Vormärz, the decades right before the March revolutions of 1848, became increasingly politicized, critical not only of their societies, but also the previous literary paradigms of Weimar Classicism and Romanticism. In their works, revolutionary in form and content, they fought for a better world and reflected on the need for resistance in the face of defeat and despair, the possibilities for a good life in an unjust world, and the role of art in political and social struggle. The course's main focus will be on Georg Büchner (1813-1837), whose works explore the tension between subjective agency and the destructive dynamic of history (Danton's Tod), idyll and insanity (Lenz), or individual life and structural oppression (Woyzeck). We will also engage with the function of humor and subversion in social critique (Heinrich Heine), the fight for a better status for women (Fanny Lewald, Louise Aston), and hugely problematic components of the rising German nationalism like anti-French and anti-Jewish sentiments.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: GRST 213

GRST306 Feeling Critical: Emotions in the 20th & 21st Centuries

Do Germans have feelings? The prevailing image of the cold German, characterized by emotional restraint and subdued industriousness, indicates significant changes since the Romantic era, when German was considered the language of passion, equally suited for expressing deeply felt personal convictions and nation-forging collective sentiments. Focusing on the pivotal transitional decades of the 20th century to today, a period stimulating conspicuously non-emotional, critical artistic-intellectual responses to ongoing political shifts and global crises, we turn to the cultural artifacts of this time as an archive of feelings (Ann Cvetkovich) to trace this development. Through close readings of literary and journalistic texts, works of visual art, performances, music, film, and theater in their cultural and political contexts, we explore if and how they negotiate and contribute to affective structures and strategies--an approach termed "reading for emotion" by Anna Parkinson. We examine methods of evading or sharing "authentic" emotions in recent literary expressions, including German Popliteratur, autofiction, and social media formats, dialectic tensions of pop-journalism that engages aspects of critical theory and cultural studies from an affirmative perspective, and Christoph Schlingensief's confrontational artistic interventions in response to a social and political landscape of repressed feelings. Course readings, discussions, and assignments will be in German.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: None

GRST310 Newest German Literature and Film

This seminar is designed to introduce students to films and literary texts produced in the German language in the past few years. Because the materials we will read and watch are of recent vintage, they are not yet part of an established canon: What their significance is and how and why we should engage with them is far from settled. For this reason, this seminar will fulfill a twofold task: (1) It will critically engage with some of the most cutting-edge literary and filmic creative work currently being done in the German language; and (2) it will offer extensive opportunities to explore and critique how these texts deal with contemporary social issues such as the revival of nationalist, Islamophobic, and authoritarian politics, the European Union's crisis of legitimacy in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, or the new "social question" arising from the dismantling of the welfare state and the growing "precarization" of work.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL316
Prereq: GRST213

GRST320 Places of Remembrance: Historical Consciousness in Germany

Memorial days and monuments: every nation recalls its history. Antisemitism, the Holocaust, East Germany's STASI terror and the resistance to dictatorships, and the more recent debates about Germany's colonial history come to mind when we think of 20th century Germany. In this seminar, we will explore the culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) and visit places of remembrance (Erinnerungsorte) virtually. We will discuss how and what we do--and do not--remember, based on selected readings, documentaries, and memorial sites. Speakers from Germany will be invited via Zoom to talk about specific places and activities of remembrance. We will develop online projects, for example, one's own family history or that of others, or geo-mapping memorial sites.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL320
Prereq: GRST213

GRST330 Nietzsche als Versucher (CLAC.50)

The term "Versucher" combines three meanings: (i) a writer of essays, (ii) a maker of experiments and hypotheses, and (iii) a tempter who seductively tests convictions and provokes latent desires. Friedrich Nietzsche draws on all these senses when he proposes "Versucher" as "the not-undangerous name [he] dares to bestow" on the "philosophers of the future"--a coming generation of free spirits who will (finally) be capable of appreciating and continuing his intellectual legacy (Beyond Good and Evil, §42).



This course will interrogate Nietzsche's conception of a philosophical Versucher and examine how this concept might apply to Nietzsche himself: as an experimenter with literary style and genre (including the essay form) and as a polarizing cult figure who has attracted the fascination of generations of teenagers and the most diverse (often diametrically opposed) ideological movements. How is it that Nietzsche inspires such passionate attachment in such radically different readers? What is it about his philosophical style and literary form that cultivates a feeling of intimacy and fierce allegiance while also admitting such aggressively divergent interpretations? To explore these questions, we will read and discuss excerpts from Nietzsche's writings and correspondence alongside texts by his friends and interlocutors--such as Richard Wagner, Paul Rée, and Nietzsche's unrequited paramour, Lou Andreas-Salomé. We will also look at prominent cases of his cultural reception--notably by the Nazi party (due to the influence of Nietzsche's sister, who was a party member) and simultaneously by opponents of totalitarianism such as Robert Musil, Karl Löwith, and Walter Kaufmann.



This course is part of the Fries Center for Global Studies' Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) initiative. It is taught in German and associated with COL290/PHIL252 "Nietzsche - Science, Psychology, Genealogy," though students can take either course independent of the other. No background in philosophy or literature is required for this course, but advanced-intermediate (B2+) reading and spoken German is a must.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: CGST290, COL287, PHIL253
Prereq: None

GRST332 The Racialized German Screen

In this course, we will examine filmic constructions of racial otherness in German cinema from early sound film until the present. The films in this course represent Asian, Jewish, Black, Native American, Romani, and Muslim characters. Some of these racialized character types are inextricably tied to Germany's history of war, migration, and asylum, including the post-WWII "war child," the West German guest worker, the former East German asylum seeker, and the twenty-first-century refugee. We will consider the parameters of national cinema, asking to what extent Germany's films can be seen as a projection screen for anxieties about racialized others, but also potentially fantasizing about cosmopolitan, multicultural Germany. While the majority of these productions are created by white German filmmakers, we witness a shift in more recent productions, where filmmakers of color step behind the camera to reclaim their narratives while employing their own strategies of representation. In addition to screening and analyzing films, we will read accompanying texts that will provide an aesthetic and cultural frame for interpretation.



Through careful film screenings, reading assignments, scaffolded analysis assignments, a presentation, and the creation of a final video essay, students will develop analytical skills in the viewing and interpretation of films and in writing original arguments about film history and cinema culture. Students will gain vocabulary for interpreting, analyzing, evaluating, and researching films in the context of the history that shaped and was shaped by them. No prior film studies knowledge is required, but the class discussions will take place entirely in German.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: GRST 213

GRST335 Writing between Cultures: German Literature and Film by Authors of Foreign Descent

This seminar will introduce students to both literary texts and films by immigrants or descendants of immigrants, all of whom write in German, whether as their first or second language. Among the topics we will explore are homesickness, interactions with bureaucracy, use of and perspectives on language, questions of citizenship and identity, assimilation and integration, cultural misunderstandings, and encounters with bigotry and xenophobia. We will discuss works by Yoko Tawada, Aras Ören, Rafik Schami, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Wladimir Kaminer, Vladimir Vertlieb, Saša Stanišic, and others as we consider what properties make their works part of the canon of German literature, or not. Films by Fatih Akin and Yasemin Samdereli are also included in this course.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL353
Prereq: GRST213

GRST342 Empire, Memory, Translation: A Seminar on the Rings of Saturn

In this seminar, we will explore three themes: The lasting effects of European imperialism and colonialism in (mostly but not exclusively) Europe and their literary representations; the relationship between historical memory and fiction in these representations; and the role of translation in shaping the relationship between historical memory and fiction.



At the center of this course is W. G. Sebald's travelogue "The Rings of Saturn" ("Die Ringe des Saturn"), a work we will read in both its German original and its congenial English translation. Sebald's genre-defying narrative recounts the historical traces of empire, war, and colonialism in the observations and reminiscences of the protagonist's wandering through the de-industrializing landscape of England's Suffolk County during the early 1990s. Obsessively associating phenomena near and far in an almost paranoid fashion, Sebald's first-person narrator leads the reader to the devastations wrought in China during the Opium Wars and in the Congo during Belgian rule; the local and global effects of cycles of capital accumulation, resource exploitation, and climate change; and the challenges and pitfalls of memory's attempts to find an adequate narrative form for how the globally disparate effects of capitalist modernity are interlinked.



All discussions and papers will be in German, and readings will be in German and English, with a consistent focus on theoretical and practical questions of translating from German to English. We will proceed at a slow pace, with plenty of time to grant our superb primary text the time and attention it deserves. This course is designed for students who have taken GRST 213 or have spent a semester studying abroad in a German-speaking country. We will focus on developing critical writing, reading, interpretation, and translation skills in German. Since the quantity of reading is fairly modest, we will put much emphasis on regular writing and rewriting.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL392
Prereq: None

GRST350 Global Economy: Germany and the World in an Age of Extremes, 1870-1957 (CLAC.50)

This Center for Global Studies discussion course explores the experience of globalization in the German-speaking world from the war of German unification in 1870 to the emergence of the European Community in 1957. It will analyze German imperialism and overseas investment before 1914; the deglobalization of the German economy in the First World War; the problem of reparations and other economic challenges faced by the Weimar Republic; and the impact of global protectionism and the Great Depression, the economic forces allowing the rise of Hitler, the economics of war, and the Nazi "New Order." We will explore the reasons for the ultimate failure of the German war effort and the country's catastrophic destruction and defeat in 1945, as well as Germany's postwar division and occupation as well as the gradual reconstruction and reintegration of the West German economy into a European and global division of labor beginning with the Bizone Agreement and GATT (1947), the Marshall Plan (1948), and the London German External Debt Agreement (1953), culminating in the Treaty of Rome (1957) creating the European Economic Community. The course will be using select German-language historical primary sources to explore this topic, supported by short secondary source narratives in both German and English pitched to intermediate to advanced German speakers/readers. Unlike the parent History lecture class (HIST 280: The Origins of Global Capitalism, 1800-present), this is a discussion course aimed at expanding vocabulary and practicing fluent discussions in the fields of history, politics, and economics.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CGST
Identical With: HIST281, CGST281
Prereq: GRST213

GRST376 The Volksstueck Tradition

In this course we will be studying the Austrian and German genre of the Volksstück. As the name suggests, plays in this genre are intended to address the joys and sorrows of ordinary people in their everyday lives, both reflecting and commenting on the social life of their times. While 19th-century Austrian Volksstücke owed much to the conventions of the commedia del arte, the genre evolved in the 20th century into a form of critical social analysis. This evolution accompanied changing concepts of the "Volk," with salaried office workers coming to the fore during the Weimar Republic. The 20th-century Volksstücke written between the world wars present characters who in real life would likely become supporters of the Nazis. Starting in the 1960s, playwrights and audiences rediscovered the Volksstücke of the prewar period, and new authors emerged. Topics and stylistic features we will examine include the changing figurations of the "Volk," dialogue employing actual or synthetic dialect and colloquial language, the prevalence of inarticulateness or inauthentic speech, oppression and exploitation of women, shifts in class attitudes, and the increasing influence of the mass media. Interesting parallels to the Volksstück can be found in Norman Lear's long-running television series "All in the Family." Among the authors we will be reading are Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Kraus, Marieluise Fleisser, Ödön von Horváth, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Martin Sperr, Wolfgang Bauer, and Franz Xaver Kroetz. All reading, writing, and class discussion will be in German.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: GRST213

GRST379 German Fairy Tales: Brüder Grimm and Beyond

In this advanced-level German course, we will read selected fairy tales from the Grimm collection and other texts, investigate the historical context in which the Grimms undertook their ambitious project, learn about ways in which scholarship has framed fairy tales, and discuss adaptations of the fairy-tale tradition in films and texts of the 20th century in Germany and the US. Most readings and all discussions are in German.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Prereq: None

GRST386 German Romanticism: Disenchantment and Re-enchantment

Famously, the sociologist Max Weber described the rational, enlightened age as "disenchanted": Unlike "the savage," he claimed, who uses "magical means" for manipulating "mysterious incalculable powers," the denizens of capitalist modernity use "technical means and calculation" to master "all things." At the same time, Weber indicated that the "process of disenchantment, which has been under way for millennia in Western culture," birthed abstract new enchantments: "Having lost their magic, the multiple gods of the past rise up from their graves in the form of impersonal forces, fighting for power over our lives and thus beginning anew their eternal struggle against one another." Against the backdrop of Weber's dialectic of disenchantment and re-enchantment, this course offers a representative overview of some of the key ideas, works, and authors of German Romanticism, a term that designates both a period that extends from about 1795 to 1848 and a style of creative and intellectual production that encompasses a remarkable diversity of phenomena, including the proto-avant-garde experiments with communal "sympoetry" and "symphilosophy" in the Early Romantic circles and the rise of "Dark Romanticism" that fuses a fascination with science and new technologies with a turn to the occult and demonic. In tracing the tensions between disenchantment and re-enchantment, we will consider works of literature, criticism, art, and music, including works by some of the key figures in the German intellectual and artistic tradition, such as Heinrich Heine, the Brothers Schlegel and the Brothers Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, Caspar David Friedrich, Robert and Clara Schumann, Franz Schubert, Karoline von Günderrode, Bettina von Arnim, Novalis, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and the young Karl Marx.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL315
Prereq: GRST213

GRST390 Romanticism-Realism-Modernism

In the study of German literature (and art), the terms romanticism, realism, and modernism designate a span of time extending from the "Age of Goethe" to the mid-20th century literary cultures of West Germany, East Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In this seminar, we want to take a closer look at representative examples for each of the three categories: What kind of subject matters are prevalent in each respective period, what narrative, dramatic, and poetic devices and forms are typically employed? What distinguishes these periods from one another, how useful are these distinctions? What, finally, is the purpose of such periodizing of literature?

The purpose of this seminar is twofold: 1. It is intended to provide a historical overview of German literature by engaging with representative romanticist, realist, and modernist works of prose, drama, and lyric; 2. It is designed to critically probe the concepts of romanticism, realism, and modernism: How useful are these categories in making us understand the evolution of fiction, authorship and readership, literary subjectivity, or narrative form? What are some pitfalls of using these categories?

All readings, papers, and discussions will be in German.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL390
Prereq: GRST213

GRST391 Weimar Modernism and the City of Berlin

One of the most fascinating aspects of Weimar modernism is the emergence of new forms of perception and consumption, reflected in a new urban consumer culture that generated an ever-changing array of visual and aural stimulations. This changed reality was perhaps best captured by the young medium of film, but older media like literature and painting also responded to this modernist challenge. This course will examine not only exemplary works of literary and visual production from the Weimar period, but also other aspects of Weimar modernism, such as the development of radio, design, fashion, advertising, and architecture, emphasizing analyses of the new mass culture of entertainment, distraction, and "pure exteriority" (Kracauer) in combination with left-wing cultural and political criticism. The city of Berlin, then the third largest in the world and in many ways the international capital of modernism, will provide the main locus of investigation. All course readings, discussions, and assignments will be in German.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: COL388
Prereq: None

GRST401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

GRST402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

GRST403 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

GRST404 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

GRST409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

GRST410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

GRST411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

GRST412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

GRST420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

GRST465 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

GRST466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

GRST469 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

GRST491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

GRST492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT