GERM 2559 (3) Reading German Stories and Histories   

10:00 - 10:50 MWF

Ms. Schenberg

In this course, students will practice and improve their language skills through reading a diversity of short German texts; we will also view and discuss films and short plays. Topics include poster exhibitions about the Weimar Republic and Germany from 1919-2019; texts will range from modern German literature to language history to everyday life during the Third Reich. These texts will be interspersed with regular grammar exercises and review. Requirements include regular attendance, tests, vocabulary quizzes, presentations, and essays. GERM 2559 can be taken for credit toward the German major or minor. Prerequisite: GERM 2020 or the equivalent. 

GERM 3000 (3)  Advanced German  

9:30 - 10:45 TR

Mr. Schmid

How do the languages we speak shape our identity? Where do we belong? What does it mean to be a speaker of German? In this content-based language course, we will investigate questions of language, identities and belonging. Among other topics, we’ll explore German as a pluricentric language and discuss what it means to feel “at home” in the German language, by reading texts from authors like the Japanese and German-language writer, Yoko Tawada, and others. Together, we will work on your communication skills in German and practice your speaking and writing. To help you communicate confidently in German, we will systematically review grammar topics at the upper intermediate level, selectively target grammar topics at the advanced level, and place special emphasis on questions of German sentence structure.

Prerequisite GERM 2020 or GERM 2050 or instructor’s permission. If you haven’t taken GERM 2020 or GERM 2050, and are interested in taking this course, please email Marcel Schmid at ms5qt@virginia.edu!

GERM 3290 (1) German Studies Round Table  

5:00-5:50 W

Ms. Lahme

The German Conversation class is designed for students who wish to improve their ability to express themselves in German. In a small-group setting, we will focus on communications skills and discuss topics ranging from personal interests to current events. This course is open to all language levels.   

GERM 3300 (1) Language House Conversation  

TBA

Ms. Parker
 

For students residing in the German group in Shea House. May be taken more than once for credit. Departmental approval needed if considered for major credit. Prerequisite: instructor permission."

GERM 3510 (3)  German Cinema     

3:30 - 4:45 TR

Mr. Dobryden

This course examines the history of German cinema from the Weimar Republic to the present. We will study films by directors such as Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, Helke Sander, and Fatih Akin, who are considered part of the canon of German cinema even as they interrogated the boundaries of the nation. In so doing, we will examine how film was itself an important vehicle for defining Germanness, for both domestic and international audiences. Studying German cinema alongside Germany’s complex history can will offer insight into how stories and images help construct, problematize, or contest definitions of national belonging. 

GERM 3559 (3)  Performing the Political on the German Stage      

1:00 - 1:50 MWF 

Ms. Zuerner

GERM 4600 (3) Fourth Year Seminar 

3:30 - 6:00  R    

Mr. Bennett 

GETR 3392 (3) Fairy Tales 

3:30 - 4:45  MW   Sec. 1

5:00 - 6:15  MW   Sec. 2 

Mr. Schmid

In fairy tales, everything is possible: throw a frog against the wall, it may well turn out to be a prince in disguise; go visit your grandmother and you may realize that she has been eaten and replaced by a wolf; and if you have plans for the next hundred years, you better beware of being pricked by a spindle. Entering the world of fairy tales often feels like passing into an elaborate dream: it is a world teeming with sorcerers, dwarves, wondrous objects, and animals that speak. In this seminar, we focus on tales from fairy tale traditions in Germany and around the world. Why did the Grimm brothers bother to collect fairy tales? How does Disney depict the fairy tale in film? –  These are some of the questions that our seminar addresses.  Requirements include regular attendance, active participation, an exam, and written assignments.

GETR 3420 (3) W.E.B. Du Bois and German Social Theory: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Weber 

 2:00 - 3:15 MW

Mr. Wellmon 

Looking back on his decades-long study of Black Americans in 1944, W.E.B. Du Bois observed that he had overestimated the power of reason and higher education to lead to political reform and human freedom. Although he had studied in Berlin and immersed himself in German philosophy and social theory, he had, he wrote, failed to grasp “how little human action is based on reason” and to appreciate “the economic foundations of human history.” In this class, we’ll try to understand what Du Bois saw in these German social theorists and thinkers like Freud and Marx but also in Nietzsche, Weber, and others around 1900. No knowledge of German or of philosophy required. All are welcome. 

GETR 3464 (3) Medieval Stories of Love and Adventure

2:00-3:15 TR  Sec. 1

3:30-4:45 TR  Sec. 2 

Mr. McDonald 

An interactive course, involving reading, discussion, music, and art, that seeks, through selected stories of the medieval period, to shed light on institutions, themes, and customs. At the center is the Heroic Circle, a cycle with connections to folklore, the fairy tale, and Jungian psychology—all of which illuminate the human experience. Discover here the genesis of Arthurian film, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and more. All texts on Collab.

Second Writing Requirement

Cultures and Societies of the World

GETR 3559 (3) Short Forms

2:00-3:15 TR

Mr. Bennett 

GETR 3559 (3) Marx, Capital, and Freedom: Translating Capital for Today 

3:30-4:45 MW 

Mr. Wellmon  

Princeton University Press recently published the first new translation of Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 in over in over fifty years. This course will consider, in particular, how the PUP translation deals with the mysteries Capital claims shape our world––social struggle, the power of things, money’s generative powers, the futility of some work, the possibility of changing the world––as well as some of the most pointed critiques of Capital. The course will be taught in English. Students interested in receiving GERM credit can enroll in a related independent study with Prof. Wellmon. 

GETR 3559 (3) Diary Fiction 

11:00 - 12:15 TR

Ms. Martens

Diaries are for intimate secrets?  Yes--but not just!  People have kept journals for many reasons. There are travel journals and sea logs, records of everyday life, testimonials to alarming events, gossipy accounts of social interactions, notebooks for capturing one's momentary aperçus and ideas, and so forth.  Fiction writers, however, have invented many more uses for the diary form than these!  The diary's strict yet elastic form (first-person periodic narration) has offered creative writers many intriguing possibilities beyond imitating the styles of real diaries.  An ideal outlet for sincere self-expression, for intimate confessions, the fictive diary is also as if made to order for creating an unreliable narrator, one whose views are undercut by the plot.  If a second voice is introduced alongside the diarist's monologue, this can destabilize the diarist's account, whereas conversely a diarist's truthful account can overthrow a second narrator's misguided opinions.  Writing from day to day, a diarist is ignorant of what the future holds.  Such blindness toward the future has inspired many writers to use the diary form for suspense stories (e.g., Dracula).  In this course we will focus on the ways in which writers have imaginatively exploited the diary's formal features.  We will also consider how diary fiction evolved from the late eighteenth century, when the first fictive diaries were written, to the present.  We will read several masterpieces of diary fiction--novels--including Sartre's Nausea and Frisch's I'm Not Stiller, and otherwise stories from a brand-new anthology of short diary fiction.   Students will have an opportunity to try their hand at writing a diary (easy!) and/or diary fiction.

GETR 3562 (3) German New Wave Cinema: Reinvention, Remembrance, Rebellion 

12:30 - 1:45 TR

Mr. Dobryden 

This course explores how West German art cinema of the 1960s-80s reinvented filmmaking, remembered the Nazi past, and rebelled against cultural and political institutions. In dialogue with films by Werner Herzog, Helke Sander, R. W. Fassbinder,  Margarethe von Trotta, and others, we will examine the aesthetic and political possibilities of cinema, in the context of an affluent consumer society with a violent past that many preferred to forget.

GETR 3780 (3) Memory Speaks 

2:00 - 3:15 TR

Mr. Martens

Memory is a crucial human faculty.  Our ability to remember our own past is one of the things that make us human.  Memory has long been thought to ground identity: without memory, one has no sense of self.  Memory has been seen as fundamental to psychic health, and even as a remedy in times of trouble, as well as essential to our ability to imagine the future.  Remembering has its delights.  Certainly the idea of losing one’s memory, through shock or illness for example, is terrifying to contemplate.  Yet having too many memories of the wrong kind is believed to endanger our equilibrium.   Maddeningly, given its power to make us healthy or sick, memory often lies beyond our conscious control.  It operates according to its own laws, giving us what we want only sometimes.  Undeniably useful, it has also been seen as deceptive.  It is demonstrably suggestible.  It is not surprising, therefore, that memory is a subject of vital importance in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences alike.

This course will focus on individual memory and in particular on autobiographical memory (our memories of our own lives).  We will read autobiographies and works of fiction, written from the early twentieth century to the present, by Patrick Modiano, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marguerite Duras.  We will also study two films on the theme of memory:  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inside Out.  Concurrently, we will read psychological, psychoanalytic, and neuroscientific work on memory.   Some attention will be paid to the issues of false memory, external memory, and mediated memory, as well.

Two short papers, presentations, exam.