GER 336 - Telling the Past: History, Trauma, and Memory in German Culture

This course examines the interplay between storytelling and historical memory in modern German culture. We will explore how historical events shape individual experience and how narrative forms influence the ways history is understood. Key topics include nineteenth-century realism and everyday life, twentieth-century modernism and the First World War, and representations of Nazism and the Holocaust in film and literature. Texts by Schiller, Kleist, Droste-Hülshoff, Hauptmann, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Musil, Mann, Remarque, Jünger, and Sebald. Films by Fassbinder, Rothemund, and Haneke. Conducted in German.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I - Arts, Literature, & Philosophy, Distribution Group I - non-English Language
Prerequisite(s): GER 311
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): GER 312
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical or works of the visual or performing arts).
Use a language other than English to understand and convey meaning in spoken, written, or mediated contexts appropriate to the course level.
Analyze how meaning is constructed and negotiated in a language other than English by examining grammatical structures, discourse conventions, or communicative strategies in spoken and written contexts.