Class Schedule for Winter 2024

The course centers on a popular German TV series presenting the problems of German unification from the perspective of high-school students: An attractive young teacher works in a high school in former East Germany facing the stereotypes, aggressions and frustrations of the East-West encounter. Discussions about the film segments are enhanced by readings of texts, newspaper articles, about the situation of German society, about the educational system, real estate in Eastern Germany and other legal issues. The class is taught in German and focuses on an extension of vocabulary, grammar, and on the improvement of critical discussion and writing skills.

In our course, language functions are closely tied to communicative intentions as well as contextualized practice within certain subject areas. Grammar is tied into the authentic use of language and thereby transformed into a means for communication. This integrated approach not only expands students’ linguistic abilities but also introduces students to seminal cultural and literary texts while giving them the opportunity to enter into existing discourses about these texts. Through history, art, feature films, politics, cultural history, and music students learn about the variety of cultural contexts in the German-speaking world today. The specific emphasis of GER 312 is on intercultural competence with a particular emphasis on questions of race in the German (and comparatively, in the US) context. Students will be introduced to Black German cultural producers (writers, actors, musicians, poets), obstacles and structures that hinder them at social and political participations, the ways in which they have inscribed themselves and their experiences into German history and how they continue to fight for their visibility and position in contemporary Germany. The entire sequence, German 311 through 313, presents both dominant cultural values and the varieties of cultural inflections within the Germanic world, alerting students to both the continuities and changes within the social and linguistic environments that have German as the official language. In this way, students can gain insight to how countries other than the United States address linguistic and cultural differences.