Fall 2024 Class Schedule

• Fall 2024 Class Schedule
• Fall 2024 Course Descriptions

FALL 2024 CLASS SCHEDULE

Fall 2023 course descriptions

GER 101-1,2,3 : Beginning German 

GER 102- 1,2,3 : Intermediate German

The three-quarter Intermediate German sequence has several major goals. While students continue to develop proficiency in German language skills, they employ a variety of materials in the spoken and written word. They also gain insight into Germany and its place in Europe in the past and today. Since history is a critical part of German identity, our examination of German society includes study of the Weimar democratic republic, the Nazi regime, and divided and reunified Germany. By the end of the academic year, students will be able to handle a variety of communicative tasks in straightforward social situations, including predictable and concrete exchanges necessary for functioning abroad. We are working with the new Impulse Deutsch 2 printed textbook (Machen) and online workbook (Lernen + Zeigen). We will also continue to work with a variety of original materials, including music, literature, and films.
Prerequisite in German for 102-1: 101-3 or placement exam results
Prerequisite in German for 102-2: 102-1 or placement exam results.
Prerequisite in German for 102-3: 102-2 or placement exam results.

GER 104-7 : First Year Seminar -  (College Seminar) 

As a College Seminar, the course will introduce you to college life and the essential, but mostly unwritten, rules, expectations, resources, and habits for you to succeed as a student. This “hidden curriculum” will include topics such as time management, emotional health, academic integrity and the mechanics of citation, and how to seek help. Our assignments will include a variety of small, weekly writing assignments and short summative, comparative, and analytic essays to begin your familiarization with college writing.

German 205-0 – Focus Writing - 

This course is designed especially for students who wish to improve their writing skills in order to become independent, confident and proficient writers of German. The thematic basis for the course is the city of Berlin and the personalities, places, historical events, cultural trends, and visions that have shaped it during the 20^th and are shaping it during the 21^st Century. Course materials will include current texts from newspapers and magazines, fictional works by German-speaking authors, as well as feature films, episodes of a German telenovela, music, and videos. Students will learn to analyze and to produce portraits of people and places, narratives, and film reviews. Grammar topics relevant for each unit will be reviewed thoroughly and integrated in context.

Prerequisite in German: German 102-3.

German 209-0 – German in the Business World

In this course, students will acquire basic business-related German language skills and attain a cross-cultural perspective on German and American business practices. The emphasis will be on communicative situations such as oral and written social interactions with customers, sales dialogues, business travel, basic formats of business letters and internship applications. The course is taught entirely in German and emphasizes developing cultural knowledge and German language skills to prepare students for basic professional activities in and with German-speaking countries.

Prerequisite in German: One 200-level course in German or permission of the DUS.  

German 230-0 – Berlin and the Culture of Democracy

This class aims to introduce students to the history and culture of Berlin from 1900 to the present. Drawing on a wide range of media, from maps through film to music, the class concentrates on a series of transformative moments in German cultural history seen through the prism of Berlin. Students will engage with the varied historical, socio-political, and artistic changes in German culture throughout the twentieth century, including the vibrant and provocative culture of the 1920s and early 1930s, with a focus on changing forms of gender identity (the “New Woman”) and sexual subcultures (as in the film Cabaret). Further, students will examine the everyday and extraordinary history of German-Jews in Germany around the devastating caesura of the Jewish genocide executed by the National Socialists. After examining the megalomaniacal plans that the Nazis made for Berlin, the class turns to the devastated city of 1945 and the divided city of the Cold War, where the conflict between “East” and “West” emerges in the “concrete” form of the Berlin Wall. Further topics include the events surrounding the collapse of the Wall and the creation of the Berlin Republic, the changing face of national culture in light of the migration of the so-called Turkish “guest workers” of the post-War years, particularly through the art of later generations of Turkish-German authors and filmmakers in Berlin.
Prerequisites: None.
Prerequisite: none.

Historical Studies Distro Area

Interdisciplinary Distro

Literature Fine Arts Distro Area

German 236-0 – Kafka and Nietzsche

This course takes its point of departure from two sayings: “there are no facts, only interpretations” (Nietzsche), and “Only here is suffering suffering” (Kafka). It explores the relationship between suffering and interpretation. For Nietzsche, the interpretation of suffering – real or imagined – is not only the origin of all moral and legal categories but also the source of philosophical speculation. For many of the characters that inhabit Kafka’s fictions, suffering – real or imagined – generates interminable interpretations, and the interminability of interpretation is itself the source of intensified suffering. Beginning with, and continually returning to, Kafka’s very short story, “The New Advocate,” which is about Alexander the Great’s horse, who has lowered his ambitions and thus become a lawyer, the course considers the question: what is greatness? In the first part of the course we pursue this question in the context of certain sections from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and from his Toward the Genealogy of Morals. In the second, we turn to a series of Kafka stories, aphorisms, and his great unfinished novel, The Castle.
Prerequisites: None.
Ethics Values Distro Area

Interdisciplinary Distro - See Rules

Literature Fine Arts Distro Area

Back to top