* GMAN 110a, Elementary German I  Staff

A beginning content- and task-based course that focuses on the acquisition of spoken and written communication skills, as well as on the development of cultural awareness and of foundations in grammar and vocabulary. Topics such as school, family life, and housing. Course materials include a variety of authentic readings, a feature film, and shorter video clips. Tutors are available for extra help. To be followed by GMAN 120. Enrollment limited to 14 per section. Students must preregister through Preference Selection during the online preregistration period. Details and a link to Preference Selection are provided on the German department Web site at http://german.yale.edu.  L1  1½ Course cr
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GMAN 120a, Elementary German II  Staff

Continuation of GMAN 110. A content- and task-based course that focuses on the acquisition of communicative competence in speaking and writing and on the development of strong cultural awareness. Topics such as multiculturalism, food, childhood, and travel; units on Switzerland and Austria. Course materials include a variety of authentic readings, a feature film, and shorter video clips. Tutors are available for extra help. To be followed by GMAN 130. Enrollment limited to 14 per section. Students must preregister through Preference Selection during the online preregistration period. Details and a link to Preference Selection are provided on the German department Web site at http://german.yale.edu.  L2  1½ Course cr
MTWThF 10:30am-11:20am

GMAN 130a, Intermediate German I  Staff

Builds on and expands knowledge acquired in GMAN 120. A content- and task-based course that helps students improve their oral and written linguistic skills and their cultural awareness through a variety of materials related to German literature, culture, history, and politics. Course materials include authentic readings, a feature film, and shorter video clips. Tutors are available for extra help. After GMAN 120 or according to placement examination. Followed by GMAN 140. Enrollment limited to 14 per section. Students must preregister through Preference Selection during the online preregistration period. Details and a link to Preference Selection are provided on the German department Web site at http://german.yale.edu.  L3  1½ Course cr
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GMAN 140a, Intermediate German II  Staff

Builds on and expands knowledge acquired in GMAN 130. A content- and task-based course that helps students improve their oral and written linguistic skills and their cultural awareness through a variety of materials related to German literature, culture, history, and politics. Course materials include authentic readings, a feature film, and shorter video clips. Tutors are available for extra help. After GMAN 130 or according to placement examination. Normally followed by GMAN 150 or, with permission of the director of undergraduate studies, by GMAN 171. Enrollment limited to 14 per section. Students must preregister through Preference Selection during the online preregistration period. Details and a link to Preference Selection are provided on the German department Web site at http://german.yale.edu.  L4  1½ Course cr
MTWThF 10:30am-11:20am

* GMAN 152a, Advanced German, Contemporary Germany  Lieselotte Sippel

An advanced language and culture course focusing on contemporary Germany. Analysis and discussion of current events in Germany and Europe through the lens of German media, including newspapers, books, TV, film radio, and modern electronic media formats. Focus on oral and written production to achieve advanced linguistic skills. After GMAN 140 or 145. For entering students with a score of 5 on the German Advanced Placement test, or according to results of the placement examination. Students must preregister through Preference Selection during the online preregistration period. Details and a link to Preference Selection are provided on the German department Web site at http://german.yale.edu.  L5, HU
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

* GMAN 160a, German Culture, History, and Politics in Text and Film  Theresa Schenker

Advanced language course about the history, politics, and culture of East Germany from 1945 to reunification. Analysis of life in the German Democratic Republic with literary and nonliterary texts and films. Includes oral and written assignments, with an emphasis on vocabulary building and increased cultural awareness. Taught in German. After GMAN 140, 145, or 150, or with permission of instructor.  L5, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* GMAN 173a, Introduction to German Lyric Poetry  Austen Hinkley

The German lyric tradition, including classic works by Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Eichendorff, Heine, Mörike, Droste-Hülshoff, Rilke, George, Brecht, Trakl, Celan, Bachmann, and Jandl. Attention to the German Lied (art song). Development of advanced reading, writing, speaking, and translation skills. Prerequisite: GMAN 150 or equivalent.  L5, HU
TTh 1pm-2:15pm

* GMAN 200a / HUMS 130a / LITR 130a, How to Read  Rudiger Campe and Hannan Hever

Introduction to techniques, strategies, and practices of reading through study of lyric poems, narrative texts, plays and performances, films, new and old, from a range of times and places. Emphasis on practical strategies of discerning and making meaning, as well as theories of literature, and contextualizing particular readings. Topics include form and genre, literary voice and the book as a material object, evaluating translations, and how literary strategies can be extended to read film, mass media, and popular culture. Junior seminar; preference given to juniors and majors.   HU
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

GMAN 208b / HIST 254b, Germany from Unification to Refugee Crisis  Jennifer Allen

The history of Germany from its unification in 1871 through the present. Topics include German nationalism and national unification; the culture and politics of the Weimar Republic; National Socialism and the Holocaust; the division of Germany and the Cold War; the Student Movement and New Social Movements; reunification; and Germany's place in contemporary Europe.  HU  0 Course cr
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

* GMAN 232a / FREN 340a / HUMS 429a / JDST 286a / LITR 232a, Paul Celan  Thomas Connolly

An undergraduate seminar in English exploring the life and work of Paul Celan (1920-1970), survivor of the Shoah, and one of the foremost European poets of the second half of the twentieth century. We will read from his early poems in both Romanian and German, and his published collections including Der Sand aus den Urnen, Mohn und Gedächtnis, Von Schelle zu Schelle, Sprachgitter, Die Niemandsrose, Atemwende, Fadensonnen, Lichtzwang, and Schneepart. We will also read from his rare pieces in prose and his correspondence with family, friends, and other intellectuals and poets including Bachmann, Sachs, Heidegger, Char, du Bouchet, Michaux, Ungaretti. A special focus on his poetic translations from French, but also Russian, English, American, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, and Hebrew. Critical readings draw from Szondi, Adorno, Derrida, Agamben, and others. Readings in English translation or in the original languages, as the student desires. Discussions in English. None.  WR, HU
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

* GMAN 254b / JDST 335b / PHIL 274b / RLST 249b, Jewish Philosophy  Paul Franks

Introduction to Jewish philosophy, including classical rationalism of Maimonides, classical kabbalah, and Franz Rosenzweig's inheritance of both traditions. Critical examination of concepts arising in and from Jewish life and experience, in a way that illuminates universal problems of leading a meaningful human life in a multicultural and increasingly globalized world. No previous knowledge of Judaism is required.  WR, HU
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* GMAN 275b / FILM 425b / LITR 358b, East German Literature and Film  Katie Trumpener

The German Democratic Republic (1949-1989) was a political and aesthetic experiment that failed, buffeted by external pressures, and eroded by internal contradictions. For forty years, in fact, its most ambitious literary texts and films (some suppressed, others widely popular) explored such contradictions, often in a vigilant, Brechtian spirit of irony and dialectics. This course examines key texts both as aesthetic experiments and as critiques of the country’s emerging cultural institutions and state censorship, recurrent political debates and pressing social issues. Texts by Brecht, Uwe Johnson, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, Johannes Bobrowski, Franz Fühmann, Wolf Biermann, Thomas Brasch, Christoph Hein; films by Slatan Dudow, Kurt Maetzig, Konrad Wolf, Heiner Carow, Frank Beyer, Jürgen Böttcher, Volker Koepp.   Knowledge of German desirable but not crucial; all texts available in English.  WR, HU  Tr
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* GMAN 279a, Romanticism: Poetics, Politics, and Economy  Anja Lemke

The epoch of Romanticism, situated between the French Revolution and the Restoration, is as long (ca. 1790-ca. 1830) as it is complex. Early romantics such as Schlegel, Hardenberg or (the young) Tieck seem to respond to completely different problems than for example authors like E.T.A. Hoffmann, Clemens Brentano, Eichendorff or Bettine von Arnim. Their texts provide an example of the various ways in which literature around 1800 deals with the modern experience of contingency, with social and epistemological differentiation, and political shock, and the poetic, aesthetic and genre-theoretical complexity that emerges from this process. The seminar explores this by examining key concepts of Romanticism – especially of early romantic aesthetics - such as transcendental poetry, irony, exponentiation, arabesque, the fragmentary and the (self-)reflexive, as well as considerations of imagination, perception, and sign theory, and by linking them to romantic positions in the field of philosophy, political and social theory and economics. We discuss programmatic writings, theoretical notes, and literary texts in different genres.  HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* GMAN 288a / HUMS 480a / LITR 482a / PHIL 469a, The Mortality of the Soul: From Aristotle to Heidegger  Martin Hagglund

This course explores fundamental philosophical questions of the relation between matter and form, life and spirit, necessity and freedom, by proceeding from Aristotle's analysis of the soul in De Anima and his notion of practical agency in the Nicomachean Ethics. We study Aristotle in conjunction with seminal works by contemporary neo-Aristotelian philosophers (Korsgaard, Nussbaum, Brague, and McDowell). We in turn pursue the implications of Aristotle's notion of life by engaging with contemporary philosophical discussions of death that take their point of departure in Epicurus (Nagel, Williams, Scheffler). We conclude by analyzing Heidegger's notion of constitutive mortality, in order to make explicit what is implicit in the form of the soul in Aristotle.   HU
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

* GMAN 310a / LING 191a, “Sprachkrise”—Philosophies & Language Crises  Sophie Schweiger

The crisis of language predates the invention of ChatGPT (who may or may not have helped write this syllabus). This course delves into the concept of language crises and its long history from a philosophical and literary perspective, examining how crises of language are represented in literature and how they reflect broader philosophical questions about language, identity, and power. We explore different philosophical approaches to language, such as the history of language and philology (Herder, Humboldt, Nietzsche), structuralism and post-structuralism (Saussure), analytical and pragmatic philosophies (Wittgenstein), phenomenology and deconstruction (Heidegger), and analyze how these theories shape our understanding of language while simultaneously evoking its crisis. The course also examines how such language crises are represented and produced in literature and the arts; how authors and artists approach the complexities of language loss, and how crises help birth alternative systems of signification. Through close readings of literary texts by Hofmannsthal, Musil, Bachmann, et. al., we analyze the symbolic and metaphorical significance of language crises, as well as the ethical and political implications of language loss for (cultural) identity. Experimental use of language such as DaDa artwork, performance cultures, and “Sprachspiel” poetry by the “Wiener Gruppe,” as well as contemporary KI/AI literature, further complement the theoretical readings. By exploring language crises through the lens of philosophy and literature, we gain a deeper understanding of the role of language—and its many crises—in shaping our understanding of ourselves and our communities.  HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* GMAN 355a / FILM 318a / HUMS 344a, German Film from 1945 to the Present  Fatima Naqvi

Trauma, gender, media, transnationalism, terrorism, migration, precarity, neoliberalism, and environmental ethics are the issues we study in films from the German-speaking world. We begin in the immediate post-war period: How does the Second World War and its aftermath inflect these films? How does gender play an increasingly important role in the fiction films under discussion? What new collective identities do films articulate in the course of the politicized period from the late 1960s into the late 1970s, when home-grown terrorism contests the category of the West German nation? How do the predominant concerns shift with the passage of time and with the changing media formats? What is the role of genre in representing transnational problems like migration after 2000? How do economic issues come to the fore in the precarious economic conditions shown? When does violence seem like an  answer to political, economic, and social pressures and the legacies of colonialism? Particular attention is paid to film aesthetics. Films include those by Julian Radlmaier, Hubert Sauper, Sudabeh Mortezai, Fatih Akin, Wolfgang Staudte, Alexander Kluge, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Harun Farocki, Michael Haneke, Christian Petzold, Jessica Hausner, Mara Mattuschka, Ulrich Seidl, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, among others. Visiting directors Julian Radlmaier and Hubert Sauper will be integrated into the course. This class will have an optional German section (50 minutes a week) for students interested in counting this class for the Advanced Language Certificate. A minimum of three students is required for the section to run.  HU
Th 9:25am-11:15am, W 6pm-8pm

* GMAN 366a / HUMS 419a / LITR 393a / PHIL 346a, The Short Spring of German Theory  Kirk Wetters

Reconsideration of the intellectual microclimate of German academia 1945-1968. A German prelude to the internationalization effected by French theory, often in dialogue with German sources. Following Philipp Felsch's The Summer of Theory (English 2022): Theory as hybrid and successor to philosophy and sociology. Theory as the genre of the philosophy of history and grand narratives (e.g. "secularization"). Theory as the basis of academic interdisciplinarity and cultural-political practice. The canonization and aging of theoretical classics. Critical reflection on academia now and then. Legacies of the inter-War period and the Nazi past: M. Weber, Heidegger, Husserl, Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno, Jaspers. New voices of the 1950s and 1960s: Arendt, Blumenberg, Gadamer, Habermas, Jauss, Koselleck, Szondi, Taubes.  German reading and some prior familiarity with European intellectual history is helpful but not essential.  HU
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

GMAN 381a / PHIL 204a, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason  Eric Watkins

An examination of the metaphysical and epistemological doctrines of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Prerequisite: PHIL 126 or DRST 004.  HU
MW 9am-10:15am

* GMAN 478a, Directed Readings or Individual Research in Germanic Languages and Literatures  Staff

Individual study under faculty supervision. Applicants must submit a prospectus and bibliography approved by the faculty adviser to the director of undergraduate studies. The student meets with the adviser at least one hour each week and takes a final examination or writes a term paper. No credit granted without prior approval of the director of undergraduate studies.
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* GMAN 492a, The Senior Essay Tutorial  Staff

Preparation of an original essay under the direction of a faculty adviser.
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