32 courses with the subject GERM, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
GERM 121Beginning German I1.00
Introduces students to the basic structures of German and focuses on the four language skills of understanding, speaking, reading, and writing German in cultural, functional contexts. The courses simultaneously introduce students to the vibrant societies and cultures of German-speaking Europe. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Language Study Core Component: None
Continued introduction to the basic structures of German with a focus on the four language skills of understanding, speaking, reading, and writing German in cultural, functional contexts. The courses simultaneously introduce students to the vibrant societies and cultures of German-speaking Europe. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Language Study Core Component: None
Elementary-level language courses taken abroad with a Colgate study group, an approved program, or in a foreign institution of higher learning. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Language Study Core Component: None
GERM 201Intermediate German I: Germany in Europe1.00
Completes the presentation of basic structures of German and helps students develop greater facility and sophistication in using these structures, in comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing. Continues the exploration of German cultures begun on the 100 level with a focus on Germanophone Europe. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Restrictions: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Language Study Core Component: None
GERM 202Intermediate German II: Germanophone Europe1.00
Completes the presentation of basic structures of German and helps students develop greater facility and sophistication in using these structures, in comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing. Continues the exploration of German cultures begun on the 100 level with a focus on Germanophone Europe.. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Language Study Core Component: None
GERM 295Intermediate-Level German Language Abroad1
Intermediate-level language courses taken abroad with a Colgate study group, an approved program, or in a foreign institution of higher learning. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Language Study Core Component: None
GERM 325Transnationalism in Contemporary German Culture1.00
As demographic changes in Europe unmoor conventional conceptions of national culture, the discourse of transnationalism has emerged to address contemporary political and cultural phenomena no longer confined to nation-states. Abreast of such developments, students examine the transnational imagination at work in recent German cultural production, with a focus on cinematic and literary negotiations of German and European identity since 1989. Factors contributing to these negotiations include the tenuous legacy of German unification, the fragile consolidation of the European Union, and the ongoing migration of people to German-speaking Europe from non-European backgrounds. The method of inquiry is multidisciplinary, engaging with contemporary films and literary writings in conjunction with cultural history, as well as social and political theory. To address the aesthetic qualities of transnational cinema and literature, students familiarize themselves with the terminology and methodologies of film and literary studies in German. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Recommended: FMST 200 is desirable but not required Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Language Study and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
GERM 326Germany and the Environmental Imagination1.00
Germany is widely recognized as a global leader in environmental policy and green technology. To what extent does Germany's role as a pioneer in the global environmental movement have its roots in German culture? Building on interdisciplinary scholarship in the growing field of environmental humanities, this course offers an introduction to environmental thought in German literature, culture, and the arts from the 18th-century to the present. The goal of the course is to develop an ecocritical model of reading, focusing on the way literature and other artworks stage the encounter between people and nature in a range of different genres: fairy tales, prose, poetry, landscape painting, and film. Tracing the emergence of the German environmental imagination in key texts from German literature, art, and film, the course also examines the emergence of the modern environmental movement in Germany, and explores how literature and the arts contribute to contemporary debates about environmental justice, species extinction, and sustainability. Course taught in English with an optional CLAC section in German. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges Core Component: None
GERM 327Reinventing Berlin: Memory, Culture, and Urban Space1
Berlin has long been considered the quintessential modern metropolis and one that continually reinvents itself as an ongoing experiment in urban culture. Today, the capital of united Germany's "Berlin Republic" is a vibrant, ethnically diverse city with political and cultural meanings that resonate far beyond its borders. Students approach contemporary Berlin by way of historical, political and cultural stories of its urban landscape. Through study of monuments, architecture and city planning, film, art and literature, eyewitness reporting and historical analysis, students explore reinventions of the city and the transformations of its urban space and public culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In doing so, the changing conceptualizations of civic and national identity, collective memory and imagined futures elicited by Berlin's complex history are also addressed. Participation in the accompanying CLAC section is mandatory for students wishing to earn GERM major/minor credit. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
GERM 351Introduction to German Literary Studies1.00
Introduces students to a variety of German literary texts from the 18th century to the present, in their cultural and historical contexts. Students explore a number of topics: revolution and social change; constructions of gender; national identity; migration and minority experience; and modernity and aesthetic innovation. In the process, students consider the versatile powers of literature to interpret and influence personal and collective experience. The course also serves as a workshop in which to develop techniques and vocabulary of literary and cultural analysis. In addition to furthering critical understanding of German literature as part of living culture, this course will help students strengthen and expand German language skills in all four areas: reading, writing, comprehension and speaking. Taught in German. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Language Study and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
Introduces students to the academic study of German by exploring key topics and foundational methods of the discipline, while further developing advanced German language competencies. Deepening students' familiarity with Germanophone Europe, the course adopts a multimedial approach to German studies (print, visual art, stage, radio and film) to advance cultural and transcultural literacy. The focus of the course depends on the instructor, who may emphasize the relationship between crisis and critique in the history of Germanophone Europe; the gray zones between the past and the present, the living and the dead in studies of ghosts and the uncanny; multimedial memory studies; or the borderlands of European multiculture. Taught in German. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression
For students enrolled in the Freiburg Study Group in the subsequent semester and required for those FSG students who are on campus in the fall. It is held largely in a workshop format focused on honing skills and practices to prepare for a successful semester abroad. Topics include cultural study related to the study group's travel seminar; targeted linguistic preparation for academic study in Germany; strategic work on German University assignment formats such as Referate, Protokolle and Hausarbeiten; techniques for enhancing resilience and well-being and achieving personal goals; and occasional work related to required University bureaucracy. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: None Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: None Core Component: None
Advanced-level language courses taken abroad with a Colgate study group, an approved program, or in a foreign institution of higher learning. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Language Study Core Component: None
Introduces Goethe's writing and thought through selected plays, narrative fiction, critical writings, and poems. Topics include Goethe's interest and influence in various cultural spheres, such as the visual arts, the scientific fields of his time, and politics in the age of revolutions. Students explore his comparative approach to world languages and literatures, his changing aesthetic positions during his lifetime, and his literary explorations of gender and love. The seminar interprets Goethe in the context of his time and also examines his dominant and debated position in the German cultural tradition. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
What does it mean to write in German as a Jew today? A diverse group of contemporary German-language authors position themselves as Jewish writers engaged in probing the complex constellations of identity and intergenerational trauma and memory after the Shoah. Much of their work is centered on the Jewish experience in German and Austrian cultures, yet always in a web of relations to other places, their contexts, and languages - for example, Israel and the US, France and Algeria, Russia and Poland. Seismic shifts in national borders and transnational mobility, including German unification in 1990, the immigration of many Jews from the former Soviet Union to Germany and more recent demographic influences of migration of the 21st century, are further reshaping the topographies of intersectional identities and society that these writers explore. Students examine the relationships of generational position, gender, and literary voice; the interfaces of personal stories, historical knowledge, and contemporary local contexts; the politics and collective understandings of the memory of the Shoah; and the roles of literary representations in shaping that memory as time passes and personal memory disappears. Readings include fiction, essays, interviews, songs, and articles by Wolf Biermann, Ruth Beckermann, Maxim Biller, Irene Dische, Olga Grjasnowa, Lena Gorelik, Barbara Honigmann, Wladimir Kaminer, Ruth Kliiger, Katja Petrowskaja, Doron Rabinovici, Robert Schindel and others. May be taught in English translation or in German, depending on the semester and student interests and
GERM 467Körper-Kino & Kino-Körper: Body Cinema & Cinematic Bodies1.00
Presents a history of German and German-speaking film with special focus on the depiction of the human body. Drawn from nearly a century (1929 – 2019) of cinematic history, course materials include silent films from the Weimar Republic, post-war Austrian filmic activism, East and West German cinemas, and contemporary Berlin School and transnational European Cinema. Assembling a number of filmmakers with an emphasis on German/European traditions, the course revisits the filmic canon and introduces filmmakers from outside film studies' canonical scope. Established auteurs such as Werner Herzog or VALIE EXPORT are juxtaposed and paired with lesser-known artists such as Heiner Carow or Mara Mattuschka, as well as newcomers such as Jan Soldat or Pia Hellenthal, to convey the diversity within film's and filmmakers' exploration of the human body. As the thematic vector brings together auteurs of entirely different traditions, it also draws attention to filmic genres often neglected by academics, such as anime, music videos, pornography or short films. "Kinokörper" or "cinematic bodies", become significant by means of their actions, they take shape in the disciplining of their representation, and fulfill different functions for the genres they traverse. The unsettling effect cinematic bodies have on filmic genre distinctions – such as those between fiction and report, pornography and its documentation, scripted narrative and spontaneous improvisation – are of particular interest. The seminar is conducted in German. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
GERM 477Central European Modernity: Austria-Hungary and after1.00
At the dawn of the 20th-century, central Europeans lived, debated, and created amidst great doubts that their world had any future. At the heart of a conflicted and paradoxical modernity arose a keen sense of the unreality and futility of human affairs. Yet modernity's seemingly unresolvable challenges—including questions about the political arrangements of diverse and multilingual societies, the constitution of the human psyche, the chances of human survival on the eve of World War I, as well as class, inter-ethnic and gender relations—spawned a furor of pioneering responses in the urban centers of Germanophone Europe. Exploring the resources of this rich period with a focus on Austria-Hungary and the First Austrian Republic (1890-1934), students investigate the cultural, literary, philosophical, artistic, and musical activity abounding in Vienna, Prague, and other sites of central European modernity. Readings include works by Zweig, Roth, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Freud, Musil, Kraus, V. Canetti, and Kafka. Focus on literary and historical texts from central Europe will be supplemented by visual works of art, architecture, music, and cinema relevant to the period. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Language Study and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
Examines the literature and cultures of German-speaking Europe in the 20th century. Due to the wealth of the material, selections vary from semester to semester. Areas of focus may include: the Weimar Republic, exilic literature by émigrés of National Socialism, coming to terms with catastrophe in literature and film, comparative approaches to West and East German literature, Austrian and Swiss writers, migration and transnationalism, and the literature of German unification and the Berlin Republic. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Confronting Collective Challenges and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
A survey of selected examples of German poetry from the Baroque period to the present. Poems are examined with an eye to developments in form and to poetry's engagement with the changing world in which it is created, from the Thirty Years' War to the European Union. Coursework allows students to probe the subtle ways in which poetic texts have challenged the "German language" – considered as a shared means of communication to the end of mutual understanding. Indeed, why is it that lyric poems – seemingly no substantial threat – have often been met with mistrust or even fear? And why is it that precisely these – often
GERM 482The Novella and the Village: Modern Tales from the Country1.00
Examining a unique German form from Goethe to the present, students explore the narrative forms of the novella and the short novel in the context of increasing urbanization in German-speaking lands, with a focus on the 19th century. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Language Study and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
Examines the history, theory, and practice of German drama with a focus on a selection of major dramatic works from the 18th century to the present. As theater continues to thrive as a unique aesthetic and social institution of German-speaking Europe, students conduct a performance-oriented study of theater as a medium of cultural and transcultural communication. Canonical playwrights to be studied may include Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Kleist, Büchner, Nestroy, Ibsen, Brecht, Soyfer, Peter Weiss, or Heiner Müller. Contemporary playwrights may include Sibylle Berg, Nurkan Erpulat, Elfriede Jelinek, Dea Loher, Falk Richter, Yael Ronen or Roland Schimmelpfennig. Investigating the genres of the bürgerliches Trauerspiel, the Volksstück, epic theater, postdrama, and postmigratory theater, students also undertake experiments in drama pedagogy. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation or Language Study Core Component: None
What is German World Literature? This question highlights the relationship between the idea of a national or a single linguistic literary tradition and a broader concept of literature that crosses linguistic, cultural, or national boundaries. This seminar focuses on theories of "world literature/s" and on primary literary texts written in German as examples of works that circulate through and reflect multiple cultural and linguistic contexts. How are the Grimm fairy tales mediated by Disney? What do we understand by the term "Kafkaesque"? Why did Goethe emulate the Persian poet Hafis? Do Senoçak's readers in America contribute to a new idea of German and German-Turkish literature? Topics include the roles of translation, migration, economic and media globalization, nationalisms, and contemporary and historical transnational identities in shaping world literature written originally in German. Taught in German. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Artistic Practice and Interpretation and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
GERM 487Post-Soviet Authors in Contemporary Germany1
Examines works written by authors with a Soviet heritage, specifically in the context of post-Soviet immigration to the newly unified Germany in the 1990s. The topics to be explored include the Soviet imperial legacy, sovietization as russification, postwar legacy, conflict of memory cultures, eternalization of memory, postmemory and generational conflict, antiSemitism, migration and integration. Readings include works by Wladimir Kaminer, Katja Petrowskaja, Olga Grjasnowa, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Dmitrij Kapitelman, Katerina Poladjan, Alina Bronsky, Lena Gorelik, Ira Peter, Mitja Vachedin, and Nino Haratischwilli, among others. Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: Language Study and The Process of Writing Core Component: None
Opportunity for individual study in areas not covered by formal course offerings, under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Credits: variable Major/Minor Restrictions: None Class Restriction: None Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression Liberal Arts Practices: The Process of Writing Core Component: None
