25 courses with the subject GMST, 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.
GMST 001Intensive Elementary German1
Students who start in the GMST 001- GMST 002 sequence must complete GMST 002 to receive credit for 001. For students who begin German in college, this course is designed to develop active use of the language. The class combines intensive practice in listening, speaking, writing and reading with the study of grammar. Authentic materials (texts, videos, music) familiarize students with the culture of German-speaking countries. This 1 credit class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays with a one-hour tutorial on an additional day. Humanities. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Hicke. Fall 2027 Hicke.
This class is the continuation of GMST 001 and also for students who placed into the second semester. Second semester German continues to develop core language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). Regular engagement with authentic texts, videos, and music from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria further enhances cultural competency. This 1 credit class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays with a one-hour tutorial on an additional day. Humanities. 1 credit. Spring 2027. Werlen. Spring 2028 Werlen.
This class is for students who completed the GMST 001 - GMST 002 sequence and those who place into the third semester. Expanding and reviewing core language skills, the course integrates intermediate-level reading, listening, and viewing materials with more advanced writing practice. This 1 credit class meets on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with an additional tutorial on Tuesday. Students are required to attend at least two of the weekly German language tables each month (on Mondays in the DCC). Humanities. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Hicke. Fall 2027 Hicke.
Through discussion of German films and presentations on student-selected topics, this course develops students’ speaking skills. Content changes every semester and students can enroll in this class multiple times.
Current enrollment or completion of GMST 001 . 0.5 credit. Fall 2026. Burri. Catalog chapter: Modern Languages and Literatures: German Studies Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/german-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
GMST 006German Conversation0.5
Through discussion of German films and presentations on student-selected topics, this class develops students’ speaking skills. Content changes every semester and students can enroll in this class multiple times.
Completion of GMST 001 . 0.5 credit. Spring 2027. Burri. Catalog chapter: Modern Languages and Literatures: German Studies Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/german-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
GMST 007Hot off the Press: Current Headlines from a German Perspective
(Cross-listed as LITR 007 ) This half-credit course invites students to explore the urban culture of Berlin, a European hotspot for politics, the arts, media, high-tech start-ups, and clubbing. Venturing beyond the capital, students then examine facets of Germany’s contemporary cultural, social, and political landscape. Students will help select specific topics for readings, discussions, and presentations, and participants interested in developing their German language skills will have the opportunity to engage with relevant texts and media in German. Taught in English. .5 credit. Eligible for LITR
GMST 008Texts in Context: Topics in German Culture and Society from the Reformation until Today1
This fourth-semester course is designed to advance linguistic skills through engagement with a specific topic. Studying literary, artistic, journalistic, and historical sources, students enhance their analytical, writing, and communication skills. This course is the gateway to all upper level courses in the German Studies curriculum. Topics alternate every year. Topic for Spring ‘24: Nature and Ecology in German Literature and Culture
GMST 003 or Placement Test Score between 425-525. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ENVS. Catalog chapter: Modern Languages and Literatures: German Studies Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/german-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
GMST 009FYS: Finding Refuge (W)
(Cross-listed as LITR 009G ) In this course, we will compare two historical periods of mass migrations: refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in 1930s and 1940s and refugees from conflict zones coming to Germany today, and especially during the so-called “refugee crisis” between 2015 and 2019. Connecting political reality with literary and artistic representation, we will use texts, films, current news coverage, and activist art projects to place flight narratives in their historical contexts and to learn about refugee lives, the lasting effects of migration, the social and political reality of those considered “migrants,” and the ways in which migration enables new connections between marginalized histories and precarious positionalities. Humanities. Writing course. 1 Eligible for CPLT, GLBL-paired, PEAC
This fourth-semester course is designed to advance linguistic skills through engagement with a specific topic. Studying literary, artistic, journalistic, and historical sources, students enhance their analytical, writing, and communication skills. This course is the gateway to all upper level courses in the German Studies curriculum. Topics alternate every year. Topic for Spring ‘26: Fairy Tales. Taught in German.
GMST 003 or Placement Test Score of 500 or above. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for CPLT, ENVS. Spring 2027. Hicke. Spring 2028 Hicke. Catalog chapter: Modern Languages and Literatures: German Studies Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/german-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
GMST 017First Year Seminar: Testimonial Literature1
(Cross-listed as LITR 017G ) This course explores the notion of testimony as an important aspect of a literature of resistance. We investigate how testimony intertwines with questions of writing and truth, and creates a response to cultural violence. Students read theories and literature of resistance and testimony in a wide-ranging selection of time periods and cultures, from the formation of a philosophical and religious idea of testimony in antiquity (Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions) to its later development in the theories of Emmanuel Levinas. We will also study the emergence of the literary notion of testimony by analyzing works of poetry, narrative, and film, with a particular focus on Jewish responses to the Shoah, and Latin American and Latino responses to political and social repression. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for PEAC
GMST 020Topics in German Studies I: Weimar Berlin: Modernity, Metropolis, Mayhem1
Berlin became a hub for modern media in the Weimar years (1919-1933). In this course we track how new forms: film, photography, popular song, illustrated magazines, and experimental writing reshaped politics, desire, and everyday life. We will study the city’s art scene and soundscapes alongside debates about mass culture, propaganda, censorship, and social crisis. Case studies include stardom and spectatorship, bodies and fashion, montage and advertising, street life and the press, and the cultural work of gender, queerness, and Jewish modernity. Conducted in German.
Placement test or GMST 008 . Taught in German. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for CPLT, ESCH, GLBL-Paired Fall 2026. Hicke. Fall 2027 STAFF. Catalog chapter: Modern Languages and Literatures: German Studies Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/german-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
GMST 026Popular Music and Media1
(Cross-listed as FMST 026 , LITR 026 , MUSI 005E ) What do classical music, teenie bop, soul, battle rap, and jazz have in common? Philadelphia. This team-taught interdisciplinary course investigates the histories, structures and cultural connections between popular music and other media in the city of Philadelphia. What links sound, image, and place? How do musical expressions and genres interact with urban life at specific junctures in Philadelphia history? How do modes of production and exhibition formats (radio vs. television, club v.s stadium) along with distribution venues (record store vs. Spotify) engage with genre, gender, and race configurations? What lies at the intersection of regional, national, and global fan cultures? How does celebrity culture then and now impact what is popular and how does it affect Philadelphia’s music industry and vice versa? Providing a grounding in music and media history and theory, we will research and analyze mainstream and independent Philadelphia-specific case studies in radio, film, theater, television and social media in order to better understand and engage with the complex webs that characterize contemporary media, its production, and its consumption. Student projects will explore the intersections and interactions between individuals, ethnic and racial groups, established and new Philadelphians, city government, region, empire, and nation that have and continue to shape Philadelphia through the music and media created here. This course will be taught in Philadelphia. Core class in the Tri-Co Philly Program . Humanities. 1 credit. Spring 2027. Simon. Spring 2028 Simon.
GMST 029The Theater of Intervention: After Shakespeare and Müller1
(Cross-listed as THEA 011C ) In this course students will read selected texts by William Shakespeare and Heiner Müller, identify relevant contemporary themes and then create their own performances. The goal of the class is for the student to create work without distinctions between writing, acting and directing-the director as performer, the actor as the author of their own expression. This work also seeks to remove any separation between the artist and the citizen, political thinker, and activist. How can theater function as a performative political statement? How can a theater artist intervene in making social change? Readings will include Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, and Hamlet, both Shakespeare’s original versions and Müller’s contemporary adaptations. Open to all students without prerequisite. Taught by Cornell Visiting Professor Barbara Wysocka. Humanities. 1 credit.
GMST 037The Holocaust: History, Representation, and Culture1
(Cross-listed as HIST 037 and LITR 037G ) Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, and despite an enormous amount of research and testimony, the genocide of European Jewry continues to generate compelling interpretive questions. This course is a multidisciplinary exploration of the Holocaust with special attention paid to forms of memory, commemoration, and artistic representations through the study of fiction, poetry, film, memoirs, and historical scholarship Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for PEAC
(Cross-listed as LITR 038G , GLBL 038 ) In this course we will compare two historical periods of mass migrations: refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in 1930s and 1940s and refugees from conflict zones coming to Germany today, and especially during the so-called “refugee crisis” between 2015 and 2019. Connecting political reality with literary and artistic representation, we will use texts, films, current news coverage, and activist art projects to place flight narratives in their historical contexts and to learn about refugee lives, the lasting effects of migration, the social and political reality of those considered “migrants,” and the ways in which migration enables new connections between marginalized histories and precarious positionalities. Taught in English. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for CPLT, PEAC, GLBL paired
(Cross-listed as FMST 051 , LITR 051G ) Setting out from the cornerstones of aesthetics, history and memory, this course introduces you to post-war directors from Italian Neo-Realism, British and French New Waves, Eastern European Cinema, Post-New Wave Italian auteurs, Spanish cinema after Franco, New German Cinema, Swedish and Danish cinema. The course addresses key issues and concepts in European cinema such as realism, authorship, art cinema, and political modernism, with reference to significant films and filmmakers and in the context of historical, social, and cultural issues. Taught in English. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for FMST, GLBL-Paired, LITR
(Cross-listed as LITR 054G , FMST 054 ) This writing intensive course is an introduction to German Cinema from its inception in the 1890s until the present. It includes an examination of early exhibition forms, expressionist and avant garde films from the classic German cinema of the Weimar era, fascist cinema, postwar rubble films, DEFA films from East Germany, New German Cinema from the 1970s, post 1989 heritage films, Turkish-German Cinema, and Berlin School films from the 2000s. Students in the class will analyze a cross-match of popular and arthouse cinemas while discussing concepts of mass culture, medium-specific aesthetics, propaganda, history and memory as identity- and nation-building practices. Taught in English. Fulfills national cinema requirement for FMST.
FMST 001 or instructor’s permission. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Fall 2027 Simon. Catalog chapter: Modern Languages and Literatures: German Studies Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/german-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
GMST 056Outbreak Narratives: A Medical Humanities Exploration of Literature on Germs, Vampires, and Other Plagues1
(Cross-listed as LITR 056G ) This Medical Humanities course invites students to pause and think about the contradiction inherent in human contact: on the one hand, we need it in order to flourish, while on the other hand, it poses potential risks. Informed by a theoretical framework that draws on insights from fields such as Disability Studies, Cultural Studies, and Gender Studies, this course offers students the opportunity to analyze German literature depicting contagious outbreaks, life in isolation, and explore the ethics of cure and human experimentation. As part of a larger focus on the ways in which cultural representations of contagion are informed by cultural norms and how, in their turn, these representations have an impact on shaping and building cultural communities, students will be asked to consider the many connotations and valences of the term “contagion.” Most simply, the word “contagion” denotes a risk of contamination, a potentially lethal danger to the exposed subject. This course invites students to go beyond this literal interpretation of the word in order to contemplate the ways in which contagion challenges the notion of an isolated, self-contained self, to explore the intriguing possibility of a self with fluid boundaries that is constantly shaped by a community, and to cultivate empathy for other community members in the face of shared vulnerability. Using German literature in English translation to explore literature on the plague, cholera, tuberculosis, HIV, as well on as vampires, we will consider how race, gender, class, and historical époques shape illness stories. In particular, we will look at the power dynamics that code contagions either as negative (where it refers, for instance, to a potentially deadly disease) or as positive (where it refers to contagious affects or an exchange of ideas). Authors include Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Elfreide Jelinek, Thomas Mann, J. W. Goethe, Fanny Lewald, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Bertha von Suttner. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GLBL-paired, GSST
GMST 070Writing and Screening the Nation: A Comparative Perspective1
Cross-listed as FREN 070 , CPLT 070 This course explores the continued relevance and resonance of the First and Second World War across European cultural productions, be they literary, cinematic or graphics works. More specifically, through a comparative lens of mostly French and German works, we investigate how these works participate in the formation and re-shaping of national and transnational memories: the relationship between what disappears, what remains, and what re-emerges in that process. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GLBL, FMST.
Cross-listed as LITR 083 , FMST 083 . This course looks at the history and format of the crime drama in film and on television. More than other genres, crime dramas have reflected on societies’ historical blind spots, taboos, and peripheries along with its reigning hierarchies of power, and they have debated foundational ethical parameters amidst ongoing struggles to deal with change, particularly in relation to childhood, gender, race, class, and sexuality. At the same time, shows like CSI have altered television aesthetics and spectatorship in dialogue with new forensic and media-specific technologies: What has made the crime drama such a success in different mediascapes (silent and sound cinema, network TV, cable era, and Netflix)? How have its familiar stock characters, plotlines, settings, and recognizable styles adapted? What accounts for its ability to speak to audiences across different cultural backgrounds while emanating from and representing cultural, national, and regional specificities (Scandinavian crime, American film noir)? How has the genre responded to social activism and debates over the prison-industrial complex? How can we explain serial killer fandom in the convergence era (e.g., Twitter followers responding with likes to a mugshot of a suspected murderer)? HU. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Simon. Spring 2028 Simon.
GMST 008 or GMST 020 . Taught in German. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for CPLT Catalog chapter: Modern Languages and Literatures: German Studies Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/german-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
GMST 092Topics in German Studies II: Confronting the Past in German Art, Literature, and Film1
GMST 008 or GMST 020 . Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for CPLT. Spring 2028 Werlen. Catalog chapter: Modern Languages and Literatures: German Studies Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/german-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
