The intellectual is a modern figure emerging in the German social and political landscape around 1800. Straddling the roles of prophet, critic, political activist, scholar and artist, intellectuals defy clear cut categorization, but this "free floating existence" of the intellectual is part of the ongoing fascination surrounding this public…

Over recent decades, literary scholarship has shifted focus from a generalized or transcendental concept of writing to an analysis of its historically specific techniques. This has allowed for a clearer view of differences among communicative structures and settings. Through a coupling of case studies and theoretical models, this course aims…

Idyll is often seen as mere kitsch. But this might change. Today, the modes and styles of expressing personal and social "happiness" are no longer bound to an ambitious agenda for personal perfection or to an explicit political utopia. Could this result in a new interest in the idyll as a key form to address happiness? The seminar will examine…

We will read, hear and/or watch notable speeches of the 19th and 20th century and analyze them from historical, political, rhetorical and media historical perspectives. After formulating their own analysis of a speech, students will discuss its immediate and long term effects. List of speakers: Luther, Goethe, Bismarck, Freud, Hitler, Adenauer…

According to the obvious line of investigation there are clear cut demarcation lines: Journalism is a business while literature is art or journalism is writing short, factual articles about events while literature is all about creating fictitious events. Contrary to these simple truths stands the history of literature: journalism and…

You have to read Goethe! But how is this possible, given that the "Goethe" in the Sophienausgabe is 142 volumes thick, and the literature on Goethe fills up entire libraries? The seminar departs from this problem in order to find entries into the textual cosmos called "Goethe". The selection and compilation of Goethe-texts is, following the…

Romanticism thought of itself as great: "Only it can become, like the epoch, a mirror of the entire world of its surroundings, an image of the era." (F. Schlegel) At the same time, Romanticism did not allow itself to be defined by this term, since it "could only become, it cannot be exhausted by any theory" (Athenäumsfragment 116). This…

Germany knows neither a Glorious Revolution nor a French Revolution. Revolutions remain for the most part only attempted Revolutions -- and these attempts are most often bitter failures. This seminar will read these failed Revolutions through the lens of literary and historical texts: From the Mainzer Republik (1793) through the Revolutions of…

The German Democratic Republic is history since 1989. GDR literature is now a closed corpus of texts, which makes it into an ideal field for literary historians. How did literary production work in the GDR? How was literature distributed, and how was it read? Close readings of texts by Christa Wolf, Reimann, H. Müller, Sascha Anderson (among…

Myths are a form of symbolic capital: they provide orientation and generate confidence. Myths are a complex construction of historical facts, their embeddedness in media, their cultural circulation, and their political exploitation. This seminar will study a variety of foundational German myths such as Nibelungen, Kaiser Barbarossa,…

Aphoristic collections occupy a prominent place in the canon of German literature. One could argue that there were in fact two "Golden Ages" of the aphorism genre. In the first, around 1800, writers such as Lichtenberg, Goethe, or Klinger took an old tradition to a new height. In the second, around 1900, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Kraus wrote world…

Alexander Kluge, decorated with virtually every prize a writer, movie director and TV producer can receive in Germany, has always been a political author focused on the history and fate of Germany. His extensive and wide-ranging body of work can be considered as one vast library devoted to this topic. Drawing on this multi-media collection the…