UPenn-Germanics

Undergraduate Chair
Catriona MacLeod
733 Williams Hall
(215) 898-7334
cmacleod@sas.upenn.edu

Graduate Chair
Liliane Weissberg
747 Williams Hall
(215) 898-3343
lweissbe@sas.upenn.edu

Acting Department Chair
Frank Trommler
743 Williams Hall
(215) 898-8606
trommler@ccat.sas.upenn.edu

Kathryn Hellerstein, Yiddish
748 Williams Hall
(215) 898-7103
khellers@sas.upenn.edu

Kim-Eric Williams, Swedish
751 Williams Hall
(215) 898-7107
wkimeric@aol.com

Visit our homepage for undergraduate program information, course descriptions, syllabi, events, and extra-curricular activities: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/german

Major in German: Choose from a wide variety of courses in language, applied language, culture, literature, and history. You can be confident that you will leave our program fluent in the language and at ease in the cultures and traditions of the German speaking countries
Major in German Studies: This versatile program offers you fluency in the language, culture, and literature, in addition to enabling you to select five courses related to your German interests in other School of Arts and Science departments. An efficient way to double major and to prepare for graduate school or an international career.
Double Major in German and Your Major of Choice: You are already in the Wharton School, International Relations, Computer Science, History, or Political Science. If you want to make yourself really competitive, then consider adding German as a double major. This could be just the edge you need.
Minor in German: You have satisfied your language requirement, but elect to keep up your German with some advanced language courses. To obtain a minor only requires 6 credits beyond GRMN 104 and most of your courses satisfy other college requirements.
Certificate in German Language Study: Students can receive a Certificate by completing 3 courses taught in German in addition to passing proficiency. Students must receive a minimum of a B+ average in the three courses, and may not take the courses on a pass/fail basis.
Most of these options can readily be combined with Penn’s study abroad programs in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich. Do not forget these programs afford you Penn credit for the courses that you take. You will satisfy courses in your major, double major or minor as you become more fluent in the Germanic language via total immersion in two of Europe’s most exciting cities.

GRMN 012 My Angel Made Me Do It
Hill House Seminar
Distribution III: Arts & Letters
301 W 3-6 pm K. Otto
Angels, angels, angels -- they are everywhere these days. You've seen them on TV (Touched by an Angel) and in films (e.g. Dogma). What are they really? Do they exist? Who are they? Why do some people think they have one? Good angels? Bad angels? We will explore angels from artistic, literary, theological and cultural perspectives. We will read and discuss, in English, some works of Rilke, Goethe, Milton, Fuentes, Marlowe, Benjamin, France and others; we'll view and discuss Wings of Desire and other films. We will consider the Jewish, the Christian and the Moslem perspectives and views.

Language Courses

GRMN 101 Elementary German I
001 MTWRF 12-1 Staff
002 MTWRF 12-1 Staff
Designed for the beginning student with no previous knowledge of German. German 101, as the first course in the first-year series, focuses on the development of language competencies in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. By the end of the semester students will be able to engage in simple conversations about familiar things, know greetings and everyday expressions, they will be able to count and tell time, and negate sentences in day-to-day contexts. Furthermore, students will be able to speak about events that happened in the immediate past and express plans for the future. In addition, students will have developed reading strategies that allow them to glean information from simple newspaper and magazine articles and short literary texts. Because cultural knowledge is one of the foci of German 101, students will learn much about practical life in Germany and will explore German-speaking cultures on the Internet.

GRMN 102 Elementary German II
001 MTWRF 11-12 Staff
002 MTWRF 12-1 Staff
003 MTWRF 12-1 Staff
This course is a continuation of GRMN 101 and is designed to strengthen and expand students’ listening, speaking, reading, and writing competencies and to deepen an understanding of German-speaking cultures. By the end of the course students will be able to handle a variety of day-to-day needs in a German-speaking setting and engage in simple conversations about personally significant topics. Students can expect to be able to order food and beverages, purchase things, and to be familiar with the German university system, the Arts, media, and current social topics. Students will begin to be able to talk about the past and the future, make comparisons, describe people and things in increasing detail, make travel plans that include other European countries, and make reservations in hotels and youth hostels. By the end of the course students will be able to talk about their studies and about their dreams for the future. In addition, students will develop reading strategies that should allow them to understand the general meaning of articles, and short literary texts. Furthermore, students will feel more able to understand information when hearing German speakers talking about familiar topics. Cultural knowledge remains among one of the foci of German 102, and students will continue to be exposed to authentic materials.

GRMN 103 Intermediate German I
001 MTRF 12-1 Staff
Improves students’ writing and speaking competencies in German, increases vocabulary, and helps to develop effective reading and listening strategies. Our in-class discussions are based on weekly readings of literary and non-literary texts to facilitate exchange of information, ideas, reactions, and opinions. In addition, the readings provide cultural and historical background information. The review of grammar will not be the primary focus of the course. Students will, however, expand and deepen their knowledge of grammar through specific grammar exercises. The course also offers a film component and concludes with a glossed excerpt from a longer text in preparation for German 104.

GRMN 104 Intermediate German II
001 MTRF 11-12 Staff
002 MTRF 12-1 Staff
003 MTRF 1-2 Staff
Expands students’ writing and speaking competencies in German, increases vocabulary, and helps students practice effective reading and listening strategies. Our in-class discussions are based on weekly readings of literary and non-literary texts to facilitate exchange of information, ideas, reactions, and opinions. In addition, the readings provide cultural and historical background information. The review of grammar will not be the primary focus of the course. Students will, however, expand and deepen their knowledge of grammar through specific grammar exercises. Students will conclude the basic-language program at PENN by reading an abridged and glossed version of an authentic literary text offering the opportunity to practice and deepen reading knowledge and to sensitize cultural and historical awareness of German-speaking countries.

GRMN 107 Accelerated Intermediate German
001 MWF 10-11 V. Byrd
TR 10:30-12 V. Byrd
An intensive two credit course in which two semesters of intermediate German (GRMN 103 & 104) are completed in one.

GRMN 180 German in Residence
301 TBA M. Belcher
This is a 1/2 credit course for students living in the Modern Language House.

GRMN 215 Conversation and Composition
Prereq. 104 or equiv.
001 MWF 12-1 C. McCandless
Required for the major, also carries credit for the minor in German. Offers students the opportunity to improve significantly written and spoken discourse strategies and to raise language competence to an academic register. In addition, the course familiarizes students with several reading strategies. Students write several essays, weekly reaction pieces, lead discussions, and create short in-class presentations. During the second half of the semester, students create a common course web site in connection with their readings of an authentic literary text. In collaborative group work, students create the contents for different components: biography, text analyses, historical background, geography and didactizations emphasizing integrated skills and discourse competence. Their work is posted to a web site, which in turn, is incorporated in the 4 th-semester syllabus, where students use the peer-generated information and comprehension checks for their understanding of an abridged version of the authentic literary text.
Please visit the Homo.Cyber project at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/german/215/

GRMN 221 Advanced Grammar and Stylistics
001 TR 12-1:30 F. Brevart
This course is designed to help the student develop a more sophisticated writing style in German. This is achieved by means of the study and discussion of the fine points of German syntax (e.g. correct usage of tenses, punctuation, experimentation with word order, etc.), by a variety of exercises in finding synonyms, similes, analogies, and rhetorical strategies, and by exposure to numerous idioms. Emphasis is also placed on determining the appropriate sage of language in a specific situation. The ultimate objective of this course is therefore to encourage an active and imaginative use of the German language. Students should be prepared to undertake an active role in critiquing one another's writing.

GRMN 220 Business German: A Micro Perspective
Prerequisite(s): GRMN 215 or equivalent
Foreign Language Across Curriculum (FLAC)
001 MWF 11-12 S. Schlichting-Artur
This course is designed to enhance your speaking, reading and writing skills, in addition to helping you build a strong foundation in business vocabulary. Course objectives include acquiring skills in cross cultural communication, teamwork, business management, and creating a business plan. German grammar will be covered on a need be basis. This course will prepare you to perform and contribute while in a German-speaking business environment.

GRMN 009 Vocabulary of Desire
Fulfills the College Writing Requirement
301 TR 12-1:30 M. Wetli
Notions of Desire in German Literature
Our exploration of German literature will focus on manifestations of desire in several German literary texts from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. This topic-focused course uses these texts to inaugurate an exploration of desire—its relationship to the senses, its consequences, the experience of desire, and desire in writing—within the context of a writing seminar. Specifically, we will focus on writing as process, revision, peer review, mechanics, and style. The writing assignments are designed to enable you to explore our topic in various forms, including journals and responses. You will continue to evaluate your writing and your peers’ throughout the writing process in accord with a revision schedule that is largely student-driven. To accomplish this task, we will read works by representative Czech, German and East German authors—Goethe, Kleist, Rilke, Mann, Plenzdorf, and Süskind. Course requirements include active and meaningful participation, peer review, journal writing, and three essays. Students will submit a portfolio of their written work at the end of the semester. No knowledge of German required.

GRMN 216 Introduction to Literature
General Requirement III: Arts & Letters
Prerequisite(s): GRMN 104 or the equivalent
301 MWF 10-11 C. Frei
Required for the major, also carries credit for the minor in German. Develops students' basic skills of literary interpretation. Exposure to various reading techniques (e.g. close reading, reading for plot, etc.) and to literary terminology and its application. Readings will include selections from prose, drama and lyric poetry.

GRMN 318 Foreign Exchanges: German Travel Literature and the East
001 TR 10:30-12:00 B. Wiggin
Through a selection of German literature drawn from a range of historical periods, we will explore a series of questions about German constructions of the “East”: Where have Germans located the East? Is this East monolithic? Is it a site of anxiety or wonder? Who lives there and how do its various inhabitants live? What happens to Germans who travel to the East? Does German-ness change when it is transplanted to the East? Can the “East” ever be located in Germany ? Does it change there? Students will be asked to participate actively in the discussion of the readings in class and on Blackboard and write several short (3pp.) papers reacting to the readings. These may include: Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzifal; Adam Olearius, Neue Beschreibung der Muscowitischen und Persischen Reyse and the translation Persianischer Rosenthal; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-Ostlicher Diwan; Herrmann von Wissman, Meine zweite Durchquerung Aequatorial-Afrikas; Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Das Leben ist eine Karawansereri; Christian Kracht, 1979; and others.

GRMN 376 From Bayreuth to Techno: Culture and Culture Politics in Germany
Distribution I: May be counted as a Distributional course in Society.
Prerequisite(s): GRMN 215 or equivalent.
001 TR 3-4:30 S. Roth
This course surveys a number of different cultural events like the music festival in Bayreuth and the “Love Parade” in Berlin as well as controversies in the cultural arena such as the wrapping of the Reichstag, the Holocaust Memorial, and the Walser-Bubis-Debate in the 1990s. Based on these examples as well as the Olympic Games in Munich 1972, the Culture City of Europe Weimar 1999, and the World Exposition Expo 2000 in Hanover, we will discuss political (national identity, foreign policy, crisis prevention) and economic (boosterism) aspects of cultural events. Differences in art and culture between the U.S. and Germany will be addressed.

GRMN 395 Senior Colloquium
Permission needed from Department
301 TBA C. MacLeod
This course is intended for students completing their senior thesis for the German Major.

GRMN 399 Independent Study
000 TBA Staff
Permission needed from the Department to enroll in Independent Study.

GRMN 499 Independent Study
000 TBA Staff
Permission needed from the Department to enroll in Independent Study.

GRMN 246 Heroes, Minstrels, Knights
All readings and lectures in English.
General Requirement III: Arts & Letters
001 TR 10:30-12 F. Brevart
In this course we will read medieval works of international literary importance, such as the Arthurian novels of Hartman von Aue Erec and Iwein, the German Song of the Nibelungs and the Old French Song of Roland as examples of heroic literature, and the tragic love story of Tristan and Isolde by Gottfried von Strasburg. We will also read two Spielmannsepen which have as their central theme the international motif of the bridal quest, namely Sankt Oswald and König Rother, and compare these works with the Nibelungenlied and Tristan, which themselves also involve the bridal quest as one of their principal structural elements. There is, however, a major and critical distinction between the traditional happy ending of the bridal quest epics and that of The Nibelungs and of Tristan and Isolde, for those two German works culminate in the total destruction and disintegration of entire peoples and values, or with the utter misery of the ideal couple. With our readings of the love poems of the French Troubadours and those of their German counterparts, the Minnesänger, our final genre of medieval literature, we will not only discuss the ubiquitous and timeless love theme in all its variations, but also the socio-political implications of such poetry.

GRMN 254 The Self-Portrait
All readings in English.
Group 4 Sections - Pilot Curriculum Course
420 TR 10:30-12 C. MacLeod & V. Coates
Who am I? What makes the creative act of representing the self different from representing another? Can the essential self be depicted authentically? Or is what is essential precisely that which can never be represented? Does the act of self-representation change the subject? Is a picture worth a thousand words, or can words provide more scope for self-representation? These are questions at the heart of humanistic studies and questions that every university student wrestles with in some form. "The Self-Portrait" will consider these questions from literary and visual perspectives, and will track these issues from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.
The class will be taught by two professors, and will include both lectures and discussion sections. Students will be exposed to a wide range of self-portraits in literature, the fine arts, and film. Within this framework, we will emphasize the literary and visual examples of Cellini, Goethe, and the Surrealists, and will visit the Dalí exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In addition to analytical assignments and a final exam, students will prepare their own self-portraits during the semester in the medium of their choice, and our course will culminate in an exhibition of their work.
Among the central questions we will address are:
1. Staging Authenticity: The various inventions that take place in any depiction of the self, raising the question of the distinction between the natural and the artificial.
2. The Trauma of the Self: The ways in which trauma both deforms and generates notions of the self.
3. The Ideology of the Self: The sometimes competing social and political claims on the representation of the self.
4. Surrogates of the Self: The ways in which objects and/or symbols can stand in for the self—sometimes violating the integrity of the self, sometimes manipulating it playfully.

GRMN 255 Mann, Hesse, Kafka
General Requirement III: Arts & Letters.
All readings and lectures in English.
401 TR 12-1:30 F. Trommler
Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Franz Kafka have become classics with their literary exploration of alienation, loss, and recovery of the individual in the modern world. This course offers immersion in some of their crucial novels, accompanied by the viewing of films (Visconti, Welles) and videos that reflect their work. Readings of such works as Kafka’s Metamorphosis and The Trial, Mann’s Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, and Hesse’s Demian and Steppenworlf are discussed in the light of Germany’s dark history in the twentieth century. The course will provide an in-depth look at the dilemma of the modern artist and the ways in which literary and visual culture can contribute to a deeper understanding of ethical issues that continue to be with us in the twenty-first century.

GRMN 532 German Literature 18th Century to Present
301 TR 9-10:30 C. MacLeod
A continuation of GRMN 531, this course examines literary developments from the Enlightenment to the present.

GRMN 564 The Yiddish Classics and Modernity
401 M 10 am - 12 pm A. Norich
All readings will be in English translation. No knowledge of Yiddish is required for this course. Undergraduates welcome.
What do we know about modern Yiddish culture? What are its origins and how did it develop? Who were its major writers and what were the themes, social structures, literary forms of primary concern to them? In this course we will answer these and other questions by reading the fiction of three writers: Sh.Y. Abramovitch (also known as Mendele Moykher Sforim, the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature), Sholem Aleichem, and Y.L. Peretz. Their short stories and novels are considered the classics of modern Yiddish literature and offer a provocative introduction into the Eastern European Jewish milieu in which they wrote and the historical, political, social and economic transformations of the late 19 th-early 20 th century. We will also consider some of the adaptations made of their work in Yiddish and English drama and film, and some of the changes made when their stories and novels were brought to an American audience.

A continuation of GRMN 101. The student’s expression and comprehension are enhanced through the study of literature and social themes.

GRMN 104 Intermediate German II
601 MW 6:30-8:15 pm Staff
Literary and non-literary texts of moderate difficulty. Continued practice in active communication. This course is designed to further develop and refine integrative skills of reading, writing, and speaking in German, as well as to prepare students for the Proficiency Examination in German and for advanced-level German courses.

GRMN 256 The Devil's Pact in Literature, Music and Film
General Requirement III: Arts & Letters.
All readings and lectures in English.
601 M 6-9 pm S. Richter
For centuries the pact with the devil has signified humankind's desire to surpass the limits of human knowledge and power. From the reformation chapbook to the rock lyrics of Randy Newman's Faust, from Marlowe and Goethe to key Hollywood films, the legend of the devil's pact continues to be useful for exploring our fascination with forbidden powers.

GRMN 402 Beginning Yiddish II
Prerequisite(s): GRMN 401 or permission of the instructor.
401 TR 10:30-12 A. Botwinik
In this course, you can continue to develop basic reading, writing and speaking skills. Discover treasures of Yiddish culture: songs, literature, folklore, and films.

DTCH 102 (502-401) Elementary Dutch II
401 MW 6:30-8:00 pm R. Naborn
Continuation of DTCH 101.
A second semester language course covering the core Dutch grammar and vocabulary with the goal of providing the corner stone for developing overall linguistic proficiency in Dutch.

DTCH 399 Independent Study
Permission needed from Department
000 TBA Staff

Advising