The German Curriculum focuses on three major periods.
Enlightenment, Weimar Classicism, Romanticism (1650–1830)
The 18th century laid the foundation for the emergence of modern Germany. Many literary and philosophical works exhibit the immense joy, hope, anxiety, and work that went into reorganizing the relationship between the individual, society, and the world after religious and hierarchical certainties collapsed in the upheaval of the Thirty Years' War and the armed conflicts and revolutions that followed. Unlike other European cultures, the German-speaking area undertook this reorganization without a territorially unified state. The powerful desire for cultural and political unity gave rise to ideas about the function, value, and precarious status of individuality, and to concepts of art, nature, Bildung, and progress that continue to inform ways in which we think of the world today.
Liberalism, Modernism, Fascism (1830–1945)
With the deaths of Hegel in 1831 and Goethe in 1832, the formative period for a culturally unified Germany came to an end. Contradictions in German liberalism–between universalist values and an increasingly exclusionary construction of national identity–created a widening rift between writers and thinkers who were committed to revolutionary change and those whose work drew on images of a preindustrial way of life. With the establishment of the German nation in 1871, accompanied by a rise in militarism and colonial aspirations, both progressive and reactionary tendencies in German culture became even more pronounced. These tendencies beset the Weimar Republic, during which Jews and other minorities enjoyed unprecedented freedom of expression, yet authoritarian "solutions" to economic convulsions and social conflict increasingly gained adherents. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they consigned artistic modernism to the category of "degenerate art." Many leading cultural figures were forced into exile. Those who remained in the country either tolerated or supported the regime.
Cold War, PostModernism, Neoliberalism (post-1945)
German culture since the end of the genocidal Nazi era has been defined by twin desires for a new beginning and for a retrieval of the humanist and progressive elements of the German tradition. While in socialist East Germany the claim to represent that tradition became official state policy, in West Germany the influence of American and British popular culture gave rise to new forms of cultural expression. Yet many modernist writers collided with a post-traumatic society in which former Nazis still occupied important offices (West Germany) or historical responsibility for fascism was denied outright (East Germany and Austria). Not until the cultural revolution of the 1960s did the conformist postwar culture begin to give way to a new diversity, and in the 1970s and 1980s new feminist, queer, and immigrant voices emerged. With the end of the German Democratic Republic in 1990, Germany entered the current era in which it has found itself playing a challenging new political role as the dominant country in the EU. The current refugee crisis and the accelerating growth of economic inequality have spawned new forms of cultural activism, especially in the visual and performing arts.
To become a German studies major, a student should have no grade lower than a B in any language course taken in the department. All German language courses below the 300-level counted toward the major must be taken for a letter grade. The department recognizes the diversity of student interests and goals by giving its majors great flexibility in designing their programs of study. Students should work closely with their major advisors to put together coherent courses of study and assure that they will make steady progress toward mastery of the German language. The department strongly recommends that majors fulfill Stages I and II of the General Education Expectations.