GERMAN SCANDVN / SWEDISH YIDDISH
Please note that this webpage will be updated as information becomes available.
For GE courses, please check out our General Education Webpage.
Undergraduate and Graduate courses
German 1101.01 • German I
4 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
GEN World Languages
GEL Foreign Language course
Introduction to language and culture of the German-speaking world, with emphasis placed on the acquisition of basic communication skills in cultural context. CEFR Levels A1/A2. Not open to native speakers of this language through regular course enrollment or EM credit, or to students with 2 or more years of study in this language in high school, except by permission of dept.
Text: Impuls Deutsch 1
German 1102.01 • German II
4 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
GEN World Languages
GEL Foreign Language course
Continued development of German-language skills and cultural knowledge for effective communication. Emphasis on more advanced language structures, sustained interactions, reading and writing. CEFR Levels A2/B1. Not open to native speakers of this language.
Text: Impuls Deutsch 1
Prereq: 1101.01, 1101.02 or 4 sem cr hrs of 1101.51
German 1103.01 • German III
4 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
GEN World Languages
GEL Foreign Language course
Development of skills for independent use of German. Discussions, presentations, writing, & listening/viewing activities that address topics of contemporary German-speaking world. CEFR Level B1. Not open to native speakers of this language through regular course enrollment or EM credit.
Text: Impuls Deutsch 1
Prereq: 1102.01, 1102.02 or 4 sem cr hrs of 1102.51
German 1101.02 • 1102.02 • 1103.02
Distance Learning option
GEN World Languages
GEL Foreign Language course
4 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
German 1101.51 • 1102.51 • 1103.51
Self-paced Individualized
GEN World Languages
GEL Foreign Language course
German 2101 • Texts and Contexts I: Contemporary German Language, Culture and Society
tbd | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
tbd | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
Development of communication skills and knowledge about recent social, cultural, and political developments in German speaking countries through texts, media and film; CEFR level A2/B1. Closed to native speakers of this language.
Prereq: 1103.01, 1103.02, or 4 sem cr hrs of 1103.51, or equiv, or permission of instructor. No audit.
German 2102 • Texts and Contexts II: 20th-Century German Language, History and Culture
Heck | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
Heck | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
Continued development of communication skills; gain an understanding of major social and cultural developments in 20th century German history through texts, media, film. CEFR level B1/B2. Closed to native speakers of this language.
Prereq: 2101 or equiv, or permission of instructor. FL Admis Cond course.
German 2254.02 • Grimms' Fairy Tales and their Afterlives
GEN Foundation: Literary, Visual & Performing Arts
GEL Literature
Richards | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
In the present DL course, we will be trying to understand the meaning and the enduring appeal of one of Germany’s greatest successes in the realm of cultural exportation—a book whose circulation figures are exceeded in Western culture only by those of the Bible, namely, Grimms’ fairy tales. This will mean asking a series of interlocking questions. How did the fairy tales come about? What were the aims of their compilers? How do the tales play to those aims? How do they exceed them? How do the tales tend to work structurally? What have their social and psychological effects been? How have they helped shape—and been reshaped by—popular cultures outside Germany, like popular culture in the U.S. In reckoning with these questions, we will be enlisting the help of a parade of great critics, including Vladimir Propp, Bruno Bettelheim, Erich Auerbach, and Jack Zipes.
Required Texts:
Jack Zipes, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
Assigned films will be available at drm.osu.edu
Other readings will be posted on Carmen.
All works in English translation; taught in English.
German 2350 • Introduction to German Studies
Byram | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
GEN Foundation: Historical and Cultural Studies
GEL Cultures and Ideas
This course provides a broad introduction to German history and culture and to the field of German Studies. Taught in English, it is an ideal course for students considering a major or minor in German, or for those with a general interest in German-language history and culture.
The course will have four components
- lectures on history (social, cultural, political, and linguistic)
- lectures on contemporary German-language society and culture
- discussion about works of literature, film, philosophy, art, music, etc.
- introductions to methods for studying language and culture
In the end, students will have a broad overview of German-language history and culture and a catalog of questions that will include tools for analyzing everything from medieval sagas to television shows, political speeches to the words they use.
Taught in English.
Required books (in recommended English editions):
Das Niebelungenlied: The Lay of the Niebelungs.Oxford Classics, ISBN 978-0199238545
The Sorrows of Young Werther. Oxford Classics, ISBN: 978-0199583027
These books are also available as open-access editions, or contact instructor for information about German or German-English editions.
Recommended book:
Mary Fulbrook, A Concise History of Germany, ISBN: 978-0521540711
German 3101 • Texts and Contexts III: Historical Perspectives
Grotans | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
Development of intermediate/advanced communication skills; broadening of cultural and historical knowledge through interaction with literary and non-literary materials informed by historical perspective; CEFR level B2. Closed to to native speakers of this language.
Prereq: 2102 or equiv, or permission of instructor.
German 3200 • Window on the World: Literature and Contemporary Society - Topics in German Literature, Art, and Film
Byram | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
In this course, we will focus on reading a contemporary novel and exploring the popular culture, social issues, and facets of daily life that appear in its pages. The novel will be selected with input from enrolled students at the end of spring semester 2022; the options will aim to contain entertaining reads with connections to contemporary social questions.
The class will be conducted in German.
Prereq: 2102 or equiv; or permission of instructor.
German 3252.02 • The Holocaust in Literature and Film
Richards | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
GEL Literature
GEL Diversity: Global Studies
GEN Theme: Citizenship for a Diverse & Just World
Why, faced with a historical catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, would we devote a class to film and literature about it, rather than to “the facts”?
HOW YOU SAY THINGS MATTERS
Come find out why.
Taught in English. Prereq: Not open to students with credit for 3252.01 or Yiddish 3399.
GE course
German 3254H • Representations and Memory of the Holocaust in Film
Holub | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
GEL Visual and Performing Arts
GEL Diversity: Global Studies
GEN Theme: Citizenship for a Diverse & Just World
Honors Course
Students will view, discuss, and examine major filmic representations of the Holocaust from several countries from the 1940s through the 1990s. Students will learn how these films have contributed to our understanding of a complex phenomenon of WWII and how the directors have coped with the thorny issues of representing something that many people consider to be unrepresentable. Taught in English.
Prereq: Honors, and Soph, Jr, or Sr standing, or permission of instructor.
German 3602 • German for the Professions 1
Heck | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
Development of cultural knowledge and communication skills for the professions; introduction to the world of German business through audio, video, print materials; CEFR level B1-B2.
Prereq: 2102 or equiv, or permission of instructor. No audit.
German 4200 • Poetry Today: Crisis, Social Media, and Artificial Intelligence - Senior Seminar in German: Literature, Art and Film (German)
Mergenthaler | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
This course will provide an overview of contemporary German-language poetry today, understood in a wide sense of the term, as well as help students to continue to refine their language skills. The focus of the course will be fourfold: 1) We will explore how contemporary poets are responding in their work to the multiple contemporary crises, including climate change, the Covid-19-pandemic, economic inequality, racial discrimination, and, most recently, the Russian war on Ukraine. 2) We will engage actively with poetry that uses today’s technology, like Artificial Intelligence, video games, and social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook. We will even have a visitor from Germany who writes poetry on Facebook, toward the end of the semester. 3) Students will have the opportunity to experiment, inside and outside of class, individually and in groups, with translating poetry from German to English, and with producing poetry in any of the formats encountered in class. 4) Finally, each student will write a 5-page research paper on which they will work throughout the semester and which they will present during the last week of classes, in a conference format. A number of small assignments and a couple of oral presentations will lead up to the development of their research papers.
For more information, please do not hesitate to email the instructor, Prof. May Mergenthaler, at mergenthaler.4@osu.edu.
Taught in German. Counts toward fulfillment of advanced requirement for the major.
Prereq: 3101 and one course at the 3000 level, and Sr standing, or permission of instructor. Repeatable to a maximum of 6 cr hrs.
Scandinavian
Scandinavian 3350 • Norse Mythology and Medieval Culture
Kaplan | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
GEL Literature
GEL Diversity: Global Studies
What do we know about Thor and Odin, and how do we know it? This course examines the myths of the Old Norse gods and the sources in which those myths are recorded. Students will gain insight into the world view and beliefs of the medieval North by reading (in English translation) the most important textual sources on Scandinavia's pre-Christian mythology. Place-name, archaeological, and other evidence will also be discussed. Students intrigued by the Viking Age, medieval Northern Europe, or the interpretation of myth will find much of interest.
Scandvn 3350 counts towards the Scandinavian minor.
Prereq: none
GE course.
Required texts: Carolyn Larrington's Poetic Edda, 2nd edition; Anthony Faulkes’s translation of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda (any edition; 978-0460876162 is fine); John Lindow’s Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (ISBN 0-195-153820); Optional: H. Mattingly and S. A. Handford’s translation of Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania (again, any edition; 978-0140455403 is the most recent)
Swedish
Swedish 1101 • Swedish I DL
Risko | 4 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
GE Foreign Language course
Introduction to language and culture of Sweden with emphasis on the acquisition of basic communication skills in a cultural context. Closed to native speakers of this language.
Prereq: Not open to students with 2 or more years of study in this language in high school, except by permission of dept.
GE for lang course.
Text: Althén, Anette. Mål 1 Lärobok (textbook with CD); Althén, Anette. Mål Övningsbok (workbook). Both Stockholm: Natur och Kultur (2007 edition).
Swedish 1103 • Swedish III DL
Risko | 4 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
GE Foreign Language course
Development of skills necessary for the independent use of Swedish. Discussions, presentations, writing and listening/viewing activities address topics of contemporary Sweden.
Prereq: Grade of C- or better in 1102.
GE for lang course.
Text: Althén, Anette. Mål 2 Lärobok (textbook with CD); Althén, Anette. Mål Övningsbok (workbook). Both Stockholm: Natur och Kultur (2007 edition).
Yiddish
Yiddish 1101 • Yiddish 1
Johnson | 4 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
GEN World Languages
GEL Foreign Language course
Yiddish 1101 is an introduction to the Yiddish language and Ashkenazic culture. The course is designed to help you learn to communicate in culturally appropriate ways in Yiddish. We aim to help you develop balanced skills in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. At the end of the semester you should be able to listen to simple conversations or stories and understand them, read and understand short texts, engage in brief conversations on everyday topics, and write short essays on familiar topics using the structures and vocabulary you have learned. In addition, you will learn about Ashkenazic culture in Europe, Israel, and the United States.
Required Textbook
In eynem: a communicative approach to Yiddish. Authors: Asya Vaisman Schulman, Jordan Brown, Michael Yashinsky. (Accessed through Yiddish Book Center website.)
GEN World Languages
GEL Foreign Language
Yiddish 2241 • Yiddish Culture
Johnson | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
GEN Foundation: Historical and Cultural Studies
GEL Cultures and Ideas
GEL Diversity: Global Studies
This course provides an introduction to the history of Yiddish culture in its many of forms of expression - literature, film, folklore, visual arts, family life, food, politics, and religion. Lectures and discussions will focus, in particular, on how migration has shaped Yiddish culture.
We will explore the movement of people and ideas between Europe, North America, and the Middle East and investigate how Yiddish culture developed without state support and across borders. We will grapple with concepts like diaspora, identity, and marginality and analyze texts, films, and other media about the shtetl and modern urban life, about border crossings and deportations, about acculturation and self-assertion, about nationalism and socialism, about gender and sexuality, etc. We will also consider how Yiddish culture was—and continues to be—transformed through generative and often fraught encounters with other languages and cultures. While gaining familiarity with the diversity of Yiddish culture, students will develop a conceptual toolbox for the study of culture and migration more generally.
No knowledge of Yiddish required. Cross-listed in Jewish Studies.
GEN Foundation: Historical and Cultural Studies
GEL Cultures and Ideas / GEL Diversity: Global Studies
Yiddish 3399 • Holocaust in Yiddish and Ashkenazic Literature
Johnson | 3 credit units | Autumn Semester 2022
GEL Literature
GEL Diversity: Global Studies
Reading and analysis of texts, films and music pertaining to the topic of the Holocaust, the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany against European Jewry, and its impact on Ashkenazic-Jewish civilization.
Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
85% of them spoke Yiddish.
Let’s hear what they had to say.
In speaking about the Holocaust, people often say that we should “Never Forget” – but what do we choose to remember? The genocide of European Jewry during the Holocaust enacted a horrific human toll and devastated Ashkenazic civilization in Europe. An emphasis on Yiddish, the language spoken by ten million Ashkenazic Jews on the eve of World War II, demands that we focus on victims, survivors, and resistors, rather than perpetrators or liberators. This course puts Jews at the center of the story of their own suffering. It delves into messy emotions, including anger, which writers might not have felt comfortable expressing in a language that was easily accessible to non-Jews.
Yiddish culture went through a renaissance in the early twentieth century, which was cut cruelly short by the Holocaust. Many of the same cultural activists who participated in pre-war Jewish life used Yiddish to confront the horror that engulfed them during World War II. By examining works of Yiddish literature about the Holocaust, this class will examine how Yiddish speakers confronted the destruction of Jewish communities in Europe. From the historians of the Oyneg Shabes Archive in the Warsaw Ghetto to the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, from Yiddish writers in America to post-war film makers who use Yiddish dialogue, this class engages with a variety of powerful perspectives on catastrophe and considers the ways that literature and film can help us negotiate some of the most painful moments in history.
No knowledge of Yiddish required.
Not open to students with credit for 399 or German 399 or German 3252.01 or 3252.02.
GE lit and diversity global studies course.
GEL Literature / GEL Diversity: Global Studies
German 6400 • Introduction to German Film
Davidson | 3 credit units | T/Th 2:20-3:40 pm Autumn Semester 2022
Taught in English, this Introduction to German Film is designed to familiarize graduate students to central texts, historical periods, and formal analysis relevant to the study of German cinema. This course will be divided into units that each address a particular (sub-)period and theme. The class will meet twice per week in 80-minute class sessions covering:
- Introductory lecture, discussion of historical period, and one or more formal cinematic element;
- Film discussion and analytical application [viewing assignments completed outside of class]
The aim of the course is to equip students with the tools needed to engage with film and visual material critically as they encounter it in further coursework and/or stages of scholarly development, be that further work in cinematic research or in preparation for Area 3 of Germanic L&L’s Master’s Assessment. Those who successfully complete this course should be able to integrate German film into their teaching profile as generalists in Germanistik or in a European cinema-studies context. This class counts in the Film Studies graduate program.
Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor.
German 6600 • Introduction to Teaching and Learning German at the College Level
Taleghani-Nikazm | 4 credit units | Mondays 1:00-3:30 pm | Autumn Semester 2022
Developing an understanding of communicative language teaching and second language acquisition as it applies to German. Overview of instructional strategies and techniques for various modalities.
Prereq: Open to Graduate Teaching Associates enrolled in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures; all others by permission of instructor.
German 6601 • Teaching Practicum
Rocker | 1 credit unit | Autumn Semester 2022
This course is for GTAs who are teaching a 1000-level German language class. The course provides graduate students with instruction and practice in designing and implementing instructional materials for their undergraduate classes. It offers best practices in creating tests, developing speaking portfolios, designing culture components, and becoming reflective practitioners.
Prereq: Grad standing, and permission of instructor. Repeatable to a maximum of 10 cr hrs. This course is graded S/U.
German 8200 • Indigenous Cultures and German Literature - Seminar in Literature and Literary Culture
Birkhold | 3 credit units | Wednesdays 4:00-6:30pm | Autumn Semester 2022
In this course we will investigate the German fascination with Indigenous cultures and explore its roots in Enlightenment thinking, the German colonial imagination, Nazi propaganda, and the post-war ideologies. We will consider German encounters—real and imagined—with Indigenous cultures not just in the present-day United States but also in Australia, Greenland, Brazil, Finland, and Cuba. We will further read Indigenous critiques and assessments of this so-called Indianthusism to help question what we as scholars should do with the trove of texts this legacy has left behind.
Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor.
German 8300 • German Nature Writing / Deutschsprachiges Nature Writing - Seminar in Intellectual History and Cultural Studies
Mergenthaler | 3 credit units | Mondays 8:15-11:00am | Autumn Semester 2022
Nature Writing is commonly seen as a way of writing that has emerged in Anglo-American literature, with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) being the first and most famous example. A text may be categorized as Nature Writing when it combines empirical or scientific observations of nature, often identified with wilderness, with personal and philosophical reflections on nature, composed in an elaborate and self-conscious literary style that aims for authenticity. Nature Writing is deemed non-fictional, but distinguished from objective scientific writing (in German, the Sachbuch) through its reflective and personal elements, which bear similarities with essayistic writing. It is usually motivated by a critique of the harm that humans have been doing to the environment, in particular in the wake of industrialization, and seeks to outline a way of living, working, feeling, and thinking that understands, respects, protects nature. In fact, the writing itself is often seen as part of that practice, and not just as a theoretical treatise.
German literature has few, if any, examples of this type of writing, for various possible reasons, including the lack of vast and grandiose landscapes that exist in North America or the ironic, self-reflective Romantic tradition (Riechelmann 2021). However, there has been new research in recent years that explores what types of writing about nature do, in fact, exist in other, international traditions, including the German tradition (Dürbeck/Kanz 2021), and these writings as well as the new research about them will lie at the center of our seminar. We will read, speak and write about selected German nature writing, in the contexts of the critique of American Nature Writing, which, today, is often critiqued for being elitist, bourgeois, anthropocentric and ethnocentric, colonialist, male-centered, and of the development of new, post-colonial, and ecocritical or New Nature Writing (NNW). NNW understands nature not as untouched wilderness, but as environment in the Anthropocene, the current era where humans have had a geological global impact on nature. This environment is not limited to seemingly untouched nature, but includes cultivated land, industrial regions, or cityscapes. NNW is a type of “arts activism” (Dürbeck/Kanz 2021, 14) that seeks to holistically transform the way humans interact with nature.
The course will focus on prose genres, including travel account, philosophical essay, popular natural science or natural history, autobiography, and memoir by both known and lesser known authors. The travel account will be the most prominent genre, and, in fact, it has been regarded as particularly important for the German tradition of nature writing. Authors whose works will be discussed may include: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, Ida von Hahn Hahn, Theodor Fontane, Wilhelm Lehmann, WG Sebald, Wilhelm Bode, Ulrike Drasener, Marion Poschmann, Peter Wohlleben, and Andreas Maier and Christine Büchner. Suggestions for other authors and texts are welcome. The final selection of readings will include student input.
Students will write a final paper or a series of short essays and give one oral presentation. The class will undertake an excursion and conduct experiments with nature writing, in German or English.
For more information or accessibility accommodations please contact the instructor at mergenthaler.4@osu.edu.
Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor.
German 8500 • Doctoral Colloquium
Mergenthaler | 1 credit unit | Autumn Semester 2022
Regular student-driven discussions of ongoing dissertations, current topics in the professional field, and new research approaches to Germanic Studies.
Prereq: Successful completion of Ph.D. candidacy exams or permission from Director of Graduate Studies and instructor. Repeatable to a maximum of 9 cr hrs. This course is graded S/U. Admis Cond course.