GERST 4002 - Changing Worlds: Migration, Minorities, and German Literature

(ALC-AS, LA-AS, SCD-AS) Satisfies Option 1.

Spring. 3 credits. Student option grading.

Prerequisite: any German course at the 3210-3499-level or equivalent. Taught in German.

L. Adelson.

What makes a German world? The defeat of the Third Reich in 1945 and the collapse of communist Europe in 1989 were geopolitical events that still reverberate in German culture, as authors consider the ever-changing imaginative contours of German worlds by literary means. Transnational migration and minority struggles represent other pivotal markers of global change in the 20th and 21st centuries. This course examines how imaginative contours of German worlds have been reshaped in literary fiction since 1945 through the lens of migration and minorities. Special attention will be paid to Jews, Turks, and Black Germans; some attention will also be paid to literary phenomena involving other minorities and migration experience, including that of Eastern Europeans who have immigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany.