How did bawdy tales of peasants using magic to climb the social ladder get transformed into moral lessons for children? The answer lies in Romanticism and its appropriation of the imagination as a force for social transformation. As Romantics edited older tales for juvenile consumption they wrote new ones for adults. This new fiction created the matrix for modern pop genres like fantasy, science-fiction, murder mysteries, and gothic horror. To understand this paradigm shift in modern culture, we will read, discuss, and write about a variety of texts the Romantics collected, composed, or inspired, including poetry and film, in addition to classic fairy tales and academic scholarship on the topic.

Full details for GERST 1109 - FWS: From Fairy Tales to the Uncanny: Exploring the Romantic Consciousness

Berlin is a city that reinvents itself by rewriting itself. In this writing seminar, we'll study a variety of literary, visual, and sonic texts to create a mythical map of the city from its emergence as modern metropolis in the 1920s, reduction to rubble in World War II, refuge for the disaffected in the 1980s, and rebirth in the 21st century. As we make our way through the linguistic, visual, and aural landscape of its ever-changing topography, we'll create our own stories of a mythical Berlin in dialogue with texts written by the displaced persons who breached its walls and navigated its illicit economies. We'll also become more critical readers and viewers, as well as better writers.

Full details for GERST 1121 - FWS: Writing Berlin

How can we reorganize society based on principles of shared resources, direct democracy, gender equality, and mutual aid? For centuries, radical thinkers have responded with the same answer: the commune. In this seminar, we will consider socialist, anarchist, and feminist proposals for how to live and work outside of the confines of the single-family home. The readings will cover a wide range of genres and historical periods: from first-hand accounts of the Paris Commune of 1871 to fictional communes in utopian literature and reports on intentional communities in the Ithaca area. In this seminar, students will gain experience writing in various genres. They will refine their writing skills through regular revisions and targeted exercises to develop their voice, use of sources, and close readings.

Full details for GERST 1131 - FWS: The Commune

A dragon-slayer wins a kingdom—then loses everything to betrayal. A young fool wanders into King Arthur’s court and embarks on a quest for the Holy Grail. The Nibelungenlied and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, two masterpieces of medieval German literature, shaped the Western imagination long before Tolkien or Wagner. In this seminar, we will ask what these violent, strange, and moving texts reveal about nobility, loyalty, men, women, and moral growth. Close reading will be our method: slowing down to notice how a text thinks through imagery, structure, and silence. Essay assignments progress from descriptive observation to interpretive argument, with revision and peer review central to the process. No prior knowledge of the Middle Ages is required—only a willingness to read carefully.

Full details for GERST 1132 - FWS: Epic, Romance, and Fate: Medieval Germanic Literature

This course is designed for first year students interested in how ideas – across time and with changing valences – shape and help us navigate our world. At stake are conversations and contestations across centuries that focus on Big Ideas such as “Origins” (Genesis, Darwin, the Big Bang); “Truth” (Plato, Kant, Nietzsche); “Storytelling” (Jesus, Kafka, Octavia Butler); “Liberation” (Exodus and Leviticus, Frederick Douglass, Sigmund Freud, Angela Davis); and “Revolution” (the biblical notion of jubilee, Marx, DuBois). The material will not be read chronologically but by shared themes, problems, and conflicts. A central concern is tracing the paradigm shifts and different models of thought that occur between antiquity, the nineteenth century, and today.

Full details for GERST 1191 - As, Ideas: Big Ideas

Students develop basic abilities in listening, reading, writing, and speaking German in meaningful contexts through interaction in small group activities. Course materials including videos, short articles, and songs provide students with varied perspectives on German language, culture, and society. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 1210 - Exploring German Contexts I

Students build on their basic knowledge of German by engaging in intense and more sustained interaction in the language. Students learn more advanced language structures allowing them to express more complex ideas in German. Discussions, videos, and group activities address topics of relevance to the contemporary German-speaking world. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 1220 - Exploring German Contexts II

Students continue to develop their language skills by discussing a variety of cultural topics and themes in the German-speaking world. The focus of the course is on expanding vocabulary, reviewing major grammar topics, developing effective reading strategies, improving listening comprehension, and working on writing skills. Small group work increases each student’s opportunity to speak in German and allows for more individualized feedback and support. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 1230 - Expanding the German Dossier

Students examine important aspects of present-day German culture while expanding and strengthening their reading, writing, and speaking skills in German. Materials for each topic are selected from a variety of sources (fiction, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet). Units address a variety of topics including studying at a German university, modern literature, Germany online, and Germany at the turn of the century. Oral and written work and individual and group presentations emphasize accurate and idiomatic expression in German. Successful completion of the course enables students to continue with more advanced courses in language, literature, and culture. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 2000 - Germany: Intercultural Context

This course aims at sharpening your awareness of personal and cultural subjectivity by examining texts in a variety of media against the backdrop of cultural, political, and historical contexts. We will focus on improving your oral and written expression of idiomatic German by giving attention to more sophisticated aspects of using enriched vocabulary in a variety of conversational contexts and written genres. Materials will include readings in contemporary prose, newscasts, research at the Johnson Art Museum, and interviews with native speakers on a topic of contemporary cultural relevance. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 2040 - Perspectives on German Culture

Learn German and understand German business culture at the same time. This is a German language course that examines the German economic structure and its major components: industry, trade unions, the banking system, and the government. Participants will learn about the business culture in Germany and how to be effective in a work environment, Germany's role within the European Union, the importance of trade and globalization, and current economic issues in Germany. The materials consist of authentic documents from the German business world, TV footage, and a Business German textbook. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 2060 - German in Business Culture

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, Thinking Media offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data. (MUSIC-HC)

Full details for GERST 2703 - Thinking Media

This course introduces the prehistory of “artificial intelligence” (AI), from ancient automata through medieval combinatorics to early modern calculating machines. Putting contemporary debates into historical perspective, readings and discussions will engage with literary, cultural, philosophical, artistic, and technical sources, as well as contemporary scholarship in critical AI studies. Discussions and writing assignments will explore the sociocultural imagination of techniques and technologies and the history of concepts related to creativity, intelligence, and artificiality. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 2727 - AI Before AI: From Automata to Thinking Machines

This 1-credit optional course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their cultural understanding by supplementing non-language courses throughout the University.

Full details for GERST 3013 - German Language Across the Curriculum (LAC)

This course is aimed to increase your linguistic competencies in German, your cultural awareness, as well as critical thinking skills. We will discuss different perspectives of the German Reunification and its implications then and today. The highlight of the course will be an intercultural encounter with students from the Bielefeld Universitat in Germany. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 3080 - Walking the Line: East and West Germany Then and Now

This seminar, taught in German, 1) continues the rigorous trajectory of language study by introducing students to longer literary texts and full-length movies; by introducing students to theoretical, critical, academic discourses in German; 2) introduces students to the rich archive of German-speaking theoretical, literary, and cinematic engagement with the question of work's place in the life of individuals and society: From Marx and Engels, via Weber's analysis of Protestant ethics as basis for the rise of capitalism, Kracauer's depiction of the new class of employees in the Weimar Republic, to the diverging valorizations of workers in the 2 Germanies; up to current discussions about the precarity of work, the post-pandemic "great refusal", and the renewed emphasis on gendered differences regarding waged work and care work. We will pay particular attention to questions like: How are work and workers represented? Who speaks for the workers? Can we imagine work differently?

Full details for GERST 3340 - Working Through Working

An introduction (without prerequisites) to fundamental problems of current political theory, filmmaking, and film analysis, along with their interrelationship. Particular emphasis on comparing and contrasting European and alternative cinema with Hollywood in terms of post-Marxist, psychoanalytic, postmodernist, and postcolonial types of interpretation. Filmmakers/theorists might include: David Cronenberg, Michael Curtiz, Kathryn Bigelow, Gilles Deleuze, Rainer Fassbinder, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Marleen Gorris, Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock, Allen & Albert Hughes, Stanley Kubrick, Fredric Jameson, Chris Marker, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo, Robert Ray, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, George Romero, Steven Shaviro, Kidlat Tahimik, Maurizio Viano, Slavoj Zizek. Although this is a lecture course, there will be ample time for class discussions. Weekly film screening, TBA. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 3550 - Political Theory and Cinema

The generative age of AI has arrived—and with it a profound question: what happens when machines begin to write the humanities? This seminar takes the most extreme case of modern violence, the Holocaust, to test the limits of memory, language, and empathy in the digital age. Each student works closely with one survivor testimony while engaging hands-on with digital tools, including text analysis, AI models, and media platforms. Through history, psychology, memory studies, and media theory, we will examine what AI can and cannot capture about human suffering, narrative, and truth. Drawing on history, psychology, memory studies, and media theory, the course confronts a core question of existence for the humanities: how to preserve the fractured, human voice that no machine can replicate. (HIST-HEU)

Full details for GERST 3709 - Testimony and Technology: The Holocaust in the Age of AI

The most intense public encounter between Existentialism and Marxism occurred in immediate post-WWII Europe, its structure remaining alive internationally. Existentialist questions have been traced from pre-Socratic thinkers through Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes onward; just as roots of modern materialism extend to Epicurus and Lucretius, or Leopardi. This course will focus on differing theories and concomitant practices concerned with “alienation,” “anxiety,” “crisis,” “death of God,” “nihilism,” “rebellion or revolution.” Crucial are possible relations between fiction and non-fiction; also among philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and political theory. Other authors may include: Althusser, de Beauvoir, Beckett, Büchner, Camus, Che, Dostoevsky, Fanon, Genet, Gide, Gramsci, O. Gross, Hamsun, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, C.L.R. James, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Lagerkvist, Lacan, Lenin, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Mishima, G. Novack, Nietzsche, Ortega, Pirandello, W. Reich, Sartre, Shestov, Tillich, Unamuno. There is also cinema. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 4210 - Existentialism

Violence is on the rise across the political spectrum. While the left has a long tradition of pacifism, the prevalence of political violence today suggests that we can no longer equate leftism and nonviolence. This course expands understandings of violence beyond the state or military force to consider left-wing theories of political violence from assassinations and sabotage to guerilla warfare and revolutionary upheaval. We will cover major transnational movements including anarchism, anti-fascism, anti-colonialism, feminism, and Marxism, as well as key concepts such as expropriation, counter-violence, propaganda of the deed, and revolutionary defeatism. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 4295 - Violence and the Left

This seminar examines “experimental media”, an umbrella term for experimental literature, poetry, film, video, photography, music, radio, theater, sound art, computer games, and other new media. With a focus on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century German-speaking world, we will discuss aesthetic experiments with form, structure, and materiality. With a view toward interdisciplinarity, our guiding questions will address the distinctions between art and non-art, amateurs and experts, and experimental and commercial media, as well as the possibilities of collaboration and the limits of the experimental method. While coursework will primarily involve reading, writing, and thinking about aesthetic texts and humanistic scholarship, there will be some hands-on work with media objects and experimental media archeology. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 4444 - Experimental Media

Undergraduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

Full details for GERST 4520 - Independent Study

The Reading Course is administered by the director of the honors thesis. It carries 4 hours credit, and may be counted towards the work required for the German Major. The reading concentrates on a pre-determined topic or area. Students meet with their honors advisor about every two weeks throughout the term. Substantial reading assignments are given, and occasional short essays are written.

Full details for GERST 4530 - Honors Research

The thesis is to be written on a subject related to the work done in GERST 4530. A suggested length for the thesis is 50-60 pages.

Full details for GERST 4540 - Honors Thesis

This seminar examines “experimental media”, an umbrella term for experimental literature, poetry, film, video, photography, music, radio, theater, sound art, computer games, and other new media. With a focus on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century German-speaking world, we will discuss aesthetic experiments with form, structure, and materiality. With a view toward interdisciplinarity, our guiding questions will address the distinctions between art and non-art, amateurs and experts, and experimental and commercial media, as well as the possibilities of collaboration and the limits of the experimental method. While coursework will primarily involve reading, writing, and thinking about aesthetic texts and humanistic scholarship, there will be some hands-on work with media objects and experimental media archeology. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 6444 - Experimental Media

This course will offer a survey of critical and interpretive approaches to literature. Based on works by Goethe, Kleist, Hoffmann, Tieck, Keller, Stifter, Rilke, Kafka, Celan, Beckett, Joyce, Woolf and others this course will discuss models of interpretation linked to various schools of thought like psychological, gender-specific, socio-economic, structuralist, philosophical or philological modes of analysis.

Full details for GERST 6522 - Methods of Interpretation: Critical Approaches to Literature

What does it mean to think through stories, especially when one’s métier is theory? This seminar considers modes of non-conceptual thought as an essential practice of twentieth-century theory. Here the story takes precedence as evidence and argument – a mode of thinking in its own right – by mobilizing images, rhetoric, plot, and other literary devices to present and examine an idea. The seminar begins with classical precursors such as Plato, biblical parables, and Montaigne and then focuses on twentieth-century thinkers who aim to reinvigorate thought via storytelling. Authors include Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Hannah Arendt, Hans Blumenberg, and others. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 6770 - Thinking Through Stories: Benjamin, Adorno, Freud, and Others

This seminar will be devoted to the careful reading of a single significant and challenging work of political theory, accompanied by consideration of the author's reception of the work of their predecessors; the contexts in which the work was written; its relation to other parts of the author's corpus; the way the work has been critically engaged by others; the state of the relevant scholarly literature; and, especially, the continuing impact of the work in twentieth-century and contemporary political theory. In Spring 2027 the course will be centered on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. (GOVT-PT)

Full details for GERST 6875 - Key Works in Political Theory

Graduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

Full details for GERST 7540 - Independent Study

The course consists of a bi-weekly workshop series focusing on a range of interdisciplinary topics and sponsored by the Institute for German Cultural Studies (IGCS). Speakers include prominent scholars in the field of German Studies (understood in a wide, interdisciplinary sense) and advanced graduate students, who discuss their work-in-progress based on pre-circulated papers. Besides attending the workshops, course participants meet with the instructor for two additional sessions devoted to pursuing the ties between the topics and disciplinary fields showcased by the speakers and the students' own work. The course is thus intended both as a survey of disciplinary approaches in German and Humanities Studies and as a framework that allows graduate students to hone professional skills (presenter and panel respondent, newsletter contributor, etc).

Full details for GERST 7541 - Colloquium