Winter Quarter 2025

Winter Quarter 2025

• For day, time, room, and TA information, see our PDF SCHEDULE or the class search tool https://registrar-apps.ucdavis.edu/courses/search/index.cfm.
• For all courses not described here, please refer to the General Catalog course descriptions: https://catalog.ucdavis.edu/courses-subject-code/ger

Jump to --> Language Courses | Lower-div | Upper-div | Graduate Courses

Undergraduate Courses

Language

GER 002 Elementary German

GER 21 Intermediate German

GER 11 Travel & Modern World
Chunjie Zhang

GER 045 Vampires & Other Horrors
Jaimey Fisher

Upper Division

GER 101B Survey of German Literature, 1800-Present
Chunjie Zhang

GER 105 Modern German Language
Carlee Arnett

Do you wonder why language is the way it is?  Did you sit in your language classes and ask why, only to be told there is no ‘why’ in grammar, it just is that way?  Do you wonder why people have such vehement attitudes about their language use?  This course will answer those questions for you within the context of the German language.  We will also discuss the sounds of German and, most importantly, the people who make those sounds.

 Required texts:  Readings will be provided by instructor

GER 116 Readings in Jewish Writing & Thought in German Culture
Sven-Erik Rose

The most widespread association people have with German-Jewish culture is undoubtedly the Holocaust, the cataclysm that brought this culture to an end. But if we remember only the Holocaust, we forget what this extraordinarily creative tradition contributed to Jewish, German, and world culture. For 150 years—between the late 1700s and the rise of the National Socialists to power in 1933—Jews in Germany and German-speaking lands produced a body of works and ideas that have left an indelible mark on our modernity. In this course, we will explore works by important German-Jewish authors, artists and intellectuals including Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, Franz Kafka, Moses Mendelssohn, Charlotte Salomon, Else Lasker-Schüler, Arthur Schnitzler, and Stefan Zweig. The course will conclude with an exploration of recent writings by Jewish authors in contemporary Germany.

Course readings will include prose literature, poetry, philosophy, political theory, theology, psychoanalysis, and painting. All readings and discussion in English. No prerequisites.

GER 134 Collective Memory and Coming to Terms with the Past in Postwar Germany(s)
Jaimey Fisher

History and memory, especially of World War II and the Holocaust, have played central roles in the political, cultural, and civic life of the postwar Germany(s) -- perhaps more than in any other contemporary country. The course contends that many of the most important debates and controversies in the postwar Germany(s) have intersected, in fundamental ways, Germany’s complicated past and how it has operated as collective memory in the society and culture in general. To investigate how this collective memory operates in the postwar Germany(s), the course examines the theories of memory in general and collective memory specifically as well as “coming to terms with the past,” the traditional phrase for Germany’s confrontation with its Nazi legacy and the Holocaust.

The class will examine key aspects and moments of this collective memory and coming to terms with the past in the postwar period, including the early postwar period’s understanding of German guilt for the war and its atrocities; the 1950s surprising nostalgia for the war-time past; the 1960s and 1970s critical reexamination of these pasts; the 1980s  Bitburg as well as “Historians’” debates; the lengthy 1980s and 1990s controversies about Holocaust memorialization and war commemoration; and contemporary  (2010s, 2020s) discussions about refugees and immigration and how these have intersected the genocide against Jewish people perpetrated in Germany’s name. In examining collective memory and coming to terms with the past, the course examines not only theoretical writings, but also the role of diverse media like photography, memoir, television, and film as well as the so-called new media in memory and memorializing.

Graduate Courses

GER 297 Special Topics in German Literature - German Stories and Literary Theory
Elisabeth Krimmer

This course combines discussions of famous German stories with an introduction to important literary theories of our time. Each class focuses on one theoretical approach, which will serve as a practical tool to enhance our understanding of these canonical stories. 

Texts to be discussed include Heinrich von Kleist, “Betrothal in Santo Domingo”; E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman”; Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, “Undine”; Adelbert von Chamisso, “The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl”; Georg Büchner, “Lenz”; Theodor Storm, “The Rider on the White Horse”; Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, “Jew Beech”; Franz Kafka, “Metamorphosis”; Thomas Mann, “Death in Venice”; Ingeborg Bachmann, “Undine Goes.” 

The literary theories include psychoanalytic criticism, postcolonialism, New Historicism, feminist criticism, ecocriticism, reader-response theory, Queer theory, and Marxist criticism. 

Knowledge of German is welcome but not required.

GER 297, section 2 - Special Topics in German

Chunjie Zhang