Courses Offered in German and Slavic Studies
Limits of Representation: Literature and Arts of the Holocaust (Kligerman)
Through an analysis of Holocaust historiography, literature and visual media this course will investigate the connections between history, trauma, witnessing and representation. The course is designed to give students an understanding of the historical, political and aesthetic import surrounding the attempted destruction of the European Jewish community by Nazi Germany. Finally the Holocaust and the changing effects within contemporary European culture (the way the ghosts of National Socialism still haunt the space of European memory) will be the focus of the last section of the seminar.
New German Cinema (Alter)
This course will trace the history of German Jewish relations as they are represented in film. The course begins with an examination of early cinema in which the figure of the Jew is either hinted at obliquely such as in The Student of Prague and Nosferatuor is directly referenced, as in The Golem. We will also look at the early work of director Ernst Lubitsch while he was still filming in Germany in contrast to his anti-German Hollywood feature To Be or Not To Be. The second section of the course will deal with how German filmmakers in the Third Reich represented the Jew in “documentary” propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew and The Fuhrer Gives a People a City in comparison to the feature films such as Heimkehr and Jud Süss. The third section will consider post-war German films from the fifties to the eighties and their attempt to discuss and represent the Holocaust. Finally, we will examine the resurgence in film about German/Jewish relations and World War to in post-unification cinema of the past fifteen years. Films to be included in this latter category may include Aimee and Jaguar, and Comedian Harmonists.