Description
In this course, students will first get a brief historical overview of postwar German history by watching a YouTube video and reading an essay about Germany's defeat in 1945. Then, we will study several short stories about the war by Heinrich Böll, perhaps the most famous writer in postwar Germany; a play by Wolfgang Borchert about a German soldier coming home from the war and having no home anymore, in conjunction with the 1946 movie Murderers Among Us; Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play, The Visit, together with Fassbinder's movie, The Marriage of Maria Braun; Max Frisch’s parable about anti-Semitism; Jurek Becker’s novel, Jacob the Liar, about Jewish life and death in a ghetto; two narratives from Sebald’s The Emigrants, both of which are dealing with the aftereffects of traumatic experiences during World War II; Eugen Ruge’s In Times of Fading Light, a family novel covering East German history, in conjunction with movies about life in East Germany under constant surveillance by the secret