Announcement

This seminar will be concerned with the almost 330 year-long history of Germans in North America. We will be looking at the migration from Germany to the New World and at the establishment of German settlements there, observing what happened to the linguistic and cultural practices that Germans had brought with them. In this context, historical documents, passages from Johannes Gillhoff's Jürnjakob Swehn, der Amerikafahrer as well as the language of the Amish will be examined. But we will also consider what Americans thought and wrote about Germany over the past few centuries. Apart from American jokes and cartoons about Germans we will discuss excerpts from James Fenimore Cooper's The Heidenmauer, Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad, Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, Ernest Hemingway's "Black Ass at the Cross Roads," Walter Abish's How German Is It, and Don DeLillo's White Noise. In terms of film, we will consider the construction of Germany and Germans in Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three as well as Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schindler's List and Munich. Many of our background readings will be taken from Josef Raab and Jan Wirrer, eds. Die deutsche Präsenz in den USA/The German Presence in the U.S.A. (2008).

Students should purchase the following two books:

Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (Penguin Classics). ISBN-10: 0140436081, ISBN-13: 978-0140436082.

Don DeLillo, White Noise (Penguin). ISBN-10: 0140077022, ISBN-13: 978-0140077025.

A reader containing additional course texts will be available from the copy shop on Reckhammerweg 4 after the first class meeting.

First seminar session: October 22, 2010.