This essay focuses on advanced‐level German instruction and advocates an open, flexible approach to integrating the recommendations of the much‐discussed 2007 MLA report on “Foreign Languages and Higher Education.” Specifically, language, literature, film, and cultural studies are combined to allow for the development of transcultural competence at the advanced level, while also fostering advanced capacities in German. Informing the discussion is an examination of changing demands on German Studies curricula and their inclusion or exclusion of canonical material. Bringing together a wide range of cultural products facilitates students' consideration of cultural/historical contexts, relationships and similarities and differences among characters, and connections to the students' own experiences. Student goal‐setting, assessment, and evaluation help to direct the trajectory of the advanced course, avoiding the common problem of underdefined or undertheorized pedagogies past the intermediate level.
The German Democratic Republic (GDR; East Germany) had an ambivalent relationship with homosexuality. Under the principles of socialism, everyone was welcome to contribute to the greater good. The situation for queer people, here lesbians and gay men, was different: one of illegality and invisibility. A difficulty in analyzing these experiences is the theory and methodology necessary to find them and draw them together in a historical narrative. This essay offers a mode of analysis in which theories of affect illustrate long-term trends in East German conceptualizations of same-sex sexuality. By discussing a 1950 court ruling and a 1989 film, the essay demonstrates the persistence of homophobic prejudice and fear of homosexual seduction of young people and the links to historical and legal developments.
On November 2, 1988, the short documentary film Die andere Liebe (The Other Love, dir. Helmut Kißling and Axel Otten) had its premiere. 1 This historical event, meant as a cinematic introduction to a subsection of GDR society, marked the slow and monumental progress that had been made in the realm of gay rights in East Germany-though not necessarily on purposewhile it also illustrated the tragic backwardness of this country that was and is, in so many ways, stuck in time. Different from other nations that transitioned from communism to postcommunism, the GDR essentially dissolved into the FRG. Unlike the more popular feature film that appeared the following year (Heiner Carow's Coming Out), Die andere Liebe (DaL) is often either left out of historical narratives or only briefly mentioned. In what follows, I examine the circumstances of the film's production and appearance in East Germany while considering the role it plays in our understanding of the development of German lesbian and gay history. More specifically, this essay will provide a reading of the film that identifies its affective engagement with various parties: the anonymous individuals it profiles, the GDR audiences, and the official state-run apparatus of film production, among others. DaL mobilizes a number of forms of affect in its sequences, engaging with its intended audience of primarily heterosexual viewers. In using "affect" instead of "emotions" here, I refer
This essay argues that the East German film Coming Out (1989) achieves a dual objective: to reflect a version of living conditions for gay citizens of the GDR at the time and to project the possibility of an enlightened future in which they, and other outsiders, do not face discrimination because of their difference. Coming Out, directed by Heiner Carow, was the first feature film about homosexuality in the GDR. It premiered the day the Berlin Wall fell and came after a long and complicated history of gay rights and activism in East Germany. Despite decriminalisation in 1968, the position of lesbians and gay men in the GDR was an ambivalent and contradictory one. Through narrative and cinematographic means, the film refers to gay history and to the dissonance between socialist society and individualism, while also presenting an affirmative message for positive change and development.
Christa Winsloe’s Mädchen in Uniform texts offer a means to examine the role of education in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German society while also exemplifying the genre of boarding school literature. This article provides an overview of educational debates in Prussia and the German Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially as these debates relate to girls’ and young women’s schooling and their intersectional concerns with social class. The schools in question lie in a framework of Foucauldian disciplinary institutions, which one can see in excerpts from Winsloe’s novel Das Mädchen Manuela.
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