The Course

GRMN 22811 Imagining Berlin

Professor Beth A. Muellner
Tuesdays, 5-7:30 pm
Remote via Teams

Course Description

The summer class plans to build on the new popularity of the interwar Weimar era of Berlin, Germany via two texts: the Netflix Series “Babylon Berlin” and the long-anticipated graphic novel trilogy Berlin (2000-2018) by the American artist Jason Lutes. We consider them specifically in comparison to historical source material and scholarship on Weimar Germany. We will take a close look at the Babylon series via its fictionalized characters, such as the New Woman/stenographer (Charlotte Ritter) and the WWI veteran/detective/morphine addict (Gereon Rath and compare them with Lutes’ art student Marthe Müller and journalist Kurt Severing. We will also read and discuss a number of primary (literature, film, and photography) and secondary texts (cultural/historical theories, histories of the Weimar era, contemporary journalistic essays) that cover themes of class discrepancy, modernity, industrialization, changing gender roles, rise of the proletariat, Jewishness and antisemitism, history of homosexuality, social and political unrest.

In order to make sense of the multitude of visual and textual stories about the Weimar period that we will encounter in these six short weeks, and to keep things playful during the summer session, each student will be assigned a fictional character to “embody” (an “avatar”). Your objective will be to use your reading and research skills to investigate and find out what life would “probably have been like” for the character you’ve been assigned and to respond in a weekly reflection blog posts (as a diary entry or a letter). How would your character have “most likely” responded to the historical realities taking place in the metropolis of Berlin during this period of tumultuous historical change? In order to do this, you will have to put together a variety of information and facts, analyze and interpret them, and then re-create a “plausible story” of one person’s life.

The course in English and counts towards an AH/PPRE/GE credit and as an elective towards the German major; it is also cross-listed with HIST or GMDS.

Student Learning Goals:

AH/German Studies Learning Objectives

  • Describe the Weimar era in its socio-historical, political, and economic complexity.
  • Identify, differentiate, and evaluate secondary texts (historical, sociological, literary, filmic, journalistic) and primary texts and genres (graphic novel, film, TV-series, photography).
  • Recognize and evaluate key players, their motivations, and events as represented in history and fictional texts.

GE Learning Objectives     

  • Identify, define, and analyze primary and secondary texts.
  • Define and interpret studies from multiple perspectives (sociological, historical, cultural).
  • Distinguish between key political ideologies of the Weimar era.
  • Compare and classify German and U.S. models of political governance of interwar years.
  • Recognize and describe how intersectional identities necessarily complicate history/culture.

PPRE Learning Objectives

  • Identify representations of complex, intersectional identities in various texts.
  • Describe the integral roles that race, ethnicity, class, and gender play in constructing the past, esp. in relation to transnational socio-political shifts (e.g. industrialization, urbanity, mechanization, sexual freedom, etc.)
  • Analyze decolonization efforts in German Studies as they play out in learning about the Weimar era.