German MSt/MPhil Programmes

Special Subjects are grouped into programmes as described below. You can either choose subjects from these programmes or devise subjects of your own. The subjects correspond to areas of particular teaching and research strength in Oxford, but the list is by no means exhaustive and is subject to amendment.

These are the Special Subject options available in 2024-25. These are indicative of the course offerings for the sub-faculty, so applicants should note that not all options will run in all years, and some course content might change.

Medieval German

Women’s Writing in Medieval Germany (Hilary Term)

Convenor: Professor Almut Suerbaum

Within a German-speaking context, women's writing happens in a variety of forms and formats: visions and mystical revelations, life writing, religious song and poetry. One of the key works is the C13 'Fließendes Licht der Gottheit' by Mechthild of Magdeburg, but the Special Subject also offers scope to explore life writing (e.g. in the 'Schwesternbücher'), narrative forms, or religious song. The texts represent forms of 'including the excluded', and the course encourages an investigation of gender-specific aspects of female authorship, as well as issues such as the public and private dimensions of literature, the role of the vernacular, the reception of pre-modern writing on modern literature. The focus will be on texts in German, but it is also possible to study this option on the basis of a combination of Latin and German material.

Modern

Contemporary Women’s Writing in German (Michaelmas Term)

Convenor: Dr Georgina Paul

This course offers the opportunity to explore the range and varieties of literature written in German by women after 1945. It was a period of extraordinary change in the status of women writers. In the immediate postwar years, women were still often confined to the domestic sphere and drew their inspiration for writing from this narrowed environment (e.g. Marlen Haushofer, Wir töten Stella, Die Wand, Die Mansarde). In the 1970s, the New Women’s Movement turned to literary expression as a mode of rebellion against societal gender norms (e.g. Verena Stefan, Häutungen; Elfriede Jelinek, Die Liebhaberinnen; Christa Wolf, Kein Ort.Nirgends); by the 2000s a new generation of ‘popfeminists’ was rebelling in turn against the expectations created by their Second Wave predecessors (Sonja Eismann, ed, Hot Topic. Popfeminismus heute; Charlotte Roche, Feuchtgebiete; Helene Hegemann, Axolotl Roadkill). From the 1980s onward, writing by women authors of migrant background began to make its impact on the sphere of literary publishing and has become one of the most significant aspects of contemporary writing at a time in which immigration and population movement are shaping societies. We will look at a trajectory of change via a selection of novels (Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn; Olga Grjasnowa, Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt; Sharon Dodua Otoo, Adas Raum). The special subject ends with a topic on ‘identity’, thinking about gender, ethnicity, and intersectionalism (Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Ausser sich; Antje Ravic Strubel, Blaue Frau; Mithu Sanyal, Identitti).Taught in fortnightly seminars, the special subject will take you through half a century of shifts in women’s roles and women’s writing, examining sexuality, intersectionality, myth, tradition, different articulations of feminism, and the politics of writing, as well as genre, aesthetic strategy and language within the context of work by important writers of the postwar period.

Jews and Judaism in German Literature from 1740 to the Present (Michaelmas Term)

Convenor: Professor David Groiser

This course examines the discourses around Jews and Judaism in Germany and Austria against the background of the history of Jewish emancipation, the resurgence of antisemitism, the Holocaust, and recent attempts to confront and comprehend this history. Within this framework, students may wish to give particular attention to one or more of the following: the participation of Jewish writers in the culture of the Enlightenment, as well as the forging of a specific Jewish form of religious Enlightenment in response to the challenges of modernity; the development of a complicated philosemitism within the discourses of emancipation and toleration, and of ant-Jewish and antisemitic images from the Romantics onwards, present within a wide range of texts whose overt ideology was often far more liberal; the complex Jewish identities of such writers as Mendelssohn, Maimon, Heine, Freud, Kafka, Schnitzler, Stefan and Arnold Zweig, Buber, Rosenzweig, Lasker-Schüler, Döblin, Roth or Kraus; the relationship between Jews in eastern and western Europe; attitudes to Hasidism and Kabbalah, neo-orthodoxy and reform; German Jews and the First World War; the ‘renaissance’ of Jewish culture in the Weimar Republic; languages of Judaism, particularly the relationship between German and Yiddish; the emergence of Zionism and Jewish nationalism; and representations of and responses to the Holocaust; conceptions of exile; and the question of whether a Jewish culture exists in present-day Germany and Austria.

Writing Rivers: National Identities, Transnational Contexts, and the Environment (Michaelmas Term)

Convenor: Dr Joanna Neilly

This subject analyses multiple literary and cultural significances of rivers. It takes a cross-temporal approach, comparing Romantic-era aesthetics with contemporary responses and theories from the Enviromnental Humanities.

The main focus is German-language representations of rivers in literature, although the double nature of rivers ˗ as territorial borders and natural phenomena that cross borders ˗ means that comparative approaches are encouraged. In the Romantic era, rivers took on special significance: Friedrich Schlegel’s Rheinfahrt and the invention of the Lorelei legend might be linked back to Georg Forster’s Ansichten vom Niederrhein but also forwards, to Heine’s Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen. If Heine and Wilhelm Müller are more ambivalent about the mythology of rivers, it holds strong in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. This period also presents an opportunity to interrogate scientific travel writing as a cultural product of empire – Alexander von Humboldt’s writings about the Orinoco are important here.

Students are encouraged, if interested, to bring in comparative readings from the 20th-century or contemporary literary landscape. A striking example is Bachmann’s Malina, in which the Danube is a landscape of violence in the context of the Holocaust. Jelinek likewise questions the aestheticization of rivers in her experimental Winterreise, as part of her longstanding engagement with Austrian Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Yet the Romantic connection between rivers and wanderers survives in a new form, for example in Esther Kinsky’s Am Fluss, which investigates urban riverscapes and subjectivity, or in Christian Petzold’s film Undine with its urban reworking of the Romantic myth.

In the seminars you can expect to discuss poems by Friedrich Hölderlin and Wilhelm Müller, Romantic fairy tales with riverine settings such as Hoffmann’s ‘Der goldene Topf’ and Goethe’s ‘Märchen’, and imperial-era travel writing, as well as recent developments in environmental approaches. You are encouraged to develop your own ideas and independent reading for the portfolio submission.

Literature and Medicine 1770-1930 (Michaelmas Term)

Convenor: Professor Barry Murnane

The relationship between literature and medicine is an important source of aesthetic developments in the modern era, helping to shape literary movements as diverse as Empfindsamkeit and Poetic Realism, Romanticism and Naturalism and helping to link writers like Goethe, Novalis, Büchner, Fontane, and Mann. There is no formal prescription and the course will allow you to examine a range of genres and writers including poetry and prose, scientific texts, and encyclopaedic literature, focusing on particular authors, periods, or on historical developments across the period as a whole. Comparative approaches are encouraged, with the opportunity to read developments in German culture alongside other European literatures. There is also opportunity to take a more theoretical focus, looking for example at issues such as affect, corporeality, and aesthetics. Some possible topics for discussion are: how literature deals mimetically with medical matters (death, concepts of illness and wellness, therapy); theories of imagination and feeling around 1800; the co-evolution of psychology in literature and clinical discourse; narrating illness; literature as medicine; depictions of medical practitioners; literature and drugs.

Cinema in a Cultural Context: German Film 1930 to 2020 (Michaelmas Term)

Convenor: Professor Ben Morgan

The course has two possible points of focus. The first is the study of German cinema between the coming of sound and the arrival of New German Cinema: 1930-1970 (the first German talkie was made in 1929; by 1970, Fassbinder had already made 4 feature films). The second is the cinema of the Berlin Republic, with a particular focus on the films of the Berlin School.

Topics for the period 1930-1970 will include propaganda and entertainment films in the Third Reich, the realism of the Rubble Films of the late 1940s, the different strategies for remembering and coming to terms with the past in the popular films of the 1950s and 1960s. German films of the period will be put in dialogue with relevant Hollywood productions of the period. The period includes the political ruptures of 1933, 1945, 1968, and the aesthetic ‘new beginning’ of the Oberhausen manifesto in 1962. But the focus of the course will be the continuities that can be observed in film style, narrative techniques and in the way film is used as a medium for reflecting on everyday problems during the period.

The Berlin School is the name given to a group of film makers who mostly studied at the Deutsche Film- und Ferhsehakademie Berlin with the filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944-2014) and who came to prominence at the start of the new millennium. Key figures include Thomas, Arslan, Angela Schanelec , Christian Petzold, Christoph Hochhäusler, and Maren Ade. Arslan first gained recognition with his migrant trilogy Geschwister-Kardesler (1997), Dealer (1999), and Der schöne Tag (2001). But like many other Berlin School filmmakers he is also interested in productive interrogations of genre film, such as the gangster film Im Schatten (2010) and the film Gold (2013), starring Nina Hoss, which re-imagines the Western. Nina Hoss is a recurring figure in the films in which Petzold explores the social landscape of a globalised world, and re-visits key moments from the recent past in search of counterfactual alternatives. Hoss features in Petzold’s Jerichow (2008), a re-making of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) which adapts the conventions of film noir for a 21st-century globalised capitalism. Other films to be studied would include Schanelec’s Marseille (2004) and Orly (2010); the tv-trilogy Dreileben (2011) which Hochhäusler made with Petzold and Dominik Graf (b. 1952) as part of an exchange between the three filmmakers about the uses of genre cinema; Maren Ade’s Alle Anderen (2009) and Toni Erdmann (2016); Petzold’s films for cinema, such as Die Innere Sicherheit (2000), Barbara (2012), Phoenix (2014), Transit (2018), Undine (2020), but also his work for tv, such as Toter Mann (2001), and the episodes he directed for the police procedural Polizeiruf 110. Films are available on dvd and many can also be viewed on streaming services. The films are largely available with English subtitles, so this Special Subject is also suitable for students interested in cultural studies or film studies. Over the 4 sessions, the aim would be to cover 4 or 5 films each time, focusing on a range of filmmakers and issues.

You can start familiarizing yourself with the vocabulary of film studies by reading David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction, currently in its 12th edition (you can read any edition). Otherwise, the best thing to do is to start watching films. For the 1930-1970 strand: You can work by director (e.g. Käutner, Harlan, Sierck), but it is often more productive to watch films with the same star (e.g. Heinz Rühman, Hans Albers, Ilse Werner, Zarah Leander), or from the same year, to get a clearer sense of continuities in style and approach. Similarly, for the Berlin School: watch as many of the films as you can but watch also films with the stars the directors regularly work with (e.g. Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Matthias Brandt, Paula Beer), or films made in same year as Berlin School productions.

Nietzsche and His Impact (Hilary Term)

Convenor: Professor David Groiser

Though largely ignored during his lifetime, Nietzsche was soon recognised as the philosopher of modernity. More radically, honestly and intelligently than anyone else, he explored the consequences that must follow if traditional religious belief and moral constraints are jettisoned to make way for a view of the universe based on scientific knowledge and the individual will. While his ideas about how to fill the resulting moral vacuum have been controversial, he is widely recognised as one of the most interesting – and entertaining – philosophers and ‘cultural critics’. He is also among the most brilliant of German stylists.

When Nietzsche began to be widely read in the 1890s, his ideas were found stimulating and liberating in the most varied quarters. There were Nietzscheans on the radical right and the revolutionary left, in the women’s movement and among Zionists. He was read avidly, but also critically, by writers as varied as Thomas Mann, Kafka, Rilke, Musil, Gottfried Benn, Alfred Döblin, Hermann Broch and Hermann Hesse, within cinema, as well as by theorists in many fields, from philosophy to political and critical theory, sociology, legal theory, psychoanalysis, literary and cultural theory, classical studies, anthropology, semiotics and even theology. Outside Germany, he was engaged with seriously by Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce, Stevens, Gide, Malraux, Camus, Belyi, Solvyov, D’Annunzio, and many others.

Students will be expected to know the following books by Nietzsche in particular detail: Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872), Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886), and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), and to have read more widely in Nietzsche’s works. They will also study his reception, looking closely at a text or texts by one or more subsequent writers in relation to Nietzsche.

Literature and Culture of the Berlin Republic (Hilary Term)

Convenor: Dr Alex Lloyd

Candidates will be expected to acquire a general knowledge of writing and culture in German since 1990 and to study a selection of texts and films from the same period. Candidates may expect to address a range of issues, including topics such as: adjustments in the German book market post- 1990; approaches to the legacies of the Nazi past; the legacy of the GDR; writing in a multicultural society; literature and globalisation; changing notions of authorship, especially in the light of the digital media; the development of the various genres; gender and writing. There is also the opportunity to focus on selected authors and issues of students’ own choosing.

Hölderlin in the World (Hilary Term)

Convenor: Professor Charlie Louth

Hölderlin’s work is both rooted in his native Swabia and unusually receptive to the way the local is bound up in the distant, the removed and the foreign. This goes beyond his deep interest in Ancient Greece and his attempts to see German and Germany in Greek terms. The world of his poems is permeable and full of references to places remote in time and space, including London, Tahiti and the Americas. Hölderlin was fascinated by journeys and the way they connect distant points and allow one to think of them in relation to one another. As well as the many actual journeys made and reflected on in his poems, there are the courses of rivers and mountain ranges, crossing and making borders and readable as signs of how history might develop. He pays particular attention to bird- flight. All these things reveal the world to be deeply interconnected, so that every landscape, real or cultural, is a hybrid landscape, both of its place and elsewhere.

Hölderlin is primarily a poet, and his poetry will form the main focus, but – partly via his friendships with Schelling and Hegel – he was closely involved in the development of post-Kantian philosophy, and his fragmentary philosophical and theoretical writings have also been returned to by many later philosophers. His poetry has drawn a large number of key 20th and 21st century thinkers, from Heidegger onwards, as well as poets from around the world. So this special subject offers an opportunity to read and write about Hölderlin’s work from a variety of perspectives, including comparative ones, noting the multiple relations that traverse it, run out into contemporary preoccupations and continue to make their way in the world today.

Initial reading list:
Theodor Adorno, ‘Parataxis: Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins’, in Noten zur Literatur III (Frankfurt, 1965) and elsewhere
David Constantine, Hölderlin (Oxford, 1988)
Winfried Menninghaus, Hälfte des Lebens: Versuch über Hölderlins Poetik (Frankfurt, 2005) Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Nature, ed. by Rochelle Tobias (Edinburgh, 2020)