Courses

All of the courses listed on this page count towards Notre Dame’s Globally Engaged Citizens Program. For more information, visit the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures website. 

Our courses are designed to help students become fluent in the German language while simultaneously developing deep expertise in the culture and history of the German-speaking world. Faculty employ their areas of specialization and personal interests to create a course of study that ranges from medieval minnesang (a type of lyric and song-writing) to issues of multiculturalism and environmental change in contemporary Germany.

Each semester, the department also offers several courses in English that are open to students without any background in the department.

Please visit Class Search for our full range of courses, which include a large assortment of offerings in both German and English. 

Courses offered every semester

GE 10101 – Beginning German I

An introduction to spoken and written German, as well as to the culture of the German-speaking world. Aims at the acquisition of basic structures, vocabulary, and sound systems. For students with no or little previous study of the language. 4 credits; meets 3 days a week.

GE 10102 – Beginning German II

Continuation of the introductory course to spoken and written German. Open to students who have completed GE 10101 or have placed into the course via online placement exam. 4 credits; meets 3 days a week.

GE 20201 – Intermediate German I

A course that develops the communicative abilities acquired in Beginning German I and II and provides a more in-depth introduction to the culture of the German-speaking world. Open to students who have completed GE 10102 or have placed into the course via online placement exam. 3 credits.

GE 20202 – Intermediate German II

A thematic class in which students work toward greater fluency, accuracy, and complexity of expression, while simultaneously gaining an appreciation for the role of German culture in the larger world. Serves as the first course that can be counted towards a major or minor in German. Course theme chosen by the instructor. Open to students who have completed GE 20201 or have placed into the course via online placement exam. 3 credits.

Courses offered every Fall

GE 30303 – German before Germany

In this course, students will learn to challenge the easy association of "German" with the contemporary country of Germany by considering the extraordinary diversity of what "German" meant before the modern country was founded. Students will examine German-speaking Central Europe from the Middle Ages until the beginnings of modern Germany, focusing primarily on literary works in their historical context. The course's historical outlook gives students the tools to critically examine today's discourses of national identity, race, and German tradition by understanding how the meaning of "German" has transformed over time. 3 credits.

GE 30305 – Contemporary Germany: Society, Politics, and Culture

This course introduces students to the society, politics, and culture of contemporary Germany. The main focus is on Germany after 1989, but analysis extends back as far as 1945 and includes comparisons to other German-speaking countries as well as the United States. Topics include social values, government and media, as well as issues currently in the news. Students also develop interpretative skills by applying them to recent films and literary works. Open to students who have completed GE 20202 or have placed into the course via online placement exam. 3 credits.

Courses offered every Spring

GE 20113 – German for the Business World

This course offers an overview of major developments in the literary and cultural history of the German-speaking world. The course explores significant figures and works of literature, the visual arts, music, and philosophy as well as their interrelationship and historical context. Students read, discuss, and analyze selected texts in German representing all genres, and become familiar with fundamental techniques of interpretation. Open to students who have completed GE 20202 or have placed into the course via online placement exam. 3 credits.

GE 30304 – German Literary and Cultural Tradition(s)

This course offers an overview of major developments in the literary and cultural history of the German-speaking world. The course explores significant figures and works of literature, the visual arts, music, and philosophy as well as their interrelationship and historical context. Students read, discuss, and analyze selected texts in German representing all genres, and become familiar with fundamental techniques of interpretation. Open to students who have completed GE 20202 or have placed into the course via online placement exam. 3 credits.

Fall 2024 courses taught in German

GE 43205 – Comedy, Tragedy, Inverted World: Masterpieces of German Drama (Mark Roche)

Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have one of the world’s richest traditions of drama as well as arguably the greatest theorists of drama. We will discuss selected masterpieces of German drama (and film), paying particular attention to the ways in which each of our works breaks expectations and advances what we might call an inverted world. The course will explore historical developments, but our primary focus will be close analysis of the works, including their ambiguities and their wrestling with tragic and comic modes of understanding the world, including interpersonal and social conflicts. Likely authors include Lessing, Schiller, Büchner, Hofmannsthal, Brecht, and Dürrenmatt. Some attention will also be given to distinctive German theories of tragedy and comedy, including the singular contributions of Hegel. 3 credits. Counts for WKLC, WKAL and LIT

Fall 2024 courses taught in English

GE 13186 – Nation and Nationality in Germany, 1800-2024 (Robert Norton)

This course introduces German literature and culture while also serving as an introduction to the seminar method of instruction. The course is writing-intensive, with emphasis given to improving students' writing skills through the careful analysis of specific texts. 3 credits. Counts for USEM, WKAL and LIT

GE 20410 – German History Through Film (William Donahue)

A vampire stalks you through a dark tunnel. A mad scientist gives human form to an android. Regimented masses march beneath monumental swastikas. Some of the most enduring images of the twentieth century were crafted by German filmmakers. They filmed in the shadow of the First World War, in the midst of economic turmoil, in the service of the Nazi dictatorship, and in a Germany divided by the Cold War. They used cinema to grapple with the legacies of military defeat, to articulate their anxieties about industrial modernity, to envision utopian futures, to justify the murder of millions, and to come to terms with these monstrous crimes. This course will integrate the disciplinary insights of history and film studies to examine how Germans confronted the upheavals and traumas associated with modernity, the utopian fantasies and cataclysmic horrors of the twentieth-century. Together, the class will pursue three major objectives. First, students will learn about the most important events and developments of modern German history. They will examine how shifting economic, cultural, and political realities shaped the German film industry, and how filmmakers used their work to understand and intervene in their social, political, and cultural issues of their day. Second, students will learn to critically analyze films. They will learn how the structural components of a film - choices in composition, editing, and sound-mixing - craft meaning through immersive spectacles that speak to audiences on multiple intellectual and emotional levels. Students will explore how filmmakers deploy these techniques to produce awe-inspiring entertainments, sophisticated instruments of propaganda, and radical social critiques. As historical artifacts, films reflect the society which created them. But students will also consider how films, as works of art, survive beyond their historical context, and are reinterpreted by new audiences with new priorities. Finally, students will practice the skills of historical literacy. They will digest, analyze, and criticize important scholarship (secondary literature). They will discern the relevance of particular interpretations for important debates. They will use sustained analysis of films as primary sources to develop, articulate, and defend their own historical interpretations and arguments..  3 credits. Counts for FNAR, WKAL and WKIN

GE 30464 – German History, 1740-1870 (John Deak)

This course begins with Prussia's initial challenge to Austria's dominance in central Europe; it ends with the unification of Germany under Bismarck's Prussia--and Austria's exclusion from it. In addition to covering the on-going Austro-Prussian rivalry in Germany, the course will consider German History in a broad central European perspective that covers the variety of what was German-speaking Europe. We will cover the cultural, social, and political transformations of the period. Specific topics may include Enlightened Absolutism and the emergence of the 'enlightened' police state, the influence of the French Revolution in the German-speaking lands, as well as the revolutions of 1848 and the struggle for German Unification. Additionally, we will cover larger long term processes such as the emergence of civil society, political transformations such as the growth of German Liberalism and Nationalism and the emergence of Socialism, and German contributions to larger cultural and intellectual fields such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism.  3 credits. Counts for MESE and WKHI

GE 33021 –  The Early Holy Roman Empire (Christopher Miller)

Although occupying a central position in the cultural, legal, literary, and political history of Europe, the Holy Roman Empire remains far too frequently sidelined within Anglophone surveys of the medieval period. This course is designed to serve as a corrective to this tendency, repositioning the Western Empire in all its diversity and geographic range at the heart of European development during the crucial millennium of the Middle Ages and its aftermath. Using a combination of primary and secondary sources, we will follow the development of the Empire in conception and reality from its Carolingian beginnings, through the heights of the Ottonian Renaissance, the fraught Salian age, and up through the great conflicts of the Staufer period, ending with the interregnum of the late-thirteenth century, during which an empire without an emperor was forced to both redefine and reinvent itself. In this course we examine what the empire was and was not during the early centuries of its existence. To what extent was the empire understood to be a revival or extension of the Western Roman Empire? To what extent was Voltaire's 18th-century indictment of the empire as "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" an accurate assessment? What relevance does the early history of an institution long famed as a political anachronism have for us today? Focusing on primary sources, we will trace both the institutional and cultural development of the empire and its varied peoples over the course of the Early and High Middle Ages, comparing our own interpretations with those of scholars both past and present. In so doing, we shall also seek to contextualize the history of the Holy Roman Empire alongside the contemporary kingdoms of France and England, while consciously eschewing normative models of institutional, legal, and (proto-)national development. 3 credits. Counts for WKHI and WRIT

Previously Offered Electives

Generally, courses with 4xxxx course numbers are taught in the target language. Courses with 3xxxx course numbers and below are taught in English. Detailed class descriptions can be accessed via the ClassSearch tool on InsideND.

Spring 2024

GE 23620 - The Death of God. Atheism in Modern European Culture and Thought

GE 30112 - Germany and the Environment

GE 33027 - Germans in the Americas

GE 43204 - Social Engagement in German Literature and Film

Fall 2023

GE 20453 - Self-deception, Life-lies and Sincerity

GE 30008 - Medieval Violence

GE 33245 - Great War and Modern Memory

Spring 2023

GE 30109 – Jews in European Middle Ages

GE 30214 – The Holocaust and its Legacies

GE 33023 – Medieval German Epic

GE 43000 – Imagined Futures German Sci-Fi

Fall 2022

GE 30010 – Sinners, Saints, & Sorceresses

GE 30011 – Weimar Republic/Rise of Hitler

GE 30207 – Intro to Gothic Language

GE 33021 – The Early Holy Roman Empire

GE 40324 – Germany’s Interwar Years

Spring 2022

GE 20430 – Existentialist Themes

GE 30112 – Germany and the Environment

GE 30214 – The Holocaust and its Legacies

GE 30401 – Nazi Germany, Nazi Europe

GE 33205 – Europe & the Migration Crisis

GE 43203 – Self, Society and the Sacred

Fall 2021

GE 20452 – Philosophy & Narrative

GE 30008 – Medieval Violence

GE 30465 – Modern Germany since 1871

GE 43300 – Seminar in German Studies