German Crime

Crime is as old as humanity, as old as storytelling. Cain's murder of Abel, Antigone's burial of Polynices, Robin Hood's robbing from the rich: all of these testify to the ongoing fascination with crime and criminality, and to literature's role in policing, and probing, the boundaries of social legitimacy. This is a course about murders, break-ins, betrayals, sexual infidelity and violence, and crimes against humanity, and the ways those crimes, sometimes moral, sometimes legal, and sometimes not really even exactly criminal, teach us about German and German literature in recent centuries. Course material will include modern and classical crime fiction (Friedrich Glauser, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Jakob Arjouni, Thomas Glavinic), crime in novelistic, theatrical and poetic genres (Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Schiller), and German-language television and film (Fritz Lang's "M,"Carol Reed's "The Third Man," "Tatort"). This course is for students with good knowledge of German. Students without German can participate in a special section with English language material.German Studies Assistant Professor Lea Pao will teach this course.