
German Language and Literatures
Explore German culture from Autobahn to Zeitgeist.
German: A Key To Many Doors
Max Kade German House
Home to over thirty students as well as a native speaker of German and a faculty member who organizes cultural events, the German House (Deutsches Haus) is a social hub for German learners and a place for linguistic immersion.

Max Kade Writer in Residence
The unique Writer-in-Residence program invites world renowned authors to teach Oberlin students in an intimate seminar setting. Writers such as Uwe Kolbe, Esther Dischereit, and Nora Gomringer (pictured above) have spent a semester working closely with our students.

Featured Courses
Enlightenment to Romanticism
A study of major movements, problems, and oeuvres in the literature from the 18th to the mid-19th century (Enlightenment through Romanticism). This course will explore the culturally productive tension between nascent nationalism and Goethean cosmopolitanism, the sometimes stunningly modern portrayal of women, and political and ideological tensions between Enlightenment and Romanticism. Prose, drama, and poetry by Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, and others.
- Taught by
- Steven Huff
Weimar Berlin
The German city of Berlin has long been a city of fascination and transformation. During the short years between WWI and the Nazi takeover, it was the center of a cultural efflorescence that has rarely been matched since, including the music of Kurt Weill, the art of Dada and Neue Sachlichkeit, and the designs of the Bauhaus, among others. This course will examine the culture of Weimar Berlin and situate it within the turbulent social life and politics of those years.
- Taught by
- Annemarie Sammartino
Realität und Lebensperspektiven: What Distinguishes One Life From Another?
This course, taught in German, revolves around concepts of reality and different perspectives on life. Each of the texts has been selected to develop various motifs that relate to this theme and to serve as an anchor point for each of the grammar topics on which we will focus. We will investigate how a person’s assumptions, abilities and disabilities, individual circumstances, and even radically altered realities influence their perspective on life.
- Taught by
What Is Pop? German Fiction, Film and Music Since 1989
What is “pop”? What characterizes pop music, literature or film? Is the popular innocuous by definition, or can it work to undermine sources of power and authority? These questions will guide our thoughts, discussions, and writing about how German pop has addressed controversial topics, such as social upheaval, immigration, sex and gender, and racism. We will deepen our understanding of pop and examine how pop intervenes in pressing issues, in our own societies and globally. Taught in English.
- Taught by
- Gabriel Cooper
Student Profiles
Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Fellow
After studying abroad in Germany during his junior year, Lukas Griffin ’20 knew he wanted to return. After graduation he was awarded the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange for Young Professionals (CBYX) fellowship, a cultural immersion program in which American and German young professionals spend one year studying, interning, and living with hosts in each other’s countries.

Teaching High School in Austria
Milena Kagel ’20, a history and German studies double major, received a U.S. Teaching Assistantship (USTA) in Austria. The USTA award provides recent graduates with the opportunity to teach English in secondary schools around Austria.
“I hope to be able to pass on my enthusiasm for language learning and create some curiosity about cultural exchange,” she says.

A Fulbright Fellowship to Germany
Jasmine Anderson ’17 fell in love with the German language in high school and during a gap year through the Rotary International Youth Exchange Program in Berlin. A German studies and politics major at Oberlin, she was awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) in Germany’s southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg.

What does German at Oberlin look like?

The German program features one-on-one peer tutoring as part of its curricular pathway.

An impromptu musical moment at the Max Kade German House.

Oberlin’s German students at the 2019 climate march.

A field trip organized by the German House to a nearby Amish farm.
