LT 450 - Literature and the City: Berlin Perspectives

Berlin, with its turbulent history and striking contrasts, has inspired a broad range of poets, writers, and authors in Germany. From Alfred Döblin who depicted Berlin as a modernist and futuristic city in 1929, Christa Wolf imagining a city of romance during the Cold War, Emine Sevgi Özdamar showing us Berlin in the 1960s as both, a city of working class migrants and of intellectuals, to Helene Hegemann who sketches Berlin as a psychedelic landscape of techno sounds in the new millennium: This course will focus on authors who chose Berlin as a setting for their literary worlds, character developments, and dramatizations. We will ask how Berlin is constructed in their texts and what writing techniques are used to build an image of the city in literary spaces and genres. Students interested in German Literature, Berlin Studies and gendered literary spaces are very welcome to this class.