German Studies 314: Apparitions of Otherness: Primitivism and the Modern

“I kept looking at the fetishes. I understood: I too am against everything. I too think that everything is unknown, is the enemy! Everything!” Pablo Picasso’s astounding utterance, made at the Trocadero Museum of Ethnography, is but one testament to Europe’s renewed interest in primitivism in the early 20th century. This interdisciplinary literature and culture course examines the ways in which authors, artists, and musicians responded to global tribal artifacts looted from German and other European colonies, spiritualism, animism, and the unconscious. Through close encounters with literary works by Theodor Storm and Franz Kafka, films by Werner Herzog and F.W. Murnau, the music of Wagner and Schoenberg, and paintings by Adolf Menzel and Franz Marc, we will ask what happens when we discover that the otherness frequently projected outward is found within. Students will also continue developing high-level German language with a focus on discussion skills, presentational language, advanced grammar, and regular writing assignments. Course taught in German.