Department of German - Northwestern University

Our Programs and Curriculum

Our Department

The Department of German owes its international reputation to a combination of path-breaking research, award-winning teaching, and engaged students. In addition to hosting our graduate program in German Literature and Critical Thought, our undergraduate major and minor programs, and our German-language program, the department interacts with a wide variety of disciplines, departments, programs, and clusters throughout the humanities and beyond. Graduates of our PhD program have secured prominent positions and fellowships in North America, Europe, and Asia. Our majors and minors combine their passion for German language, literature, and culture with kindred interests in numerous other fields of study. And the students in all of our classes are eligible for an enticing ensemble of study-abroad programs, fellowships, stipends, and internships that, each in its own way, add an inestimable value to their educational experience. We welcome inquiries into the full range of our departmental offerings.

QUICK LINKS

Featured Stories

Travel Letter from Friedman-Kline Fund Recipient Jonah Turner - Summer 2024

I just wanted to say thank you for offering the opportunity for myself and others to travel to Europe this summer through your generous scholarship. I must say that I was initially skeptical of the study abroad experience and its value, but after 2 months of classes, fantastic experiences, and new friends I must say that has changed.

As a student studying environmental engineering, it is often difficult to find the time to explore languages and other passions outside of engineering. The opportunity to explore my interest in the German language has led to unique opportunities such as my travel abroad experience this summer, as well as plenty of new friends and acquaintances. I personally attended the summer school at the technical university in Braunschweig.

Over the course of my time in Braunschweig, I had the opportunity to explore across the surrounding region and make new friends with people from all over the world that were a part of the program. The opportunity to experience and live another culture while vastly improving my language skills was an incredibly valuable opportunity. It wouldn’t have been possible without your generous contribution to the German department that allowed me to help fund this trip. Thank you so much for helping make this experience possible for myself and many others.

Thank you again,

Jonah Turner
Northwestern Class of 2026

Professor Weitzman’s most recent book garnering positive reviews

Professor Weitzman’s most recent book, At the Limit of the Obscene: German Realism and the Disgrace of Matter (Northwestern University Press, 2021), has been garnering positive reviews in scholarly journals in the U.S., Germany, and Denmark. The book investigates the conflicted representation of matter and materiality in German-language literature from 1857 to 1926 through the fraught concept of the “obscene.” As Bradley Harmon writes in MLN: “keeping one analytical foot in the traditional modes of German realism while extending the other into new territory, Weitzman innovates the scholarly paradigm for how we address and interrogate a wide variety of contemporary entanglements with the multivalent notion of materiality.” Similarly, Alyssa Howards writes in Journal of Austrian Studies that the book “truly breaks new ground, expanding and complicating our understanding of realism and the task of literature to represent the material world.” Meanwhile, Roman Widder writes in Zeitschrift für Germanistik that Professor Weitzman “has produced a standard work with the potential to reorient the study of realism: away from the epistemological aporias of poetic realism and towards realism’s ethical and political implications.” Jason Groves addresses some of these implications directly, writing in German Quarterly that the book “exposes—in realist literature’s repeated relegation of gendered and racialized bodies to ‘mere matter’ in a way that accords all too well with past and present histories of subjugation and dehumanization—something that can no longer be whitewashed as an intellectual tradition nor be assimilated into the framework of a humanist enterprise.” Finally, Svend Erik Larsen writes in Orbis Litterarum that “Weitzman’s study [deserves] a full round of applause,” calling it a “[sign] of the productivity of realism as a literary movement in an ongoing transformation.”