Students will develop their competence in listening, speaking, reading, and writing German by means of interpersonal, interpretive and presentational communicative practice. This first course serves as an introduction to German grammar and culture; goals range from developing the communicative skills necessary to find an apartment to being able to read modern German poetry.

This course will approach the history, culture and literature of Nazism, WW II, and the Holocaust by focusing on one particular aspect of the period-the experience of children. Children as a whole were drastically affected by the policies of the Nazi regime and the war it conducted in Europe, yet different groups of children experienced the period in radically different ways, depending on who they were and where they lived. By reading key texts written for and about children, we will first take a look at how the Nazis made children an important focus of their politics. We will then examine literary texts and films that depict different aspects of the experience of European children during this period: daily life in the Nazi state, the trials of war and bombardment in Germany and the experience of expulsion from the East and defeat, the increasingly restrictive sphere in which Jewish children were allowed to live, the particular difficulties children faced in the Holocaust, and the experience of children in the immediate postwar period.