The goal of this course is to explore how developments coming out of Europe helped shape the modern (western) world we live in today. We will concentrate on the period between roughly 1500 and 1800. This is the period that includes such movements as the Protestant Reformation, the scientific and industrial revolutions, the rise of capitalism, global exploration and colonialism (including the slave trade), the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the age of revolutions, and secularization. We will consider these crucial developments from a variety of perspectives in the social sciences (economics, political theory, sociology) and the humanities (art, literature, music, and philosophy). Topics to be discussed are:
1. Luther, the Reformation, the end of the Middle Ages, the birth of the modern individual (in conscience), and the “spirit of capitalism” in the Protestant work ethic;
2. The rise of science and the mathematization of nature; what is “technology”?;
3. European encounters with the “New World”; how the slave trade was a founding force for modernity;
4. The horrors of the Thirty Years’ War and the Age of the Baroque; how the modern system of the nation state and rationalist approaches to God and nature emerged out of the wars of religion;
5. Enlightenment concepts of reason, tolerance, natural (vs. revealed) religion, mathematics (calculus), and science; inherent limits of the Enlightenment project; development of capitalism;
6. The Romantic development of and challenge to the Enlightenment, different forms of rationality, strains of irrationalism, German responses to the French Revolution, and Idealist philosophy.
Readings in the course will focus on selections from primary texts.

Grading based on attendance of lectures, short response papers and quizzes on readings, midterm and final exams.

Frenemies: The Case of Germany & France

Relationships between Germany and France were tumultuous and fraught for centuries, before the signing of the Elysée Treaty in 1963 inscribed a special relationship that has been the driver of European integration. Fifty years after the signing of this treaty, the seminar traces the history of the Franco-German relationship in the context of European integration. We will examine if and in what respect there is a “special” relationship between France and Germany and what role and function the Franco-German partnership play in today’s Europe. We will especially look at key elements of what it is that links both states, the structures of bilateral interaction and different aspects of their political, social, and economic relationship. Of particular interest will be the cross-cultural dimension, i.e. the literary and artistic connections that have existed and continue to exist between the two neighbors. All readings and discussions in English.

The class offers a look at multiculturalism as “contact zone” through the examples of cultural production of various minority groups in the United States and Germany. We will discuss literary, autobiographical, and theoretical writings, films and popular music in order to explore both the historical and contemporary conditions of two different multicultural societies in a global context (such as their histories of nation building, colonialism and migration, notions of citizenship, discourses of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality). Materials will include essays by Marie Louise Pratt, Angela Davis and R. Radhakrishnan, literary writings by Gish Jen, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Honigman as well as movies on the tensions between East and West German cultures (such as Good-Bye Lenin, dir. Wolfgang Becker) and on German Turkish life (Head-on, dir. Fatih Akin) and German and US hip hop,

Requirements: regular attendance, midterm and final, short writing assignments (short essay or blog). A website will be available at the beginning of the quarter.