German 371Professor Jackson

Spring 2019MWF 10.10-11am

in English4 CreditsGenEd HS

WGSS Component | Modern European Studies Minor | Legal Studies Liberal Arts

Crime & Criminals in Modern German Culture

Crime and criminals (both real and imagined) have provided material for artists and cultural critics from antiquity to the present day. Beyond supplying provocative subject matter, criminality has historically presented an avenue by which to affirm or to critique cultural standards and practices, to intervene in legal and political discourse, and to challenge social norms of class, gender, race, morality, etc. Social, political, and scientific developments in modern Europe brought new valences to cultural understandings of crime, and thus also sparked new social policies and modes of representation by artists and other thinkers.

In this course we will examine representations of crime and criminals in German culture in the 19th and 20th centuries through historiography, literature, painting, and film, as well as changing legal codes, texts from the criminal sciences, feminist writing and other cultural documents concerned with criminality.