Photoessay #2011 - German 295

I've found my class for fall!

I'm taking classes at the University of Washington as an Access student.  I took my first one this summer, American Religion, which I've written about often.  I've also completed two certificate programs in continuing education.

What about fall?  I realized that the time was important, I wanted a class during the day, not in the late afternoon.  Preferably not 4 days/week.  Maybe a lecture class but my seminar style class this summer has been great.  Also, I can only take it if there's room, I am lowest priority.

What area?  What subject?  I started looking through the class schedule with an open mind.  I had a feeling that I would know it when I saw it.

And I did.  German 295 (also given as Comparative Literature)  Jews and German Culture.  MWF 12:30 - 1:20.  Good location, on the Quad.  Bam, that's it!  I wrote the professor who is out of the country but replied that I'm welcome to take it.  I'm IN!

Another piece of the Maier Zunder puzzle.  He (and his family) emigrated to the US in 1848 from Bavaria.  Unlike many Jews he always held a strong connection to the German-American community.  This is looking at a facet of his life and times from a completely different viewpoint.

This class has it's own poster.  Here's the text.

What does it mean to seek equal status as a citizen when the primary marker of one’s identity, that of being Jewish, is indicative of a dream to return to Zion?  How does one demand of the other, the Jew, that (s)he become German when the very notion of “Germanness” is vague, uncertain, and forever changing?  These are the primary questions that will structure our discussions during the term.  We will also be interested in the tragic trajectory that proposed solutions to these problems assumed.  In other words, we will seek to understand why for Jews the eventual solution to their predicament in Germany was to abandon dreams of assimilation and argue for the birth of a Jewish state.  Conversely, we will examine how religious anti-Semitism led to racial anti-Semitism and finally to genocidal anti-Semitism.  That is, how for Germans the solution to the “Jewish problem” became a final one: the extermination of all Jews from the globe.

The course will also pursue a second trajectory, namely, the messianic in Jewish thought.  How does the coming of the messiah or the fact that he has not yet arrived affect the disposition Jews assume toward their own lives?  How do they read history?  How do they conceive of truth when truth is not yet revealed save through ritual law?  And finally, what does revolution have to do with the Jewish notion of messianism?

Students will leave the class with a firm understanding of how Jewish assimilation failed in Germany.  They will also learn to recognize and critique the rhetoric of oppression.  Finally, students can expect to understand the impact of modernity on Jewish thought.

Now to get the books.  I started looking last night and some were not at the King County Library.