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Crime, Punishment and Ideas of Justice in German Literature
Course code: GERM4140 / GEMRG054
Course unit value: 0.5 / 30 MA credits
This course examines crime stories from late eighteenth- to mid-twentieth-century literature as manifestations of the increasingly antagonistic relationship between individual and society, based on both literary and theoretical readings. Various authors’ portrayals of good and evil, crime and justice will be discussed as well as moral and social implications. In this way, we will acquaint ourselves not only with some of the most sinister, riveting, and eerie texts ever written in the German language, but also gain a general sense of how ideas of ‘justice’ developed throughout nearly two centuries in German literature; when legal concepts from ‘diminished responsibility’ to ‘extenuating circumstances’ first entered the German imagination; and why it has so often been claimed that ideas of right and wrong are the terrain of literature, not law.
Assessment for GERM4140: one assessed 4000 word essay (100%)
Assessment for GERMG054: one assessed 6000 word essay (100%)
Tutor: Prof Susanne Kord
Syllabus and set texts:
Part I: Comprehending Crime: the Criminal as Human
Week 1. Theories of ‘comprehensible’ crime:
Norbert Elias, Civilizing Processes (excerpts);
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (excerpts);
Week 2. Friedrich Schiller, ‘Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre’ (1786)
Week 3. Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas (1810)
Week 4. Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas (1810)
Week 5. Gerhart Hauptmann, ‘Bahnwärter Thiel’ (1888)
Reading Week
Part II: Incomprehensible Crime: The Criminal and/as the ‘Other’
Week 6. Theories of ‘incomprehensible’ crime:
Lecture, ‘The case of Gesche Gottfried;
Adelbert von Chamisso: ‘Die Giftmischerin’ (1828)
Week 7. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, ‘Die Judenbuche’ (1842)
Week 8. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch der alten Dame (1956)
Week 9-10. Peter Weiss, Die Ermittlung, 1965
