German Papers

The paper consists of an authentic but adapted German reading passage of ca 500 – 600 words in length. Candidates have to answer a number of questions in German and translate 5 sentences from English into German. This is a three-hour examination.The aims and objectives of this paper are to help ab initio students of German develop core skills of language learning: reading (a text), writing (in response to a text) and translating during their first year of study. The 'W' examination of the paper is designed to test grammatical accuracy through translation. 

GEA2 comprises two elements which are taught and assessed separately, but the marks for which are combined to create one mark at the end of the year: Translation from German to English and from English to German (worth 66.6%) and Oral exam (worth 33.3%).

Paper GEA2 consists of two texts for translation into and out of German of ca 250 words each in length. The texts are authentic but adapted, and are interrelated by topic and vocabulary. The translation into German counts for 60% and the translation into English for 40%.

GEA3 provides an introduction to German studies for ab initio students. It offers an interdisciplinary foray into central aspects of German culture, including medieval and modern literature, film, linguistics, history and thought. Students are not expected to have any prior knowledge in these areas. The aim of the course is to give students a better sense of what German studies at Cambridge entail and which courses they may want to take at Part IB (their second year) and Part II (the fourth and final year).

The paper is an introduction to reading advanced German texts and to advanced German grammar and vocabulary. In classes, we will discuss and analyse authentic texts, often taken from newspaper articles and/or the textbook to secure and consolidate both global and more detailed understanding of contemporary German. Attention will be given to different registers, formats of texts, style and accuracy.

The paper consists of two parts: Translation into English and an Oral Examination.

Teaching of translation is organised by the department, supervisions in support of the oral examination are organised by colleges.

The C1 paper requires candidates to translate out of and into German, showing an advanced knowledge of the language.

In Part II, students can combine the skills they have acquired in their first two years with their linguistic experience during the Year Abroad. The aim of this course is to guarantee that students acquire the ability to move easily between the two languages. Reading and understanding complex German enables students to translate German passages into idiomatic English while they can also demonstrate their proficiency in producing accurate and idiomatic German translations of English passages.

The C2 paper offers the opportunity to engage with advanced use of the foreign language in stimulating and intellectually challenging ways, through the analysis of texts of various types and genres under a prescribed topic as specified by the Faculty Board from time to time.  At the moment, the topic will be "Identity". Students will be expected to engage critically with relevant texts, placing them in their cultural contexts and analysing their formal features and content through written work in the foreign language. 

GE1 introduces students to the many different aspects of German culture taught at Cambridge: literature of all periods as well as film, linguistics, history and thought. No prior knowledge of any of these areas is presumed. Each module covers the topic “from scratch” and provides students with the relevant analytical skills. Having completed GE1, students will have a better sense of  what German studies at Cambridge entail and what courses to take at Part IB (the second year) and Part II (the fourth year).

GE2 offers an introduction to German history and thought, from the late eighteenth century to the present. It looks at the major events and ideas that defined modern Germany. Even though the History and the Thought section are taught separately, the paper’s premise is that the two are closely interdependent: ideas are conditioned by and in turn condition the social and political reality of a particular historical period.

‘The making of German culture’ introduces you to the vibrant literary and intellectual culture of the German-speaking world in the medieval and early modern period. Through the study of core texts you will explore some of the most significant moments in the making of German culture: the bold experimentation of courtly literature; the creation of a heroic epic that went on to have national myth-making potential in the modern period; the emergence of women authors in the field of religious experience; the rise of narrative prose; the Protestant Reformation, and its changed attitudes to political authority as well as religion.

The paper consists of five modules, with free choice between these for the examination paper. The paper is designed to encourage contextual and interdisciplinary study, and the modules include thought (philosophy, psychoanalysis), and visual art, alongside a set of literary texts by key authors from across the period.

This paper consists of six modules, with free choice between these for the examination paper. The paper is designed to encourage contextual and interdisciplinary study, and the modules include historical documents, thought (philosophy, psychoanalysis), film and visual art, alongside a set of literary texts by key authors from across the period.

German today is spoken by around ninety million people, and our oldest records of the language go back to the sixth and seventh centuries CE. This paper focuses both on contemporary structures and varieties of German, and on historical change from earliest times to the present.

German shares an inheritance with other closely related languages, including English, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, but has modified this inheritance in distinctive ways. The historical strand of the paper examines data from earlier periods of German to enable students to build up a picture of how its sounds, grammatical forms and lexicon have changed over time. In the contemporary strand of the paper, linguistic data from spoken and written, standard, non-standard and dialect texts is analysed to yield a formal description of modern German, and to examine how the language is changing today.

The paper has both descriptive and theoretical goals: students will learn how to use formal linguistic terminology to describe the phonology, morphology and syntax of German, and how to use theoretical models to interpret varied and changing features. The exam includes some practical exercises in linguistic analysis as well as essay topics of a more theoretical nature.

For students from other triposes who wish to take this paper, a good reading knowledge of German is required (at least AS-level or equivalent).

This paper offers an in-depth exploration of the literature, ideas, and historical events that shaped the German-speaking lands in the medieval and early modern periods. The texts and sources for study range from courtly literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (romance, minnesang, heroic epic) through late medieval drama to the religious ferment of the Reformation and the tragedies, comedies, and novels of the seventeenth-century Baroque. Each of the seven topics aims to introduce you to important texts and writers, and also to encourage an understanding of them through a variety of interpretative approaches, including postcolonialism, theories of ritual and performance, history of media, gender, “race,” and power.

The period from 1700 to 1815 was one of rapid and far-reaching change. It saw the emergence of modern German culture, and produced some of the greatest poets, philosophers and politicians in the history of the German-speaking lands: Goethe, Kant, Frederick the Great, to name but a few. Paper GE10 offers an accessible and stimulating introduction to this era, and seeks not least to highlight the concerns which are still relevant to our own time.

“It is characteristic of the Germans”, Nietzsche remarked in 1886, “that the question 'what is German?' never dies out among them”. GE11 surveys the many different answers to this question that German thinkers and writers, including Nietzsche himself, produced since the middle of the eighteenth century. It examines how new conceptions of “what is German” were forged in a series of often heated debates about the nature and purpose of history in general and German history in particular. The paper’s premise is that the question of German national identity was intimately tied up with the question “what is history?” and with more specific questions about the German past: What was the course of German history? Would it deliver the German nation to a pre-eminent position in Europe and indeed the world? What were the decisive moments of this national history, the ones that defined the “Germanness” or Deutschtum of the Germans? How should such moments be individually remembered and officially commemorated?

It is easy to see why German intellectuals thought differently about these issues before and after 1945. Delineating the ways in which an earlier, positively conceived German “special path” towards national unity and global hegemony turned into its opposite after World War II and the Holocaust is more complicated. Even the post-war narrative of a fateful German Sonderweg culminating in the horrors of the Third Reich, paradoxically, preserved certain notions of German uniqueness and universal significance. We will investigate the extent to which both narratives relied on mythological elements and how the latter facilitated their public acceptance. GE12 is primarily concerned with these interpretative and imaginative aspects of German historical writing, that is, with the creative transformation of certain events (“facts”) into collectively shared beliefs about the nation’s destiny. Among other things, it asks why myths of historical destiny as well as cultural and racial unity were so central to the formation of a German national identity.

This paper takes in some of the most turbulent decades in the history of the German-speaking world, marked by a sequence of revolutionary movements and events, the dramatic rise and fall of Imperial and Republican systems. It is also a period of revolutions in a broader sense: the Industrial Revolution re-shaped the landscape of towns and cities; revolutions in science and thought disrupted earlier narratives which helped make sense of people’s lives; and in the cultural sphere, there was an ongoing tension between experiment upheaval and established concerns and forms (and the counter-revolutionary tendencies attached to these). The central motif of revolution and disruption will be explored in its political and historical sense and will also inform the paper on a conceptual level: individual modules engage variously with notions of aesthetic transformation, upheaval and perturbation. There is also an opportunity to explore how contemporary conceptual revolutions, e.g. with regard to gender and race, allow us to revisit this period and see it in a new light.

At the heart of the paper is an examination of the ways in which various literary genres (the novel, the Novelle, lyrical poetry) as well as the visual arts (including cinema) and the performing arts were reshaped by – and in their turn shaped – the socio-economic and political transformations that defined the period 1830 to 1945. Literary texts and other forms of cultural production were both indicators of and agents in the great social and intellectual crises of the age: the decomposition, set in motion by Freudian psychoanalysis, of the bourgeois conception of the self as a rational, self-determined entity; the re-negotiation of gender and sexual relations; colonial ambitions and anxieties; nationalism, racism, and genocide. GE12 investigates these crises through the prism of some of the most iconic as well as some lesser-known works of modern German culture.

This paper encourages students to look in detail and holistically at what it means to be German, or a speaker of German, in Europe after 1945. Clearly it means different things to different people in different places at different times, and the picture has changed profoundly since the end of World War II. Issues from the past nonetheless remain, and in their focus on history, politics, literature, film, and thought, the modules for this paper examine both continuity and change.