COMP 367
Reason and "Unreason" in the German Tradition Spring 2025
Division I W Writing Skills
Cross-listed GERM 366

“I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strength, happiness and misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.” So spoke Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s young Werther in his groundbreaking novel from 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which exposed the fault lines of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationality, on universal human values, and on optimism about the future. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Germany and Austria, challenges arose to what was touted as the triumph of objective, scientific thought, often leading to alienation and despair for the writers and thinkers who explored the deepest recesses of the mind. These challenges led to some of the most creative cultural production in Western history, but the concatenation of reason and “unreason” also contributed to one of its biggest catastrophes. This course will explore and complicate the relationship between reason and those forces that throw it into question. Specifically, we will focus first on the moments around 1800 and 1900 when the tectonic plates of reason and supposed unreason converge and collide most forcefully, reading authors like Kant, Goethe, Novalis, Kleist, Büchner, Hoffmann, and Freud, then turn to the mid-twentieth century, when both forces combine to create the disaster of the “Third Reich” and the difficulties of its aftermath (Hitler, Harlan, Bachmann, Haneke). Finally, we will look at the complex ways in which rationality triumphs and is challenged in our current time by engaging with the debates around science that roil German and Austrian society. Students with German proficiency at the 300-level will do primary readings and discusssion in German (with some background readings in English); for students without knowledge of German all readings and discussions will be in English.