German Underworlds

Catalog description

This course will investigate German theories about what lies beneath: is it hell or the subterranean foundations that keep our world from collapsing? A product of nature or culture? The origin of art or the death of all that is human? And should we go looking for it under mountains, or at the center of the modern city? We will take our examples from the German literature, film, and philosophy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and we will use them to pose questions about the role of unseen depths in the history of German thought.