What is the degree program about?

Do you like reading and are you interested in the German language? You don’t want to go to a mass university and study anonymously? If you can identify with these statements, you already meet important requirements for studying German Studies at FAU. If you don’t shy away from more abstract thinking and are interested in theoretical and methodological issues, all the better. You will learn and practice writing and working with scientific texts during your German studies.

In the field of Modern German Literature you will deal with German-language works from the Luther period to the immediate present, whereby non-fictional texts such as travel reports, reportages or diaries are also considered in addition to poetry in verse and prose. The indexing is carried out under historical and systematic perspectives, and the cultural contexts play just as important a role as questions of classification, aspects of media dissemination, or references between German literature and other national literatures.

In the history of older German literature (medieval studies), one learns to deal with texts from the period of the Middle Ages (ca. 800 to 1500). In contrast to popular contexts, such as fantasy literature or medieval festivals, the focus is on a reflected scientific and historical examination of the literature of this epoch, which is (only) quite foreign to us at first glance. Heroic epics such as the Nibelungenlied are used, for example, to discuss the historical development of gender roles, to examine the form of presentation of the narrative text, or to pose questions about the practice of transmission. Knowledge of Middle High German is acquired during the course of study.

Linguistics deals with the structure and use of language. Language is the object of study as something material, audible or written, which can be analyzed in terms of its components, units and functions. Language is also the means of communication used by human beings. Under this aspect, the specifics of oral versus written communication, linguistic varieties such as dialects and colloquial languages, as well as the historical variability of language become the subject of study.