Why Study German
(Photographs on this page by Powen Shiah '06, Special Major in German Studies)
 German is spoken in three countries with diverse cultural, political, and economic traditions: The Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It is also the mother tongue of significant minorities in neighboring countries. Among Europeans, in fact, the approximately 98 million native speakers of German greatly outnumber those of English, French, Italian (58-60 million each), or Spanish (36 million). In business, diplomacy, and tourism, German ranks second to English in Western Europe, and in Eastern Europe it holds first place.
Knowledge of German grants access not only to rich literary, philosophical, and artistic traditions but also to many other kinds of contemporary cultural, economic, political, and scientific developments. German at Swarthmore therefore offers a curriculum that reflects these wide-ranging interests.
The core faculty and senior staff of the German section personally and professionally contribute to the inter-cultural and inter-disciplinary nature of German Studies. Marion Faber, born in Hollywood , CA, recently finished a biography of the Austrian-American composer-pianist Rudolf Serkin as well as her work on post-1989 European identity, which is now the basis of a course by the same name. Hansjakob Werlen, a native of Switzerland, has been engrossed in the multi-cultural writings of one the most prominent figures of late 18th century German language philosophy: Johann Gottfried Herder. His scholarship has intersected with Bryn Mawr colleague Azade Seyhan's focus on minority literatures in Germany, resulting in the new Tri-Co course on diaspora literature in the spring of '05. Sunka Simon, hailing from North-German Hamburg, recently published a critical study of the "Fiction of Letters in Postmodern Culture" and is researching the intersections of gender, race, and place in postwar German popular culture, an aspect of which takes the form of cyberculture, the basis for her course by that same name. Elke Plaxton from Frankfurt, now a proud Philadelphian, has been amassing material on the use of fairy tales in language courses, and her German conversation course prides itself in providing the student body with German movie novelties.
 Apparent from the many alumni living and working in German-speaking countries as well as those whose personal and professional lives have been enriched by German culture, a major or minor in German can lead to a variety of careers in education, government, business, international affairs, and the arts. (See Almuni News )
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