This is Us in Language: On Mother Tongue, Fatherland, and I

“‘We’ is the battle cry of people who take a single slice of the world and insist that it is the whole world.” (Kristof Schreuf) To show how literature and critical reflections on language can be taken as counter-articulations to authoritative claims wherever one speaks in the name of us/we, this class focuses on various texts, spanning from the 19th century to the present, in which we read about the use of one mother tongue (German), the representation of some fatherland (as a reference or projection plane for identities), and articulations of the I and the collective.