All Eyes on Berlin

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

All Eyes on Berlin – The German Metropolis in Film and Text In this course we will look at Germany’s capital from two angles: as a site of filmmaking and as an inspiration for literary imagination. A modern metropolis like Berlin with its fast-paced lifestyle and its constantly developing infrastructure and architecture has always fascinated writers and filmmakers. In addition, as Germany’s capital of newspapers, publishing houses and filmmaking, Berlin also offered the necessary conditions for the production of texts and films and, even more so, was also always home to a mass audience eager to both read about their Berlin and to watch films taking place in their city. The way we see and imagine big cities today is informed by their literary and visual representations, particularly of the German capital and its turbulent history throughout the 20th century, including its current developments that still grant Berlin its status of the German metropolis. In this course, we will examine texts and films from the beginning of the 20th century up until today, including comparing visual and textual representations of Berlin. Films include Berlin, Sinfonie einer Großstadt (1927), Berlin – Alexanderplatz (1931; and excerpts from Fassbinder’s film from 1980), Der Himmel über Berlin (1987), Lola rennt (1998), Gespenster (2005), Victoria (2015) and parts of the TV series Babylon Berlin (2017). Texts include poems, novels (excerpts) and short stories by Alfred Döblin, R. M. Rilke, Erich Kästner, Irmgard Keun, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Christa Reinig, Ingeborg Bachmann and Jenny Erpenbeck, among others.