F0510 Germans in Italy

Italy\'s roles in German culture have been many: harmonious classical model, sensuous \"other\" of the inhibited (but \"developing\") Northern European, and dream of a past that implicitly challenges modern societies to reinvent their history. The course traces the phases of this cultural relationship primarily through German texts of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries: by Goethe (Italian Journey), ETA Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Heine (Florentine Nights), culminating in several stories by Thomas Mann, including Death in Venice and Mario and the Magician.In the 20th century the tradition of the Northern gaze upon the South was turned into a ghastly travesty by the horrors of World War Two. We will read a major Italian text of the 1950s that confronts and derides the German story: Primo Levi\'s Survival in Auschwitz. Yet a famous novel of the era (Lampedusa\'s The Leopard, set in 1960s Sicily) reclaims the tradition\'s structuring of subjective and familial development. Finally we engage a German retrospect on World War Two (Koeppen\'s Death in Rome) and the new Euro-cosmopolitanism of Elsa Morante\'s Arturo\'s Island.