Social Activities
The German Department at Berkeley regularly hosts a number of recurring social activities during the semester, including Kaffeeklatsch, Stammtisch, and German Film Club. For information on the current semester schedule please contact germanic@berkeley.edu
Kaffeeklatsch is a biweekly event allowing students and speakers of German of all language levels to gather over coffee. This get-together offers students the chance to practice their German through casual conversation.
At Stammtisch, undergraduate and graduate students come together to speak German in a casual environment. All levels welcome!
The German Film Club organizes public screenings of German films for students taking courses in the German department and anyone from the campus community interested in German cinema.
The Department of German offers many extracurricular opportunities. Please see Events for a current schedule of events.
The Student Colloquium Series provides a regular forum for graduate students to present their current work in German literary, cultural, and linguistic studies. This event is the perfect venue for works in progress, such as a conference paper, journal article, or dissertation chapter, where feedback and discussion (and presentation practice!) would be beneficial. The colloquium is organized and run by graduate students
Extra-Departmental Offerings
The Department of German is fortunate to be situated in an area rich with on- and off-campus cultural offerings for students, faculty, staff and visitors.
- Campus Events
- Townsend Humanities Center
- Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive
- Cultural Events in San Francisco
Conferences and Lectures
Annual Berkeley Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference
The Department of German at Berkeley has been a pioneering force in establishing interdisciplinary German studies. Since 1993, a rotating team of graduate students in the Department has organized the annual Berkeley Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference (BIGSC). In 2019, the 27th edition of this conference is being planned. In a massive collaborative effort, students conceptualize a topic, write and advertise a call for papers, select contributions, compose the program, invite a keynote speaker, raise funds, find a venue, and host about twenty to thirty speakers and guests from the US and abroad. Students find this an exhilarating learning experience to be involved in all aspects of organizing an international conference.
Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of Fake News
In spring 2021, Professors Deniz Göktürk and Elisabeth Krimmer (University of California, Davis) hosted a series of Zoom conversations with contemporary writers entitled “Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of Fake News.” This series, which continues into soring 2022, engages with writers who bring diverse perspectives to questions of societal polarization and the power of poetic imagination, and presents opportunities to experience contemporary literature in action and think about questions of truth in fiction.
Mosse Lectures
The Mosse-Lectures at Humboldt University in Berlin, founded in 1997, commemorate the history of the Mosse-family, the German-Jewish publishing house Rudolf Mosse, and George L. Mosse – the eminent historian – who gave the series’ opening speech on May 14, 1997. As an academic institution, the Mosse-Lectures continue the tradition of democratic liberalism, which was established and defended by Mosse’s newspaper Berliner Tageblatt, in their commitment to the support of cultural exchange, transfer of knowledge, and political enlightenment. With support from The Mosse Foundation, the Department of German will bring selected Mosse Lectures to Berkeley.
Semiotic Circle of California & Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable
The annual meeting of the Semiotic Circle of California and the biennial meeting of the Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable are multidisciplinary forums for the presentation of semiotic and/or linguistic research by scholars, i.e., students, faculty, independent researchers around the world. The Semiotic Circle, established in 1985, displays well the affability of its discipline through the wide range of topics presented in the humane and natural sciences, whether on language, literature, film, music, medicine, philosophy, among others. Meeting since 1990, the biennial Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable attracts scholars interested in Germanic Linguistics, its near and/or distant related languages, thus Indo-European and non-Indo-European, synchrony and/or diachrony, historical and/or contemporary language. Diverse approaches, e.g., anthropological, sociological, cognitive, literary, computer, inform the presentations. Articles deriving from both forums are represented in the Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis.
Campus and Local Resources
The strength of the German program at Berkeley is greatly enhanced by the excellence of other departments at the university. The most recent National Research Council survey reported that Berkeley has more top-ranked doctoral programs than any other university in the nation. Thirty-five of Berkeley’s thirty-six PhD programs were ranked in the top ten of their field. From Art History to Music, Political Science and Rhetoric to Architecture and Linguistics, the reputation of the Berkeley campus is not easily matched by any institution of higher education in the world.
The department also benefits from a wide variety of organizations on campus—the Institute of European Studies, the Berkeley Language Center, the Berkeley Linguistics Society, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Center for Studies in Higher Education. The recently established UC Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching, of which Berkeley is a member, affords all those involved in the practice and the theory of second language acquisition an opportunity to share resources and intellectual events.
The Pacific Film Archive, the Berkeley Repertory Theater, and the Judah L. Magnes Jewish Museum are within walking distance from the campus. The Goethe Institute is located in nearby San Francisco.
The Main Library contains roughly nine million volumes, with the Germanic collection alone comprising nearly 800,000 volumes. These holdings make it possible to do original research based on excellent primary sources. They are complemented by the collections of the libraries at the Graduate Theological Union, Stanford University, UCLA, and the other UC campuses, with which Berkeley has reciprocal borrowing arrangements. Our sizable departmental library includes a substantial video collection of German films and a viewing station, as well as recent German newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. It is an inviting place to read and relax.
The intellectual life on campus—with its steady stream of internationally renowned speakers, symposia, conferences, and (maintaining Berkeley’s reputation from the 1960s) rallies in support of local and global causes—is unique. Dozens of working groups, sponsored by the Humanities Center and made up of students and faculty from different departments, meet regularly to explore topics of particular interest. These have proved most effective in fostering intellectual exchange across disciplines and academic cultures within the Berkeley community. Students in the German Department have initiated two of these working groups, one on German idealism and another on the emergence of modernity.