An Introductory Course in the History of German Civilization

Abstract

SOME years ago it was a common complaint that the teaching of living languages was too much under the domination of the teaching of dead languages; nowadays progressives perceive that teachers of Greek and Latin have made more of some of the opportunities of presenting their subject-matter than have most of the teachers of French, German, Italian, or Spanish. It is by no means infrequent, for example, to find offered in our colleges a course in Ancient Civilization, but departments of modern languages hardly dream of introducing Modern Civilization into their program of courses. In limiting our educational offering to the language and literature of a modern European nation, we exclude much of the cultural accomplishment that makes up the real importance of the people whom we are supposed to study and thus give, in consequence, a curiously inadequate conception of their country. We are ready to smile in complacent superiority at the impression of England and America that must be made on the mind of a student, say at Erlangen or Grenoble, from translating Milton's Paradise Lost or Longfellow's Hiawatha into his native tongue. At the same time, even at our less provincial universities, we are content to continue presenting France and Germany to our students by requiring translations into English of Corneille's Cid or Schiller's Wilhelm Tell. The fact that the material of the Cid is Spanish and not French and of Wilhelm Tell is Swiss rather than German matters little. It is not much improvement to substitute, let us say, Moliere's Tartuffe or Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm so long as we are unwilling to include more of the cultural accomplishment of a country than her language and literature, which we ordinarily restrict to mean merely the representative standard works of the classical period. At some of the more progressive universities the world over, improvements in this situation are becoming manifest. At Berlin, for example, students learn about the government, institutions,