Teaching Foreign Cultural Literacy with Margarethe von Trotta's "Das Versprechen"

Abstract

Despite its lukewarm reception in Germany, the critically acclaimed feature film Das Versprechen (1995),1 set in divided postwar Berlin (19611989), has been a most welcome addition to my teaching repertoire, as it simultaneously meets campus-specific requirements and answers a national call for curriculum reform that combines language teaching with cultural studies. Most recently, I taught Das Versprechen as part of an intermediate German course at Albion College, a small liberal arts college in Michigan, that fulfills a global studies requirement with the following criteria: the organizing focus must be international (a particular region) or global (an issue pertaining to multiple regions or countries); the course must foster inquiry into the interconnectedness of international and domestic issues; the course should attempt to bring the world to the classroom, so that students learn how to function in an international environment and gain a deeper understanding of the world outside the United States. Therefore, I extensively used videos, invited guest speakers to class, and asked the native speaker, hired by the college as a language tutor, to prepare cultural units on current events in Germany so that students enhance their language skills and cultural understanding of the German speaking countries. A requirement for the course was a portfolio largely drawing on the assignments for the film. I will also teach Das Versprechen in Pennsylvania, in a German culture and civilization course that satisfies a requirement for intercultural and international competence. These specific college guidelines are fully in line with major national curriculum initiatives. In Culture in Language Learning: A View from the US (1991), Claire Kramsch points to the strong relationship between language education and global education, highlighting political goals that resulted in the passage of states' guidelines for language education. In Michigan, for instance, such training ought to the language learner effective participation in an interdependent global society, and in Pennsylvania, it should permit effective participation in the local, national, and international community (Kramsch 221). Yet apparently these learning goals have not automatically led to curriculum revisions and prompted Russell A. Berman, in Reform and Continuity: Graduate Education Toward a Foreign Cultural Literacy (1997), to encourage language departments to revise their selfunderstanding and redefine their missions as cultural studies departments teaching students foreign cultural literacy, that is, familiarity with and in the language, values, and narratives of a culture not his or her own (67). For Berman, facility in the language focuses on the interplay of language and culture; values focus on the peculiar norms and judgments that may distinguish the other culture; and narratives on the stories another culture tells about itself (67). Surprisingly, neither Kramsch nor Berman takes the actual language learners in undergraduate college settings into account. First-generation immigrants and international students either already have successfully acquired cultural competence or are in the process of becoming culturally proficient in the United States. Frequently enrolled in language classes, they serve as role models and true assets in the classroom who promote both language and culture