German with a year abroad

Currently, students study the following core modules. If there are options available the current choices are also shown. King's reviews its optional modules on a regular basis, in order to continue to offer innovative and exciting programmes, and this list is therefore subject to change. Please check here for updates, or contact the department for further advice.

The degree structure in the German Department differs slightly depending on whether
you are a native or non-native German speaker. Each year students take modules totalling 120 credits. Native speakers will take more optional modules because their language modules are worth 15 credits, rather than the 30-credit core language modules for non-native speakers.

Texts and Contexts: an introduction to German literature and culture (compulsory)
AND
German Language Core Module I (non-native speakers only)
OR
Translation from and into German I (native speakers only)

In addition, non-native German speakers choose four of the following. Native German speakers choose five.

Milestones of German History
One Hundred Years on German Cinema
Medieval Germany: Language, Literature and Society
German Politics and Society

Single Honours students may take an elective module taught outside the Department.
(Many students choose a language module taught in the Modern Language Centre.)

Students (except for German native speakers) take the core language module plus seven optional modules from the list below, including up to two further language modules. One module may be taken outside the Department.

German Language Core Module II (non-native speakers)
OR
Translation from and into German II (native speakers)

The German Reformation
Women in the early modern period: representations and responses
German Realist fiction in the nineteenth century
History into literature
Modernism and the Avant-garde
A year in the life of German-language film
Politics and popular culture in Germany after 1870
Germany since 1945: politics, society, economics
18th-century German thought: the education of humanity


Single Honours students may take an elective module taught outside the Department.
(Many students choose a language module taught in the Modern Language Centre.)

This is normally spent in Germany, Austria or German-speaking Switzerland, either as a student at one of our Erasmus partner institutions, as a language teaching assistant, or on an approved work placement. We have links with universities in Munich, Frankfurt (Main), Berlin and Vienna under the European Erasmus-Socrates scheme.

Students should take the core modules outlined plus up to four or five options (depending whether you are a non-native or native speaker).

Extended essay
AND
German Language Core Module III (non-native speakers)
OR
Translation from and into German III (native speakers)

Structure and usage of contemporary German
Germanic philology
The Nibelungenlied: from the twelfth to the twentieth century
Religion, sex and politics: German literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Goethe's Faust
Goethe: from Sturm und Drang to Classicism
Heinrich Heine
Kafka
Aspects of post-1945 German fiction
The Third Reich in the post-war German novel
Modern German poetry
Brechtian cinema and political modernism
Power and everyday life in the GDR
German reunification: culture and politics
Politics and everyday life in twentieth-century Germany
Government politics and public policy in Germany
Constructing Europe — identities and a European demos