Literary Learning: Die Buchgemeinschaft

I joined a free online course today, sponsored by FutureLearn through the University of Sheffield.  Since school will be out (not-so) soon, and since the title of the course -- Literature of the English Country House -- intrigued me, I registered.  We will be reading selections from different authors, including Jane Austen, my absolute most personal favourite writer.   (The "u" is intentional by the way!)  If you've never tried a  MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) before, I can highly recommend them.

I realized that our Berlin community already does the same kind of thing on a regular basis, albeit with a smaller group.  It is a marvelous way to understand OUR community content.  It can be fiction.  It can be non-fiction.  It can even be in the form of a graphic novel.  Reading (and reading voraciously) about a topic can give anyone a better sense of the era under study.


The Berlin Buchgemeinschaft (book club) started after a discussion at the Keller one evening.  Someone, and I really can't remember who it was, mentioned something about Christopher Isherwood and how much his work seemed to fit our sim in Second Life.  A number of us had not heard of Isherwood, and the idea of having a book club type group was born.  We would read the selection and then meet in a month to discuss it.  Zoe Foodiboo, who is the Berlin librarian, set it all up through goodreads, and we haven't looked back. She has now been joined by Webspelunker Ghostraven, who has added his skills as a moderator to our discussions.

The "rules" are that we select from books that were published in the Weimar era, or that they are contemporary books about Weimar Germany.  We have read a wide variety of books, from poetry to academia, but I think a few need to be mentioned in particular.


The very first work that the Buchgemeinschaft read is a classic, but one that I had never heard of.  At least I didn't think I had heard of it!  We started with Christopher Isherwood's collection of stories that have been published at The Berlin Stories.  It was a mix of wonderful storytelling (you'll recognize where Caberet comes from) as well as first-person insight into the emerging Nazi regime.  Between the lines is the story of a gay young man weaving his way in the shadows of Berlin, which is an aspect of Berlin culture that is integral to the reality of Interwar Berlin.  Isherwood isn't, to my mind, obvious about it, but if you are looking for it, you'll find our Eldorado Club in his writing.  I was struck how he also touched upon the plight of Jews in Berlin, as well as tensions between the ascendant Nazi Party and the opposition socialists.


Another selection was one that is well-known to most.  I had not actually read the book in years, but I show the 1930 film version of Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front in my classroom.  I have a dialogue guide that I found online that I give my students as we watch the film, which keeps fairly close to Remarque's story.  It's an old black and white film, and it takes the students in my 12th grade "Twentieth Century Topics" classes to get into it, but this film turns into a rich and meaningful viewing experience for them on many different levels.  Told from the point of view of a German from the "Slaughter of the Innocents" stage of the war, both the book and the film are a powerful anti-war message.  The discussion generally leads to the question of how soldiers who did survive Remarque's experience would have reacted to the instability of the Weimar period.  (How I wish I could get the English department to work on an interdisciplinary unit for this classic piece of literature!)

Other works are include novelized accounts (In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larsen) or collections of articles (What I Saw by Joseph Roth), both of which vividly depict Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s.  A relatively unknown work was one that totally resonated with me, as it is a story about a girl who runs away to Berlin.  Written by Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl was a work that the Nazis took on to actually destroy once they got power as it showed a side of Berlin culture that was in total opposition to their vision of women's roles and morality.  Although we have not read it as part of the Buchgemeinschaft, Keun's book After Midnight touches on similar themes of how regular Germans tried to make sense of and survive in the chaos of much of this era.  I could see glimpses of some of our 1920s Berlin girls in Doris, the main character of this work!

Some of our selections are from the time period, but not from Berlin, although they may have been read there in translation.  This would include Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Maugham's The Painted Veil, and a few others.  I think my favorite from this category was Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.  The characters were more like the people in our 1920s Berlin sim, but without the bulls.  Because of my time with Augusta in Berlin, it was easier for me to understand their motivations and made the book much more meaningful.  I had greater insight into how people that Hemingway portrayed might have felt and behaved than I would have otherwise.

Right now, we are reading a genre of book that I never thought I would try reading:  the graphic novel.  I have been surprised at how much I have enjoyed this format.  The first of Jason Lutes' trilogy Berlin: City of Stones takes the characters from late 1928 through May Day 1929, which the 1920s Berlin sim recreates each year. The combination of drawing with text and dialog really addresses the issues and concerns of the working class that our sim strives so hard to evoke.  We are now getting ready to read the next volume, Berlin: City of Smoke and plan to discuss this book on Saturday, June 28, 2014.  I missed the last one, so I am really looking forward to this discussion!

I've sent the link about the FutureLearn course on to a few of my colleagues here at school and I think I may be joined by one or two.  I'm hoping that this MOOC will be as enjoyable as our Berlin Buchgemeinschaft, but somehow I think nothing will quite match the very powerful combination of learning through both literature and experience that we get in our 1920s Berlin Project group on Second Life.