weitergeben

Welcome to the University of Michigan’s weitergeben, a teaching and research database which aims to compile materials related to German Studies from historically underrepresented groups based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and geography. 

Its scope extends across time, genre, and medium, incorporating everything from nineteenth-century feminist novels to twenty-first century films about queer Middle Eastern refugees in Germany. Alongside copies of individual materials when copyright allows—such as PDFs, video and music clips, and links to other websites—we are curating a variety of teaching materials, ranging from short individual discussion activities to multi-week final projects.

An investment in undergraduate education, we hope for this database to serve as a springboard to build upon existing German Studies curricula more inclusively of underrepresented identities and students. For researchers, it will serve as a seed farm of understudied materials, fostering new lines of inquiry. Together, it aims to bring the marginalized into German Studies not as diversity tokens but as active partners in recasting our field. 

The database is a work in progress that we hope to expand and cultivate over time as faculty and students interact with these topics and materials.