German-Language Literature after 1945: The Dreamed Ones

The afternoon schools’ co-curricular event aims to compliment the topics that students will be studying and the language skills that they will be practicing in the German A-level syllabus.

Taking Ruth Beckermann’s film, The Dreamed Ones, about the postwar writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan as its starting point, the lecture will provide contextual information about the broader context of the German-language literary climate and society during the period 1945-1970. As such, the lecture will encourage students to reflect on issues such as the difficulty of rebuilding a society and of making sense of traumatic experience (specifically, the Second World War and the Holocaust) through writing, and the problematic coexistence of victims, perpetrators, and their descendants, in post-conflict contexts.

Students will also be able to practice their German-English translation skills through a translation workshop (focused on several lines of Bachmann’s and Celan’s correspondence), and to engage with the topic imaginatively through a creative-writing activity in the target language, where students will be asked ‘to continue’ a letter extract taken from the Bachmann/Celan correspondence.

The event will be held at King’s College London. You can download a copy of the programme here.

Information about the UK certification category of The Dreamed Ones can be found here.