Making the Connection: A “Lived History” Assignment in an Upper-Division German Course

In her book Risking Who One Is, Susan Rubin Suleiman asks, “Why ... write? Why tell the tale?” and reflects further that “although the double bind of ‘having to tell, having to fail’ belongs most excruciatingly to those whose [stories] are the most painful, the most unrepresentable, perhaps it is inherent in all autobiographical writing. No one will ever experience my life as I have, no one will ever fully understand my story. Will I ever fully understand my story?” (212-213). Suleiman relates at the same time the explicit impulse to write her story, brought on by reading autobiographical texts: “Reading other people’s war memories,” she says, “has become indissociable, for me, from the desire (and recently, the act) of writing my own” (199). Suleiman’s reflections convey the importance of lived history—the personal perspective within historical, cultural, political changes and social movements—and provided the impetus for an upper-division course I designed for the spring semester 2003 at the University of Minnesota. Taught in German and intended for students who had taken at least one introductory literature class,1 the course concept reflected my sense of the inextricable connections between personal and political perspectives involved in narrating one’s experience, connections I hoped to bring out both in the course texts themselves as well as in the students’ writing assignments. Here I will discuss the design of the course and my rationale for the incorporation of a creative non-fiction writing assignment, the outcomes of the project and the challenges I faced in facilitating it, and finally will suggest how foreign language teaching, particularly at the upper levels, could benefit from a reflective engagement with the body of scholarship on college-level writing generated by the nation-wide Writing Across the Curriculum movement.2 Titling the course “Life Stories/Lived History,” I chose personal narratives that covered the post-1945 period in German-speaking countries. Ranging from a Nobel Prize winner’s autobiography to a controversial work of undercover journalism, from interviews exploring women’s lives in East Germany to a memoir of an Afro-German activist from the west, the course texts confronted us with powerful stories of individual lives.3 As we explored the clearly personal dimension and the wider social significance of each text, I