Department of German and Dutch
GERMAN COURSE INFORMATION For full information about DUTCH courses and staff please CLICK HERE
Our German Courses
Welcome to the German webpages of the Cambridge Department of German and Dutch, in which we aim to give a full guide to the Department and to the courses it offers in the Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos. There is also some information here about graduate work in German at Cambridge. Speakers of German are the largest linguistic group in the European Union and have played a central role in European history and culture for nearly two thousand years. Germany's geographical position has made it a natural mediator between east and west, north and south, and in the periods of Reformation, Romanticism and Modernism, German literature, art and music have seen the birth of movements which continue to shape the intellectual world we live in today. German has long been the language of theology, philosophy and academic scholarship, and a knowledge of it is essential in many scientific disciplines. In Cambridge we attempt to do justice to all these aspects of the German (and Austrian, and Swiss) achievement, especially in so far as they can (or must) be approached through a deep and thorough knowledge of the German language. A full command of the language is the basis of all we do here, as will be apparent from the description of our courses, and we aim to provide that even for students starting German from scratch. The Department of German and Dutch is a constituent department of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. Although it is possible to concentrate entirely on German subjects in Part 2 and at graduate level, in the first two years of undergraduate work German must be studied in conjunction with another language. We have always achieved excellent results in successive national research assessment exercises, and we shared, of course, in the Faculty's outstanding rating in the last Teaching Quality Assessment. We have a good claim to be the Department offering the best teaching of German in the UK and we are glad that you are taking time to find out about us.
