Classes have officially begun just as the trees and bushes are blooming all over Tübingen! This semester I’m taking 5 classes, two Advanced English Proseminare and three Deutsch als Fremdsprache Kurse at level B2. My DaF courses (Franz Kafka: Kurzprosa, Migrations-Literatur, und Grammatik und Konversation) have not yet begun, and I anticipate they’ll have more busy work/smaller projects. While this is one more course than I would typically take at Mount Holyoke, the courses only meet once a week, allowing for much more unstructured time to finish work or picnic outside with friends.
Upon entering “Homosexuality and Homophobia in Gothic Fiction,” the class appeared eerily similar to the every other English seminar I’ve taken. Students greeted each other, pulled out their notebooks and chatted while we waited for the lecturer to arrive. Apart from the fact that I was introducing myself to my neighbor in German, it could have been an ordinary interaction on the first day of a course at Mount Holyoke. The structure of the first class was also familiar; we went over the syllabus and then did a quick group close reading, on a text that none of us had prepared beforehand. It definitely makes a difference that the course was a smaller sized seminar and ultimately in this situation it didn’t matter that it was a large, coed research university versus my small historically women’s liberal art’s college.
At over one month in, I’m glad I’m interacting with a few German students as well. Previously it was impressed on me that Germans general kept their class life and personal life separate, but I haven’t found this to be the case so far. My presentation group and I formed quickly, despite the fact that I was an exchange student. Although I mostly speak English with my friends from STARTKurs, I’ve really been trying to only speak German to others, at least when I first meet them.
A number of small things about the education system have been surprising to me. To my horror, I discovered that my presentation partners had never heard of Google Docs!! This seems to belay a more intense focus on privacy in Germany, even among young people. I’m used to this wariness from older people, but it was pretty strange to hear from my classmates!
On a more general level, I feel like it’s very difficult to tell what I have learned or become accustomed to in Germany, since my transition has been rather gradual. I’m having a hard time separating myself from what I’m experiencing in the moment, which has been helpful, but also lends itself less to reflection. It’s definitely true that things become routine quite quickly.