Who is Allowed to Read Which Texts Here?

The other day I was talking to a fellow teacher about my plans for the next German lesson in eleventh grade. I told him I was going to read Das kunstseidene Mädchen by Irmgard Keun. It's a novel from 1932. 18-year-old first-person narrator Doris moves to Berlin and tries to get by. She comes from a precarious background and dreams of an exciting «life of splendor» in the big city. The novel lives above all from the vivid language in the style of the silent films of the time and describes the young woman's struggle for social advancement impressively and with a great deal of humor.

My colleague listened attentively and then asked me whether this book was also interesting for the boys in the class. I was annoyed and explained to him that the novel covered a wide range of topics and was therefore definitely worth reading for everyone. Later I said to myself: No one has ever asked me whether the almost exclusively male-oriented novels and dramas in the (Waldorf) school canon are «also interesting for young women». And why should they be? After all, they deal with general human life issues, friendship, crises and identity.

Latent questions and the curriculum

The Waldorf school curriculum has the special feature that it is first and foremost oriented towards the developmental tasks of the students in the individual class levels, across all subjects. Rudolf Steiner's lectures on the general study of the human being provide a basis for this. In this respect, the Waldorf curriculum differs from the curricula of mainstream schools, in which the curriculum of the individual subjects is primarily competence-oriented. Over the decades, topics for the upper school classes have been handed down to Waldorf schools that have proven to be particularly suitable for addressing the latent questions of young people.

The biographies of Goethe and Schiller and the reading of a text from the Sturm und Drang era in year nine, the Song of the Nibelungs in year ten, Wolfram's Parzival in year eleven and Goethe's Faust in year twelve are an integral part of the German blocks in the upper classes. Of course, these focal points only form part of the German lessons, around a third. As a rule, there are two blocks in each class level and also the subject lessons, so that there is room for further readings and practising the essay forms. Here, too, teachers often fall back on tried and tested content, whereby they have many opportunities to design their lessons according to their own preferences and the needs of the class – based on the themes that are relevant for the respective school year.

Siegfried versus Brünhild

As a young teacher, I have enthusiastically taught the traditional blocks in the upper school in recent years. And I have observed how profound working on the Song of the Nibelungs, for example, can be with a tenth grade class. The spiral of violence between Kriemhild, Siegfried, Brünhild, Gunther and Hagen touches on current political conflicts in several crisis areas of the world. It is exemplary of processes in which the parties involved are unable to overcome selfish interests and retribution and thus primarily has a pacifist purpose. The epic from the 13th century thus gains a topicality that is immediately comprehensible to the students. Students who are at home in the worlds of fantasy and gaming also experience astonishing déjà vu: They know the mythological protagonists and images from their leisure time and stimulating conversations can be had about why myths permeate everyday culture so deeply.

The character Brünhild often wins great sympathy, especially from the girls. At the beginning of the story, she has immeasurable physical strength and anyone who wants to woo her has to compete with her in a battle. The Burgundian king Gunther is no match for her, but wants to marry her, and together with Siegfried he tricks her and unlawfully wins her as his wife. When she refuses Gunther on their wedding night, Siegfried again rushes to her side and finally makes Brünhild sexually submissive. Brünhild then loses her physical strength, is literally a broken woman and soon no longer plays a role in the rest of the plot. The class discussion about this passage is particularly heated. The question of the rape and the perfidious guilt of Siegfried and Gunther is discussed. And it is in this context the heroic figure of Siegfried loses his glorified image for most students.

One-sided literary experience

Now, as a teacher, I can see this event from two perspectives. On the one hand, I am delighted with the students about the exceptionally strong and self-confident female character. I am also pleased about the opportunity for discussion that the reading offers us here: to address violence against women and reflect on it in relation to our present day. On the other hand, I am also following the fate of a woman with the students, which we encounter in different variations to a greater or lesser extent in all of the above-mentioned German blocks of the upper school. Positions of powerlessness, of which Brünhild is just one example here, albeit a particularly impressive one, are almost exclusively occupied by women in the literature repertoire. The majority of literary texts at school are readings with a male perspective, written by authors.

The individual case is not decisive here. It is about the totality of literary experiences that students have in German lessons and the associated one-sidedness of what literature actually has to offer. The power of literature lies in its wealth of experience, which I as a reader can draw on. I can take on perspectives that I know and those that I don't share and thus develop an understanding of myself as an individual and of my fellow human beings that can shape my biography. So for literature lessons, I ask myself the question: Who is allowed to read which texts here?

I am not only concerned with female and male perspectives, because the one-sidedness of literary experience at school goes beyond this. For example, I am very concerned that the Middle Ages and Goethe's time, with two blocks each in the upper school, have such a prominent place in the curriculum and that other literary epochs are not given a set place. The situation is similar with the inclusion of non-German perspectives in German lessons, which, in view of the great world literature to be discovered, should become a comprehensive literature lesson. The debate can easily be broadened and the questions I ask myself become all the more serious. Questions that I cannot and will not answer lightly.

Because what I understand by the term one-sidedness is merely a reflection of literary history. I also see the great potential that established school readings offer, and I enjoy teaching them. However, I am also increasingly and rightly confronted with students who ask themselves these same questions and demand from me what they are missing. I have colleagues who no longer want to teach these readings and I have others who don't think it's necessary to ask these questions at all. I think both are wrong.

It would be desirable to engage in an exchange and broaden the perspective on our subject matter - in the Waldorf colleges, amongst colleagues and across schools. This is already happening intensively in the history department; elsewhere, I experience an astonishingly uncritical attitude towards what has been taught for decades. Students are dependent on what teachers dare to do in their lessons. This makes it all the more urgent to have a discussion about the curriculum that goes beyond individual lesson design. For me, it's not about deleting what's there, but about how we read it and what great things there are to discover beyond that.

Read more: Teresa Reichl, for example, makes great suggestions for a diverse range of literature in her book Muss ich das gelesen haben? (Haymon Verlag 2023) and on her website theresareichl.com