-Discuss the depiction of Germans in Hogas's Heroes (Incidentally, the NYT July 20, 97, p.3, had an excellent article about the reception of the sitcom in Germany)

-Ask students what comes to mind with the woord "German." Make a list of about 25 words on the board and we discuss why they consider these things "German." Then ask them what they think German speakers think of when they hear "US-Amerikaner." The class then discusses the "truth" of these stereotypes and where German speakers might get them.

Then divide them into groups and have them come up with 10 things that a German speaker needs to know about "US-American" culture in order to understand it. Write their ideas on the board and try to come up with a master list.

-There is an Udo Lindenberg song--"Germans"--that deals with stereotypes about Germans--the old Goethe Institut "Gefuehle + Haerte" rock video set had an excerpted clip of it. The clip is a scream--it shows everything from Sauerkraut and Wuerstchen to the Walkyre!

- Mark Twain's 1880 book "A Tramp Abroad" talks about "The Awful German language". Hilarious. It's really more about stereotypes about how "difficult", impractical, and generally "unvernuenftig" German is. A good academic study is Guenther Blaicher (1992), "Das Deutschlandbild in der englischen Literatur" (rather than amerikanische Lit., though) There is also a SPIEGEL article (29/1990, pp. 109-112) entitled "Wer sind die Deutschen?", reporting on a "Geheimprotokoll eines von ...Thatcher einberufenen Deutschland-Seminars".

-The short story by Nicloas Born, "Der Neger im Lokal," a little 3-pager, very succinctly addresses German sterotypes and overly PC reactions to minority ethnicities. It's in the anthology "Nirgend ein Ort: Deutschsprachige Kurzprosa seit 1968, im Hueber Verlag.

-J. Douglass Guy, Tom Lovik, and Monika Chavez have written a rather nifty chapter on sterotyping -- Germans of Americans, and Americans of Germans -- in the new textbook, Vorsprung. Kapitel 3 starts out with a cross-cultural comparison of sterotypes entitled "Was halten wir von Anna? Was haelt sie von uns?" (p. 80 ->).

-Langenscheidt publishes two books. The first is "Die Deutschen in ihrer Welt" which is a contrastive study in detail of the German and the American mentality. It was commissioned by the Robert Bosch Foundation because they found that, although the senior level managment they were sending in both directions across the Atlantic could speak each other's language, they couldn't always communicate.

The authors then made a workbook on the material in the first three chapters, which they developed while working with junior year abroad students in Tuebingen. It's called "Typisch Deutsch". There's an entire unit on stereotypes, both German and American. There are some wonderful activities which encourage students not only to understand the German mentality, but also to understand that they too have culture. Most often we see the world as different from us, but consider ourselves the standard. After this course, the students have an appreciation that they also carry cultural baggage, and that they are "different from the others" also, which is not a bad realization.