Andre Fischer

André Fischer

Assistant Professor of German
Director of Undergraduate Studies in German
PhD, Stanford University
research interests:
  • 20th-Century German Literature and Thought
  • Film History and Theory
  • Aesthetics of Myth and Modernism
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    • Washington University
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    • St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
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    André Fischer’s research focuses on 20th-century German literature, film, theater and performance art, as well as intellectual history.

    Fischer’s scholarship is located at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, where he investigates practices of modern mythmaking, its aesthetics and political theologies, as well as associated concepts and strategies of resistance. In his forthcoming monograph The Aesthetics of Mythmaking in German Postwar Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2024), he explores significant turns towards myth in German postwar literature, film, and conceptual art. He is currently working on a project on forms of aesthetic and political resistance in European modernism, as well as on Black Atlantic religious aesthetics. In 2022/23, Fischer was a BECHS-Africa fellow at the Institute of African Studies in Accra, Ghana. He has edited a special issue of Colloquia Germanica (55.3-4, 2023) on “Hubert Fichte and the Poetics of Syncretism” and published articles on Bertolt Brecht, Werner Herzog, Hans Henny Jahnn, Alexander Kluge, and Peter Weiss.

    Besides teaching all levels of German language, Fischer offers courses on German and comparative literature, film, and theater, for example “Myth and Modernism” or “German Cinema and the Colonial Imagination.” He received his PhD in German Studies from Stanford University and has taught at Auburn University, before joining the faculty at WashU.

    Fall 2021 Courses

    L93 IPH 3050—Literary Modernities in Europe and America: Text and Traditions

    Baudelaire described modernity as opposing the local, transient, and fragmentary to the universal, eternal, and ideal. It also instills a tension between continuity and rupture with the past. This is true in terms of both social institutions and literary form. We will read texts in which characters' hopes are, on occasion, dashed, their aspirations thwarted, in their struggle to reconcile expectations with experience, or representation with reality. Out of such conflict, new modes of expression and creation emerge. Authors include Cervantes, La Fayette, Diderot, Goethe, Shelley, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Brecht and Beckett.

      L21 German 201D—Intermediate German: Core Course III

      German 201D is designed to expand and deepen your understanding of modern German society and culture and to help you improve your skills in all four key areas of foreign-language learning (reading, speaking, listening and writing). All class discussion and assignments will be in German, in order to provide you with an opportunity to expand your active and passive vocabulary and gain confidence in your ability to communicate in the language. Prerequisite: German 102D, the equivalent, or placement by examination. Students who complete this course successfully should enroll in German 202D.

        Selected Publications

        “Hubert Fichte and the Poetics of Syncretism,” Special Issue of Colloquia Germanica 55.3-4 (2023).

        “Polytheism as Political Form: Schmitt, Cassirer, Blumenberg,” New German Critique 149 (2023), pp. 155-182.

        “Mythos and Pathos: Herakles in Peter Weiss’s ‘Die Ästhetik des Widerstands,’” The Germanic Review 97:1 (2022), pp. 69-91.

        “Es geht um den Antirealismus: Zu Alexander Kluges realistischer Methode und ihrer Poetik des Widerstands,” Monatshefte 113:4 (2021), pp. 532-555.