Das Endziel aller bildnerischen Tätigkeit ist der BAU!

Oh, WOW. Dessau just moved right to the very top of my ‘places I need to go to as a matter of urgency’ list.

Anyway, I’m back home til Wednesday, doing no work, playing lots of Pokemon Blue on my ancient Game Boy Color instead. Reliving my childhood, basically. It’s nice to know that four years acquiring a scant knowledge of Nietzsche and post-structuralism doesn’t mean I can’t still feel that 13 year old’s excitement when my Charmeleon evolves into a Charizard.

After I go back down south on Wednesday I will commence essay writing (see below) and exam revision. But probably not straight away as I am thinking of going to Brighton for the day on Thursday.

THREE ESSAYS IN THREE WEEKS:

(1) ‘The ways in which films and literary texts introduce personal narratives and dramas blunt their potential for providing intellectually compelling accounts of national history.’ Discuss.

(2) ‘Invisibility in Grimmelshausen’s two Vogelnest-novels is nothing more than a narrative gimmick.’ Discuss.

(3) To what extent were women portrayed in a different way from men by artists from the movements which you have studied, and why?

It is going to an exciting three weeks.

Oh, how I have waited for this day

No more undergraduate classes ever. Crikey.

Oh well, no time to celebrate; better get on with those essays.

Laat alstublieft uw eigendommen niet onbeheerd achter

I am at Schiphol, waiting for my flight back to London. I should be reading Grimmelshausen. Instead, I am wasting time on the internet.

I think half my brain cells died this weekend. Fun!

And now the last two weeks of undergraduate-level teaching are underway. When I get back I’ve got an essay to write, oh dear.

Albert Heijn! I’m on my way!

Off to Nederland tomorrow. I’m so excited; I really can’t wait. I haven’t been abroad since August 19th of last year, which for me is an impossible amount of time to stay in one place.

I’m not as up-to-date on my work as I’d like to be, but I need a break. I’m only going to be there for four days. And after that will come essay after essay and exam after exam… I really won’t have much time to relax until the end of May. So this trip is very welcome indeed.

And it’s Leonie’s birthday tomorrow! And we’re all going out in Utrecht tomorrow night to celebrate. And then I’m hoping we’ll have a night out in Amsterdam on Saturday. Sunday, we’re not sure, but it’s Book Week in the Netherlands this week and if you buy a book for at least €11.50 you get free train travel on Sunday over the whole country. How good is that?

And, hagelslag. I need say no more.

L’Autriche ? Un tout petit pays. Si on le rayait de la carte. On ne s’en apercevrait même pas.

To cheer myself up a bit, I decided to give myself a night off and went to see Entre les murs.

I could write a review of it, or I could leave that up to the people who know how to do it properly: this reflects what I thought about it well enough. What an absolutely outstanding film! One of the best I’ve ever seen. I expect it won’t be to everybody’s taste; I guess some people might find it boring, or feel like it doesn’t have much of a story. Which it might not, but it didn’t matter. Perhaps it was always going to appeal to my national identity obsession. I want to go and see it again! It’s a shame cinema tickets cost so much.

Two hours and I didn’t look at my watch once. Sadly, the woman next to me – whose nationality I couldn’t work out, but she wasn’t English and she wasn’t French – didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on, and fell asleep. Fair enough. I only got annoyed when she started snoring. Srsly.

Achtung: whingeing ahead

I’ve been feeling quite down for quite a while and it’s almost all university-related. My resentment for UCL is back with a vengeance and I’m disillusioned and disappointed with my degree, the department and in certain regards the university as a whole. This isn’t really just another moan about having loads of work to do, although that’s irritating as well – I’m sick of having to do so much, expend so much effort, continuing to prove myself when I’ve already done so much and proved myself so many times. I feel like my efforts already deserve recognition, almost like I shouldn’t have to be doing all of this. I’m going to graduate with the same degree as someone who went through university in three years and didn’t have to do any of the hassle of an extra year abroad. It somehow doesn’t seem fair.

But what I’m most upset about is how poor, boring, and unstimulating this final year has been. I remember when I started back in the day as a first year, looking at the final year courses and thinking how interesting some of them sounded. Politics in the GDR. Gender in modernity. German thought and philosophy. Well, they were all discontinued in the years it took me to get to where I am now, and all I was left with was a re-hashing of modules I took in the first and second years, just with slightly different focuses. So I’ve done sociolinguistics this year, which I thought covered a lot of stuff we did in second year. Medieval literature hasn’t changed much: still talking about Arthur, the Round Table, knights, weepy ladies, etc. Translation and discussion classes are so boring as not to merit very much mention. National identity could have been a fantastic class but they removed any references to the GDR and inserted a load of stuff about Austria in its place (which was interesting, but not something I’ve had chosen to study, given the choice.)

I really think the only module I’ve taken this year that I’ve derived immediate and important and new benefit from has been Stephanie’s Weimar Film course, and even then I don’t know if it was the course content that I enjoyed, or her fantastic teaching.

Our discussion teacher asked the class in passing today: what have you gained from your degree? Now, it’d be facetious of me to say that I’m not a better-educated, more eloquent, confident person for having done this degree – or at least compared to the person I was when I went in. But when she said that this degree will have helped us to understand ‘why the Germans are as they are’, my mind just went blank. This has been a patchwork degree, with little cohesive structure, riddled with holes left because the teaching staff just went swanning off on sabbatical without a care in the world as to who would take over their teaching and make sure that the students actually got a decent education. I’ve gone through three years of London-based teaching and never had the chance to do one single course solely focusing on the GDR, despite it being so fundamental to modern German identity (whatever that is). I’ve done practically no contemporary literature (perhaps two Grass novels), no politics, no current affairs except the pathetic attempts in discussion classes which don’t even brush the surface, let alone scratch it. It’s like the department takes the view that anything modern, or popular, is unacademic; it’s a terribly old-fashioned and snobbish approach, but it’s the one they seem to take. So the average UCL German student can talk for hours about bloody Goethe and bloody Schiller, but don’t even know who Özdamar is, let alone what she has written.

Most of the members of staff in that department don’t give a shit about the students. I know it’s a general truth of university, but that doesn’t mean it hurts any the less when I’m going through all this stress and panic and whatever, and they don’t even deign it worthy of the trouble of providing a decent curriculum.

I am going to celebrate the end of this degree not because I’ve achieved a lot during it, although I have, but rather because it’ll feel like freedom. And I’m sad that I’m counting down the days to the end of it instead of being more wistful about it. I’m leaving with a resentment towards my department and my university, and that’s also a real shame.

24 days

That is all that stands in between me and the end of what is probably my last ever term of teaching at this university. I’ll have probably changed my mind by next week, but I don’t think I want to do any further study here; I’ve had enough of the place. (UCL, I mean – not London, which I still love.) I still have my heart set on that Amsterdam MA, but I remain sure of the need to have a gap year next year, so I have a long time before I have to do the application.

In the meantime, however, I’ve got a stack of work to do and it has reached that familiar stage of term where I start getting jittery and wondering how it is all going to get done. I am consoling myself with the fact that it almost certainly will get done. That never used to be particularly consoling, but it got me through both Hausarbeits in Berlin, my dissertation, and the three essays I had to write for the end of last term. So I think I have probably earned the right to put faith in my abilities a bit.

Anyway, I have now got the feedback and provisional marks for those three essays: 75 for Language, Power and Ideology (sociolinguistics, I suppose), 75 for Weimar and Third Reich Cinema, and 69 for Parzival. The Linguistics one was ‘assured and scholarly’, apparently. I never much felt like a ’scholar’ before this year. I think I need a final year average of 66 to get a First, so I am on target at the moment. The pressure is insane, at some times almost intolerable. I went out on Friday and Saturday nights, and although I did get some work done on Sunday, I just couldn’t help feeling guilty and reckless going out like that when time’s so short. Even though they were probably the only two nights I’ve been out since, well, at least the start of the year. And I always said I would never put myself through this, that I would never work myself into the ground in final year and sacrifice any vestiges of having a life just to get a First. Not quite sure what happened to that.