jay_walk

books read for english class that end in suicide: 1/15
(Romeo and Juliet)

books read for german class (that I can remember) that end in suicide: 9/12

(the ones that didn't are about the holocaust, and that didn't end well for anyone either; and Antigone, which is the only one that isn't German, and also tragedy)

So much suicide.

Cultural problem or what.
Half my time in German class is spent on the topic "Why did this character kill themselves", "was it society's fault", "how planned was it", "just how suicidal were they". I'm beginning to believe it's just the standard formula ending for a profound, classic, meaningful etc. german book.

(Spoilers by listing which of those german books end in suicide, I suppose)

I cannot stand Werther, or the romantic plays (3), dreadful pompous language in those too. By contrast I like "the New Sorrows" a bit better, though not much.
Frisch (2) can make reading of potentially interesting things singularly unenjoyable.
I loved Perfume and only technically count that as a suicide.
Spring Awakening wasn't too bad, or too suicide-focused, either.
The Prodigy is the one book in which the whole depressiveness is beautiful.

But I loved all of brit lit and american literature.

I am not fond of most of what the curriculum considers to be good german literature, or of german class in general.
Suicide-obsession, gravity, nothing spirited: all the whole enlightenment and romanticism brought to literature, it seems, is grandiose language.
Which isn't to say there aren't german works I love, or even depressive german works I like (I like Kafka for example, but then again I wasn't forced to read that). There's Sturm und Drang things I like too, I like Goethe's Prometheus. But they seem to have chosen just the most tedious stuff they could find for school.
It's just not a good curriculum, the general mood in germany is that education should not be fun or interesting. It also involves a lot of learning about grammar, for native speakers, which english class doesn't. And I have my complaints about the whole "Rechtschreibung" thing too, and about the language purists.
(One more year of it to go, and I do try to appreciate the nice things I pick up in that class, even of it's like 10 % instead of 99 % in other classes.)