Department of Germanic Studies

Fritz Breithaupt, who is always up to something interesting, starts off this year’s Faculty Notes. He writes that it is hard to get out of the shadows of empathy. He published another book on empathy in 2017, called Die dunklen Seiten der Empathie with chapters on Friedrich Nietzsche, helicopter parents, and Angela Merkel, and thought he would leave this topic behind, but he is now revising the proofs of the English version, The Dark Sides of Empathy, which will come out in early 2019 at Cornell University Press. Andrew Hamilton, one of our 2015 Ph.D.'s now at Bowdoin College, did the translation. Fritz is happy about the work in his lab, the Experimental Humanities Lab, with a number of our current students involved, including Connor Baskin, Eleanor Brower, and Claire Woodward. The lab works on narrative thinking and uses telephone games to study how stories are changed in distribution.