In the interest of fostering a socially critical and inclusive German Studies, this article urges instructors to pursue curricular reforms to diversify and decolonize German curricula at colleges and universities. While the literary canon's centrality to the German major has tended to leave monolithic impressions of "Germany" and "Germanness" on students, and thus presents an obstacle to such efforts, the canon's function might be reconceived so that the "good" it has to offer can serve different pedagogical ends. Using a German program at a liberal arts college as an example, this article presents strategies-from departmental and course learning goals to curricular structure and course design-for how to decenter the canon in the German curriculum in order to foreground social justice concerns and facilitate encounters with diverse perspectives.

This reading reassesses Feuchtwanger's novel Jud Süß (1925) as historical fiction, focusing on the temporality of the events portrayed, rather than the era in which the author wrote. An examination of the motif of betrayal, intrinsic to the historical setting's characterization, lends insight into the novel's portrayal of Jewish political power as deeply ambivalent. Whereas previous scholarship has uncritically received Feuchtwanger's justification for writing the novel, I argue that the author's interest lay in his subject – the court Jew, Josef Süß Oppenheimer – precisely as a historical Jewish figure. Through his protagonist, Feuchtwanger sought to probe dilemmas that confronted Jews torn between religious community and civil society. Ultimately, the novel espouses a pessimistic view of Jewish political power, and as response to the “Jewish question,” it exposes the insincerity of the state's offer of equal rights to Jews in exchange for relinquishing Judaism.

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The oriental imaginary of Heinrich Heine’s cycle, Hebräische Melodien (1851), borrows and diverges from European orientalism and its German Jewish counterpart, sephardism. In departing from these traditions, Heine launches a critique of both discourses and highlights their shared assertion of Western superiority. His recreation of the Sephardic past attacks the ideologies perpetuated by literary and historiographical treatments of the Orient. Directed against German Jewish orientalism and its idealization of Andalusi Jewish experience, Hebräische Melodien features complex, ambivalent portrayals of Sephardim and their Muslim neighbours. Heine’s Muslims reflect their shared history with Jews as Europe’s oriental others but also perpetrate violence against Jews. The cycle’s depictions of antisemitism in a poetic Orient serve to expose the lethal consequences of orientalism’s cultural hierarchy.