For the past 38 years, Oberlin College's Max Kade German Writer-in-Residence program has offered students an in-depth look at contemporary German literature, culture, and political issues. Now, with the publication of Willkommen und Abschied:Thirty-Five Years of German Writers-in-Residence (Camden House Press, 2005), the former writers-in-residence are sharing their memories of Oberlin through prose, poems, personal testimonies, reminiscences, diary entries, and letters.

"The volume evolved from a correspondence begun in 2001 with the program's former writers-in-residence," says Professor of German Heidi Thomann Tewarson, who is also the current chair of the department. "So manyof the authors responded to our inquiry about how they remembered Oberlin, in effect laying the foundation for what we first envisioned as a small bookand which now provides a detailed chronicle of the distinguished history of the Writer-in-Residence program."

As one of the oldest programs of its kind in the United States, Oberlin's German writer-in-residence program boasts an impressive list of participants—including some of the most prominent writers from Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland. Christa Wolf, Jurek Becker, Helga Novak, and Peter Bichsel were some of the earliest writers to visit Oberlin, while Anna Mitgutsch, Doron Rabinovici, and Peter Stephan Jungk have visited the campus in recent years. Willkommen und Abschied brings their experiences together in one volume, offering uniquely European views of a small Midwestern collegetown.

"This is definitely a new approach to looking at literature, combining as it does a general, critical overview with nicely subjective, intimate observations that can only be provided by privileged access," says Gert Niers, a professor of humanities and fine arts at Ocean County College in New Jersey, as well as a noted expert in German literature and culture in North America. "Not everyone who writes about literature can afford to house writers for such close examination; hence the volume is a valuable compendium to accompany works on contemporary German literature and enhance our understanding of them."

By the time Thomann Tewarson and her co-editor, German Faculty-in-Residence Dorothea Kaufmann, were done, the volume had grown to more than 400 pages. In addition to the contributions from the former writers-in-residence—most of which are writtenin German—Willkommen und Abschied includes biographical sketches for all of the authors who have participated in the program, as well as updated bibliographies of their works.

Gabriel Cooper '04, Alison Dennis '04, and Robin Ellis '04 helped compile some ofthe biographical and bibliographical information that accompanied each author's contribution. Cooper, currently a Ph.D. candidate in German at the University of Virginia, was also asked to transcribe and edit several of the authors' texts.

"It was interesting for me to get to know these authors," Cooper says. "If they hadn't been willing to share their experiences with us, I never would have been exposed to their writing."

For Cooper, the writer-in-residence program was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get feedback about his own writing from Austrian author Peter Stephan Jungk, who assigned weekly writing assignments in German to his seminar students.

"Most of the assignments were on topics having to do with our own personal experiences," says Cooper. "That way, Peter Stephan Jungkgot to know us and, through our in-class discussions, we got to know him better, too."

According to Thomann Tewarson, many of the writers who participate in the program do more than talk about their own writing. Often, the writers will discuss different writing strategies with the students or even teach them to write in a particular genre.

"Katja Lange-Müller [the German writer-in-residence during the spring 2005 semester] taught the students to write short stories in German," Thomann Tewarson says. "The stories were good, too. There was even some talk of publishing them."

Although the program focuses on each writer's own works,Kaufmann says that students often learn much more from the visiting authors.

"Students are prompted to look at Oberlin from an outsider's perspective and to appreciate how unique it truly is," she says. "But above all, it is the writers' individual viewpoints on their own countries' histories, and their personal stories together with their poetics, which makes their extended stays at our college so notable."