In Basel, German philology (also known as German Studies or Germanistik), includes three areas: linguistics, literature of the modern period, and medieval studies. In German linguistics, students explore the many forms of the German language to see how it developed, how it is structured, and how we learn, use, and process it. The field of literary studies describes and interprets literary works and their specific cultural contexts from the sixteenth century on, with a focus in Basel on literature of the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. The field of medieval studies addresses the history of the German language and of literature in German from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries, with written texts and other forms that language takes considered in their relationship to their social contexts, as well as in terms of such other fields as economics and psychology and such other media as music and images.

The field of German philology at the University of Basel covers the entire range of the field from both historical and systematic perspectives. With our curriculum, students cover all the eras, theories, and methodologies of the field, with a special emphasis on themes and approaches that are closely related to research in the subject area. The curriculum is characterized in particular by research-oriented subject areas and methods. Overall, German studies is oriented toward cultural studies and cultural history, combines linguistic and literary perspectives, and offers a wide range of interdisciplinary connections. German studies is also known for its interphilological orientation, which places a comparative and theoretical literary perspective at the forefront.

In Basel, German linguistics primarily focuses on the mental dimension of language and language acquisition (cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics), on language use (pragmatics), on the organization of texts and conversations (text and conversation linguistics), on language in the media (media linguistics), and on dialects as well as issues concerning the relationship between language and social identity (variety and sociolinguistics).

The study of literature in German in the modern period includes research on narratology, rhetoric, aesthetics, literary theory, textual criticism, the sociology of literature, intercultural literary studies, and inter-art studies (literature and music; literature and images). But along with such specializations, the field of study also includes teaching and research on canonical texts as literary artifacts, with the most important themes being contemporary literature, the aesthetic avant-gardes of literary Modernism, the modernization processes of the nineteenth century (from the Vormärz era up to realism and the fin de siècle), and the literature of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Age of Goethe.

The focus of research in medieval studies in Basel is the epic and lyric texts of courtly literature in the twelfth and thirteen centuries, including Walther von der Vogelweide, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Wolfram von Eschenbach. For the later Middle Ages and the sixteenth century, our focus is on lyric poetry, prose novels, and comic literature, as well on Latin and Germanophone literature of Humanism in the Upper Rhine region and its broader European significance.

For the Bachelor's degree, the field of study in German Philology offers a thematic, theoretical, and methodological foundation in all three of its fields. The curriculum encourages independent, in-depth approaches to the German language and German literature from their origins to the present. The curriculum requires a focus on one of those three fields in the second half of the course of studies for the Bachelor's degree.