In the Master's program in German Literature, students explore literature and culture in the German-speaking world from its beginnings in the eighth century to the present day. Within German philology, this specific focus on the subject gives literature, as an independent poetological or aesthetic system of discourse, the precise and thorough consideration it merits, with a historically layered and systematically developed approach rooted in the methods and theories that have shaped the field and its current practices. These wide-ranging issues include hermeneutics, narratology, intermediality, interculturality, cultural studies, gender studies, discourse analysis, philosophical aesthetics, literary ethnography, and historical anthropology.

The study of German literature focuses on literature in the German-speaking world from its beginnings in the eighth century to the present day. The distinctive profile of the field begins with the assumption that poetic texts and literary discourses are a fundamental starting point for the understanding of culture. Historical and highly systematized reflection on the origin of any given cultural situation addresses the need society has to understand itself and its cultural foundations. Thus, the program in Basel takes up the specific cultural and regional forms of German-language literature, with a special focus on the literature of Switzerland.

The structure of the course of studies offers students the opportunity to shape their own curriculum. Depending on their interests, they can focus on German medieval studies and/or German-language literature of the modern period.

In Basel, the Division of Modern German Literary Studies  is characterized by a strong research foundation in narratology, rhetoric, aesthetics, literary theory, textual criticism, postcolonial 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.