Module Summary
Saget mir ieman, waz ist minne? (Can anybody tell me what love really is?) asks Walther von der Vogelweide around 1200. He was not the first and certainly not the last to look for a lyrical solution to this question. Poets have tried to answer it by singing songs about all the different phases of loving: falling in love, desire for the loved one, the pain of separation, the distress of lost love, the agony of jealousy. We will look at selected periods in the history of German love poetry, sampling and tracing the evolution of love poetry and songs.
Part I: Medieval Concepts of Love and the Minnesang (Andreas Capellanus, Walther von der Vogelweide, Heinrich von Morungen)
Part II: Changes in the concept of Love in Lyrics and Songs up to 1800 (romantic love, Heinrich Heine)

And this is the inofficial version;-)
Singing and sighing about love is a cultural constant from the earliest records of humanity to rather more modern forms likes texting or spraying walls. We will look at the changing attitutedes between these extremes: what difference does it make if a medieval singer expresses the wish to be loved on behalf of a noble patron to a romantic poet like Heine who uses basically the same phrases and topics but clearly with an ironic undertone? And what happens if Schumann gets hold of Heine’s poems and composes Lieder to it which do not want to be taken ironically at all? We will look at selected periods in the history of German love poetry, sampling and tracing the evolution of love poetry and songs along the phases of loving: falling in love, desire for the loved one, the pain of separation, the distress of lost love, the agony of jealousy.