A major focus of our graduate-level summer foreign-language methods course with Ali Moeller has been the study and "Didaktisierung" of the youth novel Damals war es Friedrich by Hans Peter Richter (dtv junior ISBN 3-423-07800-6).  In this novel, Richter explores the critical events of the period 1925-1942 through the lens of two German families, one Jewish and one non-Jewish, that live in the same house and have a single son each.  The boys become best friends.  The narrative, told from the point of view of the unnamed non-Jewish son, unfolds the general developments in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany and the very specific events that lead to the tragic death of the Jewish son, Friedrich. 

Our primary assignment during the course has been to assemble a collection of ideas for working with this novel in the German classroom.  In order to give our project a framework, we have invented an imaginary grandson of the novel's narrator.  This grandson interviews his grandfather as part of a school project and becomes so engrossed in his grandfather's stories that he decides to create a web page about them.  Each of the 11 students in our class has taken responsibility for two or three thematically-related chapters of the novel and prepared a section of the "grandson's" project.  The various sections contain pictures and other realia that relate to the novel (some historical and some invented by us), links to useful sites elsewhere on the web, and, most importantly, samples of creative-writing activities that teachers could assign to their students as they work with this novel in the German classroom. 

We envision that this project could be used by other teachers in the following ways: 

•    as a source for finding individual pictures, realia, and web-sites for use with the novel;
•    as a site that students can explore on their own to enrich their experience of the novel;
•    as a model of a project that students could do themselves.