Chair: Creative Writing - Head: Professor Doris Dörrie
Professor Doris Dörrie has headed the Creative Writing program and defined its content since January 1997:
“First and foremost, writing is a craft. Practicing. Continuing, keeping at it. Whether it’s art, you find out much later. That’s my main goal in my work with students: To consider writing a craft, while thus also losing one’s fear of it.“
Doris Dörrie: Über das Schreiben (On Writing)
In the creative process, access to one’s own creativity can easily become buried by fear and doubt – but there are many ways to return to creativity and imagination. With our students, we practice discovering buried treasures and the joy of their retrieval.
Our courses cover a broad spectrum, reflecting the variety of creative spaces that we open up with our students. For an exhibition, for example, we turned the entire HFF lobby into a public show. The students experienced the creative potential of a “Writer’s room”, where they collectively developed and immediately produced a Web series. Each year we take our new students on a project week abroad – one of our most important seminars, which opens students up to totally new writing experiences, while also yielding our annual edition.
We highly value openness, curiosity and networking, which is why we offer frequent interdisciplinary projects for HFF students from all disciplines. Often of international renown, our lecturers bring in new impulses and developments from around the world, while combining creative joy with great experience in the craft.
Our chair belongs to Department VI – Screenplay. Since its founding in 2005, Department VI – Screenplay has rounded out the education profile of this University, and is headed by Prof. Michael Gutmann. The composition of the department curriculum is a joint effort.
For more information, go to: Curriculum or Projects & editions.
Doris Dörrie on writing
”In Germany we have this national writing handicap, because of our deep conviction that you cannot learn writing. You either drop from heaven and land on German soil as Goethe – or you might as well not bother. Which naturally explains the constant moaning, that we just don’t have any writers.
Americans, with their dreadful optimism that anything can be achieved, certainly haven’t balked at applying this to writing. Long before the invention of ”creative writing”, they had a notion that writing could only be learned by writing – a much more pragmatic and hardly awestruck attitude toward writing.
Writing is, first and foremost, a craft. Practicing. Continuing. Keeping at it. Whether it’s art, you find out much, much later. That’s my main goal in my work with students: To consider writing a craft, while thus also losing one’s fear of it.
Meanwhile also examining the question: What do I actually want to say? And why? These seemingly harmless questions can easily drive one around the bend, for nothing is harder to answer. This is my main source of joy in my work with students: burrowing deeper and deeper, like a mole, into these two questions; equipped with good technique and good tools.
What could be finer than to embark on this expedition together? However, in our seminars, we sometimes also walk across glowing embers – but that’s another story.”