Truffaut’s famous Jules et Jim, which depicts a fiery love triangle between a bohemian Frenchman, an Austrian writer who fights alongside Germany in WWI, and a troubled femme fatale, captures the volatile dynamic that characterized the relationship between France and Germany in the twentieth century. Caught in an obsessive love-hate relationship, France and Germany have engaged in a dialectic marked both by aggression and mistrust, on the one hand, and a mutual fascination and attraction, on the other. In this course, we explore the explosive and ongoing cultural exchange between the two nations, emphasizing the traumatic experience of two world wars in selected works of fiction and film. We focus on the cultural encounters between these two nations as they struggle not only with their individual identities but also with their collective European ones. “Paris-Berlin Express” takes us on a journey from the dreamlike Paris of the surrealists to the nightmarish Berlin of the expressionists, from the homefront to the trenches, from resistance to collaboration. We read works by Baudelaire, Rilke, Wedekind, Breton, Apollinaire, Isherwoood, Vercors, and Céline. We also view Pabst’s Westfront 1918 and Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion.