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About the background of this course:
If you are concerned with the fact that a driver in Germany will not arrive at his starting point after having done 4 left turns, then it is not much use to speculate on the qualifications of German city planners, - what you really need is historical knowledge: The street in a German downtown area are in existence since the Middle Ages, when people walked on foot or rode on horseback; they did not build those streets for us but for themselves. Same way we build computers nowadays, - for us, not for posterity (of which we know nothing anyway).
I find it more than interesting to look back on historical developments in order to better understand those things that determine our present lives. If you look at the right things you will find these things most fascinating, - in contrast to what you are usually presented with in standard history classes. It is simply exciting to learn about the normal lives of normal people in those past times. Much more exciting than learning about kings and when they reigned.
And here literature has a very special function: It takes us along on the journey into the past without treating us like pupils, for it narrates a story as if the events were happening right then and there, even if we see the people and the places of times gone by. We don't need to know about history in order to feel the intensity of such narrations.
BUT: Those narratives - if they don't happen to be products of our own times - were created in a historical constellation much or at least somewhat different from ours, and if we endeavour to understand them well we need to follow their friendly invitation and find some of the things about unmarried mothers, stealing wood from the lord's forest, the life of the soldiers around 1800, being hungry in the time after WW II, sexual taboos in Victorian times, etc, etc. If we understand such historical facts these stories will speak to us in an even clearer and more colorful language.
Imagine someone reading a story from our times in, say, 200 years, not knowing that at the time there were no hotels on the moon, that telephones, however, were devices without monitors, that cars needed gasoline, and that people liked to sit in the sun since the atmosphere was still fairly intact. Such a reader simply does not have enough knowledge to fully understand what the texts are all about. On principle that is normal for all human beings, at least in the beginning: As children we do not know that other cultures have different languages from the one we speak, in the same vein we, as adults, do not 'naturally' know that a family 500 years ago was a VERY different social unit from what it is now (in our cultural setup). It takes quite a learning effort to see that our way to look at the world is not the same as having grasped the world.
That is one of the big issues in this course: To sharpen our awareness for things that don't exist any longer in the world of today, - which however were at the time natural occurrences in the life of ordinary people. It may be more important than ever nowadays to turn egocentric attitudes into knowledge.