I took several years of German in junior/senior high school, so naturally I continued w/a year of this to satisfy my undergrad language requirement in college.

We also had an arts and literature requirement, needed 2 courses of this, so rather than taking an easy route, I figured I would continue to hone my rudimentary German and took German Lit I&II, I was classic German literature, II was more modern stuff.

C&V German literature was the most insanely difficult course I took as an undergraduate despite the fact that my major was physics. Talk about jumping into the deep end of the pool. The lectures were all conducted in German, along with all papers had to be submitted in German. And, unlike the language courses where the topic was, "Excuse me sir, does the bus stop here at 3 o'clock?", the topic of discussion was all this ponderous 19th century Teutonic philosophizing. Schiller's Wilhelm Tell (William Tell) was the worst, laden with archaic Swiss-German dialect that showed up in no dictionary that I could find.

I and fellow named Robbie were the only civilians in this course, everyone else was German or had spend years growing up there w/their family on some foreign posting or some other such connection. We were both in shock and awe after the first weeks of this. We both were going to drop the course, but the prof really urged us to continue, so we did.

Thus, we continued on through this dark impenetrable quagmire. Finally, we get to Minna von Barnhelm, which billed itself as Ein Lustspiel (a comedy). My hopes were soon dashed - while it was a little less dense than the other stuff, it was largely more of the same.

So eventually I go to visit the prof in his office:

me: Minna von Barhelm...

prof: Yes, what about it?

me: It's a comedy, right?

prof: Your point?

me: Well, we are about halfway through it and nothing funny has happened yet.

prof: You have to understand that to the Germans, anything with a happy ending is a comedy.

Now to be fair, we both knew that lustspiel means comedy in the classic Greek sense of the term and there is another German word for our modern American understanding of it as a farce, but I've always appreciated his tongue in cheek observation.