German Language

The Goethe-Institut Boston was the first Goethe-Institut in the United States and founded in 1967. It is located in the historic Back Bay/Beacon Hill area and provides services for the six New England states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

The Goethe-Institut Boston is the contact point for anyone interested in German culture and for those who want to study or teach German. The language department offers a full range of language courses and official exams. In our multimedia classrooms, students not only learn German, but develop a more comprehensive understanding of German culture.

Learning about German life and culture is an integral part of the language courses. Extensive workshops and teacher training seminars for school and university teachers of German as a Second Language round off the program. The Goethe-Institut's language-learning system is worldwide and modeled after the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for language acquisition.

For over 40 years, the Goethe-Institut Boston has been promoting an ongoing dialogue and exchange between American and German artists and experts in order to present German culture abroad and help shape a current understanding of Germany today. In order to achieve this goal, we collaborate extensively with our partners at the local universities (Harvard University, MIT, Boston University, among others).

The program department organizes a broad range of events and supports projects in the fields of film and new media, arts, theatre and dance, music, literature, architecture and more. Events take place in our auditorium as well as at partner venues. Beyond this, the Goethe-Institut arranges thematic trips to Germany for experts in the arts and media.

North American Region

The work of the Goethe-Institut Boston is integrated into the North American region, along with Washington (regional head office), New York, Chicago, San Francisco und Los Angeles (USA), Montréal, Ottawa and Toronto (Canada) and Mexico City and Guadalajara (Mexico).

Cuba also belongs to the North American region, and work leading to the establishment of a Goethe-Institut in Havana is underway. The network of six institutes in the United States is committed to the same set of goals and objectives.