Fratricide, vendetta, suicide, abuse of women, alcohol consumption, indications of cannibalism - the list of possible trigger warnings for Shakespeare's Hamlet is long.

Eva von Contzen rightly points to a debate on content and trigger warnings in university teaching that has reached Germany with some delay.

Should, indeed must, students be protected from potentially traumatizing content in lectures and seminars?

However, von Contzen's plea for a creative handling of such warnings seems half-hearted: Lecturers should use warnings as "door openers for critical debate".

In practice, such notices are more likely to nip discussions in the bud, since students are at least indirectly asked to stay away from the seminar or not to even read the texts provided with a warning.

Students who are, or at least should become, responsible citizens are being patronized in the name of a well-meaning "care" that contradicts the ideals of university teaching.

Where did you want to stop with the warnings?

In a literary and cultural studies seminar, the all-round “appreciation” that von Contzen speaks of should also extend to the text, whose strangeness needs to be recognized and opened up – and whose openness should not be covered up with warnings from the outset, one wanted achieve a truly open-ended discussion.

But such a discussion always includes the element of the unexpected, of surprise and irritation.

Trigger warnings are not "door openers" but portcullises that prevent such moments from arising in the first place.

As a practical solution, a single note before the start of the course was enough: We warn against literature!

It contains potentially disturbing themes, objects, and values ​​that may conflict with contemporary perceptions and sensibilities.

Your strangeness is not a mistake, it is program.

Literature is one big trigger.

However, what used to be morally objectionable is often no longer so today and vice versa.

Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterley's lover?

No problem.

But Lolita?

Could be dangerous.

It should not be concealed that lecturers can sometimes be shaken by the texts they have chosen themselves.

The sibling murder in Thomas Hardy's novel "Jude the Obscure", survived unharmed in student days, was much more disturbing when read repeatedly in the seminar a quarter of a century later.

Literature is a never-ending education of the heart.

The shared emotional experience that you can live through in the seminar is something that nobody soon forgets.

Literature doesn't always make it easy for us, and that's a good thing.

Literature creatively accesses the imaginary, human dreams and nightmares;

it is important to face up to it, without shyness and without paternalism.

It cannot be the purpose of studying literature to prevent the challenge of the strangeness of fiction.

Students and lecturers should accept this challenge, which allows them to grow together in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

As readers, we are required to continually review our own standards.

You don't have to like a character like Hamlet, you don't have to be like him to learn something from him.

But you don't have to warn her either.

Where would you stop warning if you started with it?

Should financially strapped students be warned that banknotes will be burned in Dickens' novel Great Expectations?

The trigger warning works according to a crude stimulus-reaction scheme that cannot possibly do justice to the careful handling of texts.

If the standards are set beforehand and the triggers are carefully marked, the references to the strangeness of the text can only be lip service, behind which the risk and wild thinking of literature would have to wither away.

But where, if not at the university, would there be a place for such discussions, such experiences?

The author is a professor of English at the University of Munich.