Challenging Monolingualism: Institutional Implications of Postsecondary German Language Instruction

Abstract

We often pose the question How much German in German Studies? in more specific form, as, for example, does William Donahue when he wonders whether we shouldn't give our conference papers in German (German Quarterly 78.4 [Fall 2005]). Donahue's sensitive observations concerning our use of German as professionals in formal scholarly contexts may provide for many of us non-native speakers of German an uncomfortable occasion for recognizing our inadequacies and discomfort with being foreigners in foreign-language departments, of facing, as one older colleague once described it, our discomfort with a lifetime of impersonating a German. Yet whatever pangs of conscience I personally may suffer when I rely on my native tongue instead of my hard-won foreign one in a scholarly context, specialists of German should be sharply aware of the distortions that occur when we pursue the life of the mind as a matter of guilt and redemption meted out depending on whether we practice our spoken German at scholarly meetings. We write for publication in the language in which we are best able to formulate our ideas at a particular moment in our life history and we write in the language required by the venue in which we plan to publish and by the audiences we wish to address. When we speak to our colleagues and collaborators, moreover, we speak in the language in which we are both emotionally and intellectually most comfortable with one another-indeed, sometimes that medium of exchange will involve frequent code switching from one language to the other, maybe even with a smattering of Italian, French, Dutch, Danish, Polish, Czech, Turkish, or Yiddish. Neither the GSA nor the AATG can serve as language enforcers, and one would hope that neither organization would ever do anything but strive to create the most open, inclusive, and productive forum possible for the exchange of ideas. For me the question How much German in German Studies? has other implications. I urge that we consider first and foremost what this question means institutionally; in the end, it surely pertains to the resources, both human and monetary, that colleges and universities are going to devote in the future to the teaching of the German language. German departments or German sections within foreign-language departments have long been entrusted with teaching German to undergraduates. This is an important mission, for the study of a language not one's own can offer students one of the more radical confrontations with human difference provided in postsecondary education. Especially at this moment in the history of the United States, it is critical that our students participate in such encounters and undertake such engagement as a central feature of their undergraduate education. Therefore, any respectable future we envision for ourselves in American academia as Germanists, German cultural historians, or professors of German studies, or whatever we prefer to call ourselves, must in my view include the continued teaching of the German language at multiple levels at postsecondary institutions. As a non-native speaker of German, I remind all of us that learning German well, if one is not actually living in a German-speaking country, is a long and arduous path. Non-native speakers of German cannot develop adequate language facility in this American context unless they are taught systematically. Without the language there is little justification for making appointments in an administrative unit called German or, for that matter, appointing our German Ph.D.s at all. German history can be taught in a history department-and indeed is taught at some institutions by the colleague who teaches European history and actually specializes in, for example, France; the teaching of German literature-if it is done in English only-can be subsumed by a comparative literature program or perhaps a department of literature or English; contemporary culture can be taught in the context of a department of geography, anthropology, or ethnology, and so on. …