Critical Theory and the German Studies Association

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Critical Theory and the German Studies Association Lutz Koepnick (bio) In 1976 a number of historians and literary scholars founded the Western Association of German Studies (WAGS) to promote multidisciplinary approaches to teaching and researching German culture in North America. The moment was auspicious, given that in the same year Jürgen Habermas—the then most prominent representative of the Frankfurt School—received the Sigmund Freud Prize, a highly prestigious award granted by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung to honor the work of outstanding scholars and their contribution to the development of the German language. In bestowing the Freud Prize to Habermas, the Akademie endorsed the value of reciprocal relations between humanistic thought, critical social thinking, and literary culture, as well as between theory, literature, and history. In his laudatio, the writer Dieter Wellershoff noted: “Philosophy today has to open up toward the sciences and may thereby distance itself from poetry. However, I see the significance of Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy in the fact that his rational, modern, and informed language holds on to the dream it shares with the expressive language of the poets.”1 As they gathered in 1976 to inaugurate what in 1984 was to become the German Studies Association (GSA), many WAGS members were no doubt driven by a similar dream and vision: the hope to make the different languages of disciplinary research on things German porous to each other; the ambition to develop joined idioms of academic work powerful enough—as Habermas expressed it in his own acceptance speech2—to overcome one-track specialization and equip a larger public, including the one of current and future students, with various tools to question both the authority of tradition and the ongoing traditions of authority. In its foundational text, WAGS presented itself as an organization welcoming persons in history, literature, politics and government, geography, humanities, and other fields relating to German-speaking Europe. The interest of the Association spans the period from early times to the present German Federal Republic, German Democratic Republic, Austria, and Switzerland, and includes Germans and German culture in other countries.3 [End Page 553] The document sealing the transformation of WAGS into GSA in 1984 intensified this vision, introducing the GSA explicitly as both a “multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary organization” whose members’ interests involved “specific or broad aspects of history, literature, politics, and government, and other fields relating to German-speaking Europe.” Habermas’s prize-winning insistence on the permeability of disciplinary borders and the need of academics to speak to issues of larger political or cultural concern seemed to have borne fruit on the other side of the Atlantic. The GSA’s emphasis on both specificity and broadness, and its dedication to work connecting different branches of the academy, echoed some of the central tenets that German critical theory had embodied since its inception in the 1920s and that had motivated the Akademie to award the Freud Prize to Habermas. In this essay, I will probe this assumption in greater detail. In the essay’s first section, I return us to WAGS’s and GSA’s early years to explore the extent to which critical theory’s stress on collaborative work and synthetic cultural criticism indeed informed the association’s development. To expand and complicate matters, in section 2, I reconstruct the impact of French critical theory on WAGS and GSA convention programs and publication outlets during the 1970s and 1980s, and then—in section 3—I fast-forward the reader to the twenty-first century and discuss certain continuities and transformations in critical theory’s past and present place within the GSA. Beginnings in the 1970s Let us recall: In his famous essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” of 1937 Max Horkheimer, in his role as the head of the by then New York–based Institute of Social Research, defined critical theory as an exercise reflecting on theory’s own location in the historical process while being dedicated to the vision of a society overcoming the shackles of domination, capitalist exploitation, and the historical repression of nature. Unlike traditional theory and science, critical theory’s task was to understand the present, including the present of academic scholarship...