Critique of Identity Formation: Toward an Intercultural Model of German Studies

Abstract

In 1933, Germanistik in Germany was redesignated Deutschkunde and converted to Deutschwissenschaft als Organ des deutschen Selbstverst.indnisses.' It thus came to serve, rather than to record and analyze, the formation of a national identity as it was conceived by the same ideologues for whom the parallel redesignation of Literaturkritik as Schrifttumsbetrachtung was not merely a question of nomenclature. Germanistik was assigned the new task of not only exploring, but also of promoting Germanity. Deutschtum emerged as the unconditionally accepted litmus test in dealing with all German language, literature, and history. If the nominal expulsion of criticism from literary criticism was to be a prerequisite for national identity, it could be carried out only through the actual expulsion of the critics themselves, who would neither apply nor pass the test. Underlying the suppression of criticism was an affirmative concept of culture that served to strengthen and justify the new power structure, as prescribed patterns of thought usually tend to serve the status quoboth before and after the Third Reich and inside as well as outside Germany. For this reason it is necessary to proceed very carefully whenever the subjects, objectives, and methods of Germanistik are coupled with the problematic complex of German identity. Since the following remarks are aimed at a critical inversion of this coupling, it is even more important to be on guard against the possibility of false connotations. This caution seems appropriate even in the United States where the quest for a particularly German identity has less cause and no institutional support. The caution may even be necessary in a country where the national agenda has not become as radically implausible as it has in German history. In the United States, the general sense of historical continuity and national pride would hardly encourage the kind of reflection upon cultural ideology that directed the German mind through the long series of political, military, economic, and moral crises. The German experience of crises and breaches may indeed present itself as an extreme foil against which even non-German phenomena could gain clearer contours, allowing a more critical stance. Thus intercultural comparison has a heuristic value pertaining also to the methodology of German Studies, to which the present considerations are intended to contribute. It appears that the concept of education underlying the training of German teachers in the United States before World War I did not differ fundamentally from the nationalist claim promoted in Germany in the interest of identity formation. An excerpt from the Monatshefte fiir den deutschen Unterricht published in Wisconsin in 1908 serves as an example of the wide-spread expectation that teachers of German would completely and without any criticism identify with the target culture: