Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik. Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika by Frank Trommler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik. Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika by Frank Trommler Stephen Brockmann Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik. Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika. By Frank Trommler. Vienna: Böhlau, 2022. Pp. 384. Hardcover €28.00. ISBN 978-3412525422. Frank Trommler’s beautifully illustrated tome is both an autobiography and a personal history of German studies in the United States over the course of the last six decades. As someone who served as president of the GSA at the moment of German reunification, who organized the humanities program of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, D.C., from the early 1990s into the twenty-first century, and who played a central role in planning the academic commemoration of the three-hundredth anniversary of German immigration to North America in 1983, Trommler is uniquely placed to offer insights into the ways that the field has changed. These changes are both positive and negative. When Trommler arrived in the United States from West Germany in the 1960s, “German studies” did not exist, and the most influential practitioners of Germanistik, defined primarily as the study of canonical German-language literature, formed an “old boys network” that came together every year in December for the MLA convention. That “old boys network” was, to a large extent, dominated by white, male, German-speaking immigrants from Central Europe, many of whom had fled from the predations of the Nazi dictatorship. During his first decades in the United States, Trommler witnessed the final flowering of that approach to Germanistik. At the same time, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, he fought for and helped to ensure the breakthrough of a more comprehensive, historically and politically oriented approach to the German-speaking world, one that brought historians together with literary scholars. Their most important institutional foundation was the GSA, a product of the 1970s that was originally called the Western Association for German Studies (WAGS) before its name changed to the current one in 1983. The transformation in the field also brought with it increasing diversification, as more and more women began to take on leading roles, feminist scholarship grew and flourished, and the definition of “German” was broadened to include more than just traditional ethnic Germans but also multiculturalism, hybridity, migration, etc. The field also became increasingly “Americanized,” i.e., less dominated by Germanistik [End Page 340] as practiced in Germany and Austria and more focused on its position within the US academy and in dialog with American colleagues in other disciplines such as English and history. Paradoxically, this “Americanization” of German studies was also championed by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which had a keen interest in preserving the relevance of Germany and German culture for an American audience. All of those developments were always threatened by the fundamental fact that Germany is a long way away from the United States, and that the humanities generally, as well as foreign languages and cultures, including German, are relatively marginal. Even within the MLA, the English language and British, American, and Canadian literature dominate. During the Cold War, German and other foreign language fields profited from a Cold War bonus, and even after German reunification, the field of German profited temporarily from renewed interest among American college students. However, in the long run, the end of the Cold War led to declining interest in European languages and cultures, including German. The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, only exacerbated this problem, and Trommler notes the way that US and European attitudes differed radically in the wake of that event: “The Americans are from Mars, the Europeans from Venus” (335–336, a reference to a book by Robert Kagan published shortly after 9/11). As a result of all these developments, as well as others, American interest in central Europe generally, and in German-speaking culture specifically, radically declined after 9/11, and it has continued to decline. Therefore, although the field of German studies has become more diversified and open, it has also become less central to US intellectual life, even within an academic setting. The field has been diversified but also, at the very same time...