For Want of a Word ...: The Case for Germanophone

Abstract

For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost ... runs the traditional children's rhyme. In what follows, I would like to argue that another such nail is missing in German-language literary and cultural studies: the term germanophone, a word that needs to be coined and put into use as a parallel to the widely-accepted anglophone and francophone.1 In English and French studies, the adjectives anglophone and francophone have seen broad use, referring to those cultural groups and literatures using the respective languages, but not representing a predominantly European frame of reference. The very existence of the adjectives implies that anglophone and francophone cultures are postcolonial, tied to a past of conquest by the European powers; the terms, however, also imply that the colonial legacy of language and culture has been appropriated by various colonized peoples and used for their own purposes after official decolonization. At times, the use of these terms is also tied to the psychology of the colonial legacy: first, as Frantz Fanon outlines, the native other was inferior to the colonizer's hegemonic culture. After official decolonization, the question of otherness persists as a cultural legacy within the colony itself. Yet the term germrnanophone does not exist. The essay that follows will outline what the lack of that term implies for the present state of German cultural and literary studies. That is, it will argue that the present practice of German studies in any of its recent incarnations still bears unmistakable