German Studies in the Post-Holocaust Age: The Politics of Memory, Identity, and Ethnicity

Abstract

Del Caro, Adrian, and Janet Ward, eds. German Studies in the Post-Holocaust Age: The Politics of Memory, Identity, and Ethnicity. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2000. 244 pp. $55.00 hardcover. Paperback edition, 2003. 262pp. $21.95. German Studies, the editors of this volume assert, is in crisis. Enrollments in German majors and German courses are in decline and the number of K-12 students learning German has dropped precipitously. To readers of this journal, the alarm has been heard before. The editors argue, however, that the way out involves embracing the multi-ethnicity of German-speaking literature and facing the cataclysm of Germany's twentieth-century legacy, particularly the Holocaust. They also urge more English-language courses and greater inter-disciplinarity within a German Studies curriculum. The essays, selected proceedings of a symposium held at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1995, suggest the possibilities of a post-Holocaust German Studies. The symposium was also meant to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the death camps and the end of the vicious war in Europe unleashed by Nazi Germany. As in many volumes of collected essays, the contributions are of unequal quality and design, ranging from Walter Sokel's astute reflections on Heidegger's understanding of Being and Kari Grimstad's informative narrative about Germanistik in Canada to essays that rarely stray outside a predictable post-Holocaust canon. There are twenty-three essays in all and they are divided into four sections: cultural philosophy and ideologies of identity; post-Holocaust identity debates; poetry and images after Auschwitz; and sites of meta-German multiplicity. The latter category mainly refers to the special relationship of German literature and German studies outside the Federal Republic. Of the twenty three contributors, eighteen are from the field of German literature proper, three are historians, one is a political scientist and one is a novelist. Seven of the contributors teach at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Of the eighteen Germanists, only one teaches in the Federal Republic of Germany. The distribution of contributors means that German studies is largely read through the interpretive prism of German departments in North America. Because the essays tend to be short, many of them might be described as either translations of German debates for American audiences or interventions in these debates. Representative of the first genre is Andreas Michel's clear presentation of the controversial position of the GermanJewish patriot and historian Michael Wolfsohn, who consciously eschews a hyphen in his self-attribution; or Thomas Hollweck's resume of the debate over unification among leading German intellectuals. …