Of Walls and Windows: What German Studies and Comparative Literature Can Offer Each Other

Abstract

Although this essay will focus on German studies, the case of German is in many ways representative of the situations of other European languages or commonly taught languages, as contrasted with so-called critical languages such as Sanskrit, Urdu, or Basque. Moreover, if current enrollment trends continue, as documented for instance by Bettina Huber and Richard Brod in the Winter 1997 issue of the ADFL Bulletin (55), German, along with Russian, Italian, Latin, and even French, may soon become critical languages, i.e. taught only rarely. Some of the following remarks will touch on ways we might prevent, and are already working to prevent, this development from occurring. The image of walls in the title of this essay is meant to allude to the occasional insularity, even chauvinism, of German as a literary discipline. There have been times when the study of German literary history (Germanistik) has built walls around itself, walls impenetrable or at best impermeable, for example, during the Wilhelmine era (the period from 1871, when the first German nation was founded with Bismarck as chancellor and Wilhelm I as