The Project of German Studies: Disciplinary Strategies and Intellectual Practices

Abstract

The Project of German Studies:Disciplinary Strategies and Intellectual Practices Celia Applegate (bio) and Frank Trommler (bio) In the late twentieth century, academics have often attached the label “project” to intellectual trends as if they had been planned and executed by some invisible command center—a Hegelian confirmation that even academic modes change according to emanations of the world spirit. Transformations in the study of the culture and history of German-speaking countries since the 1960s had no single animating spirit, but they did have common roots in dissatisfaction with existing arrangements and excitement about new paradigms. The consequence has been a set of far-reaching changes to the conduct and content of instruction and research into the twenty-first century. As “German studies” became a convenient general term for these changes, they took on the momentum of a project, equipped with trenchant assessments, strategic committees, task forces, inner-disciplinary confrontations, and organizational innovations. This article considers the intellectual forces shaping German studies during the last forty plus years. It delineates the different stages of this project within the context of tremendous transformations in American higher education during this period. The founding of the Western Association of German Studies (WAGS) in 1976—in 1983 renamed the German Studies Association (GSA) and extended to a North American constituency—helped to establish German studies as a multidisciplinary enterprise bringing together history and German. This constellation of disciplines followed the intentions of its founder, the historian of contemporary politics Gerald Kleinfeld, who balanced the organization’s journal, German Studies Review, between the two disciplines and formed early ties to political science, as well as subsequently to a host of other disciplines, including film studies, art history, theater, women’s studies, and economics.1 German studies in North America thus initially took the existence of disciplines as the basis for its activities. The nonsynchronic, asymmetrical development of disciplines is our point of departure for exploring the various and sometimes contradictory approaches to the subject matter of this “intradiscipline.” Interdisciplinary dialogue as such did not stand at the beginning but rather at a later stage of the story of what became known as German studies in this country. [End Page 471] History and German, the two disciplines in which American students studied German culture and history over many decades, have not always maintained a partnership within the American academy. The increasingly troubled relationship between North America and Germany became obvious during the two world wars. American historians of Germany could be mobilized to serve in intelligence services, whereas German scholars, many of whom were later recruited as Army language instructors during the war, kept a low profile for their core activities of teaching German and reading the classics. Perhaps these different effects resulted from the different standing of Germany in the education and cultural identity of Americans, or perhaps it reflected expediency and wartime policies. The postwar result, however, saw German history strengthened as an academic subject within departments of history but the once-influential German language and literature suffering the consequences of Nazi Germany’s infamy. These latter subjects fell from grace and into increasing irrelevance in the eyes of American students. The study of modern German history, in contrast, flourished in the guise of a morality tale about how modern institutions and economies could develop into barbarism under antidemocratic, antiliberal leadership. Its “universal significance” derived from its role as “the ‘other’ in the rise of a corporate pax americana and of ‘America’ as the imaginary fulfillment of the Western course of (liberal capitalist) development.”2 German émigré historians played a major part in nurturing German history in North America, and their approach tended to foster this moralizing version of German history, in which the rise of the United States became central not just to twentieth-century history but to that of Western civilization tout court. At the same time, even though the German language retained importance according to the country’s crucial role in America’s European commitments, German literature seemed increasingly of interest only to those who had continued to identify with it during the years of bitter confrontation, especially members of the educated middle classes in the Midwest where German-American...