German Studies Association Research Articles

Why Are We Having Different Experiences? Reflections of the GSA Committee on Institutional Transformation and Social Justice

Why Are We Having Different Experiences?Reflections of the GSA Committee on Institutional Transformation and Social Justice Tiffany Florvil (bio), Alicia E. Ellis (bio), Damani Partridge (bio), Eli Rubin (bio), and Chunjie Zhang (bio) In March 2020, a new GSA committee was formed to address the issues of unequal and troubling experiences, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color at the German Studies Association conferences. While we started with the well-known moniker, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), as we began to think beyond inclusion into the existing framework, we requested that our name be changed to the Committee for Institutional Transformation and Social Justice (ITSJ). The new name, we believe, better expresses the needs and the aspirations that we think the GSA as a whole should have. As we began the discussion about changing both our name and mission, Irene Kacandes was chair and Venkat Mani was an active participant. Damani Partridge was on the executive board and came to the committee to discuss the broader critique of "diversity" and "inclusion," particularly in contexts in which these practices and terms did not lead toward institutional transformation.1 Venkat Mani completed his term on the committee in 2021 before the GSA meeting of 2021, and Irene Kacandes completed her term shortly thereafter. Chunjie Zhang subsequently joined the committee in addition to Damani Partridge. Most recently, after the 2022 GSA meeting, we have added a graduate student representative, Sascha Daniels. Since its inception, the committee has held monthly meetings and undertaken multiple actions, with a particular emphasis on the annual GSA conferences in 2021 and 2022. We are most grateful to the editor of German Studies Review, Katharina Gerstenberger, for generously providing us this opportunity to report our past and current work and to continue to expound upon our perspectives for the future. We also invite feedback and comments from the international readership in and outside [End Page 117] of the United States to enrich our work and make the GSA an even better and more creative community that affirms the principles supporting BIPOC, LGBTQI+, and disability scholars. From the start, the committee decided to become more than mere window dressing. We are deeply aware that institutional transformation and social justice cannot and should not only be the committee's responsibility; rather, these efforts demand broad attention and more extensive support from the entire membership. We are, of course, extremely grateful for the numerous invaluable suggestions that we have received from diverse members. It is clear that GSA members have good intentions and offer generous resources such as time and experience so that they, too, participate in change that addresses our overarching concerns, which we will discuss in greater detail below. The committee understands itself as a bridge between the membership at large and the GSA executive board. We will help to identify and move forward the most urgent issues and work to identify solutions and other modes of redress. As an example of our ongoing work, in May 2020, we drafted a letter to the entire GSA membership in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. We also discussed how to have productive collaborations with other scholarly organizations in addressing threats to international students. In 2021, the committee invested most of its energy toward holding a plenary at the GSA conference with the title "From Intent to Action: Inclusionary Practices for the GSA." We offered the plenary as a hybrid event, and are grateful to the GSA leadership, in particular Benita Blessing and Margaret Menninger, for working with us to address the technological challenges. After a short introduction and personal testimonies about issues concerning general participation and experiences of harm at the GSA expressed by some committee members, including Irene Kacandes, Alicia Ellis, Eli Rubin, and Tiffany Florvil, we broke into four groups, three remained online and one in person. While we did not conduct an official count, we estimate that over one hundred conference participants joined the plenary. In 2022, the committee helped draft two statements addressing the war in Ukraine and nationwide anti-trans legislation. At the 2022 GSA conference in Houston, the committee organized the roundtable, Whose Body? Whose State? to address issues of abortion...

:Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsDreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor. Edited by Neil Gregor and Thomas Irvine. Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association, volume 18. Edited by David M. Luebke. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. Pp. xii+308. $135.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper and e-book).Anthony J. SteinhoffAnthony J. SteinhoffUniversité du Québec à Montréal Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 94, Number 4December 2022Families Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722189 Views: 20Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Introduction: Reexamining Turkish German Archive(s)

This cluster emerged from a GSA (German Studies Association) conference panel series that aimed to (re)examine the Turkish German archive by specifically taking into consideration developments since 2013. In line with this issue’s focus on “investigations into critical and artistic attempts to challenge conceptions of the archive as a static, objective site of knowledge,” contributions that follow engage with a variety of positions of archival engagement in the Turkish German context. The ensuing questions have guided our inquiry: How have recent (forced) migrations from Turkey impacted and transformed Germany’s cultural, institutional, political, and academic landscape? How do relocation, immigration, and exile figure thematically and conceptually? What kinds of exchanges with long-standing Turkish and Kurdish diasporic communities have occurred? Which collaborative efforts and interventions have emerged that promote “radical diversity” (Max Czollek) and highlight alliances across minoritized communities? How have discourses on dis/integration shifted through artistic collaborations (especially those taking new formats and modalities into account)? How do cultural practices engage multiple sites across borders? How are (post)migrant perspectives and positions changed, rejected or redefined? How do contemporary voices and practices connect to, or “open up old archives” and make the voices of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s “audible” (Utlu “Un/Sichtbar”)? In what ways do Turkish German archive(s) help us understand historical continuities and discontinuities and how does the recent wave of migration from Turkey alter our assessment of Germany’s “migrant archives” (Yildiz and Rothberg)?

Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements ed. by Karen Hagemann, Donna Harsch, and Friederike Brühöfener

Reviewed by: Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements ed. by Karen Hagemann, Donna Harsch, and Friederike Brühöfener Tiarra Cooper Karen Hagemann, Donna Harsch, and Friederike Brühöfener, editors. Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements. Berghahn Books, 2019. 408 pp. Paper, $145.00. Drawn from sixteen papers delivered at the 2015 German Studies Association conference, this five-part volume draws on Christoph Kleßmann's term entanglement in investigating the porous, divisive, and at times continuous national contours between West (FRG) and East (GDR) Germany. Composed of novel works by women and gender scholars, this collection contributes to growing scholarship that re-narrativizes German-German history as one that is both parallel and asymmetrically entangled. Looking to politics, culture, social movements, resistance, sexuality, and the media, this work probes these sites as shaped by gender. This volume's contributions bring to the surface the multifaceted ways in which East and West German family ideals—and, inherently, gender roles—were ubiquitous and influential; not only did they shape domestic policies, but they often constituted a marker of progress. [End Page 116] Whereas the socialist GDR touted the merits of a dual-earner family, its neighbor to the west sought a return to prewar values in promoting the male-breadwinner/female-homemaker model. These values are reflected in Jennifer Lynn's chapter, "Entangled Femininities: Contested Representations of Women in the East and West German Illustrated Press of the 1950s," which explores how West German magazines portrayed homemakers as universal, modern women. These depictions contrast with those in East German magazines, in which the female figure, imbued with ideological values, represented the progressive, superior counterpart to that in the West. These competing ideals are echoed in Leonie Treber's chapter, "The Big Cleanup: Men, Women, and Rubble Clearance in Postwar East and West Germany," in which she demonstrates that—in contrast to the widely circulated myth of the "rubble woman" of West Germany—it was in fact predominantly East German women who contributed to clearing rubble; officials in the West instead pursued stabilization of the family unit by returning to the male-breadwinner/female-homemaker model. Conversely, chapters in this collection highlight a unity between East and West German women in that—despite rhetoric—they all grappled with patriarchal gender norms in their everyday lives. The available avenues in which women were permitted to seek redress and political agency, however, emerged much differently on each side of the Iron Curtain. In "Domestic Abuse and Women's Lives: East and West Policies during the 1960s and 1970s," Jane Freeland explores how women, when confronted with violent home lives, sought rectification within the confines of their respective states. In the FRG, women located this violence as rooted in patriarchal inequality more generally and thematized domestic abuse in the women's movement, culminating in grassroots services and shelters. GDR officials, however, denounced domestic abuse as a capitalist relic antithetical to socialism. Though judges and courts—in addition to workplace collectives and marital-counseling services—condemned violence in the home, the disharmonious marriage became a question of the husband's commitment to socialism—not his propensity for violence. The instrumental power of state ideology in shaping women's rights to equality and citizenship reemerges in Alexandria Ruble's "Children, Church, and Rights: East and West German Protests against Family Law Reforms in the 1950s." Having inherited a 1900 Civil Code that relegated women to second-class citizens in matters of marriage, property, and parenting, both the FRG and GDR sought to reconcile state ideals with church advocacy [End Page 117] and demands for reform. East Germany, though having sought immediate reform to fulfill ideological promises of equality, eschewed public conflict and retired reform for ten years. In contrast, reform-minded FRG officials pushed reform through the delegation of a subcommittee in the interest of liberalization. This volume achieves a tremendous feat in its breadth, though its forte lies in its diverse contexts, uses, and understandings of gender—including its co-constituency with race and sexuality. Though extensive, its impressive scope can at times fall short due to gaps in scholarship—a shortcoming that the editors are transparent in conveying. While the absence of research on...

Art, Science, and the Paradox of Knowledge: Decolonizing the European Avant-Garde

Art, Science, and the Paradox of Knowledge:Decolonizing the European Avant-Garde Thomas O. Haakenson (bio) The 2021 GSA Distinguished Lecture In the Thick of German Studies: The GSA Distinguished Lecture Series As part of the German Studies Association's cooperation with the Free University of Berlin's Program for Advanced German and European Studies, it was both an honor and a pleasure to launch our winter semester 2020/21 with the GSA Distinguished Lecture by Thomas O. Haakenson, Associate Professor in Critical and Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts on October 20, 2021. In his timely contribution, Art, Science, and the Paradox of Knowledge: Decolonizing the European Avantgarde, Professor Haakenson offered critical reflections on the European avant-garde's role in conceptualizing Western knowledge since the mid-nineteenth century. Haakenson's presentation was the ninth in our annual Distinguished Lecture Series. Initiated by GSA long-time Executive Director David Barclay, the series is designed to feature outstanding research by GSA members at Free University of Berlin and to strengthen ties between scholars working in these fields. We have had the privilege of hosting distinguished speakers on a broad array of subjects and it was David Barclay who delivered the first lecture on "Old Glory und Berliner Bär. Die USA und West-Berlin 1948–1994" in 2013. Suzanne Marchand followed in 2014 exploring "Orientalism and the Classical Tradition in Germany." For 2015, Joy Calico spoke on "Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe: Musical Remigration and Holocaust Commemoration." Irene Kacandes took up another timely subject in 2016 and examined possibilities for "Memory Work for/ in the 21st Century." In her 2017 intervention "The Proletarian Prometheus," Sabine Hake applied the notion of cultural appropriation to examine the working class's use of bourgeois cultural tropes for political empowerment. Exploring the statue of a Hawaiian female deity in Berlin's ethnological collection, H. Glenn Penny engaged with the public controversies around ethnological museums in Europe in his 2018 contribution "Kihawahine: German Ethnology and its Histories of the World." Another compelling matter was taken up by Johannes von Moltke in 2019 who explored "The Meme is the Message: Alt-Right/Neue Rechte and the Political Affordances of Social Media." A strong case for considering Europe as a progressive alternative to Trump's America was made by historian Konrad H. Jarausch in his 2020 lecture "Embattled Europe: A Progressive Alternative." [End Page 329] The GSA Distinguished Lecture Series has given us much food for thought in the last decade and has served the program's central mission, to deepen the understanding of Germany and Europe in an exemplary way. Karin Goihl, Berlin Program Academic Coordinator, Free University of Berlin [End Page 330] The Wonderful World of Words My aunt Hiede Miyazaki was born in Kumamoto, Japan, on March 10, 1931. She was an excellent student, preparing at the end of World War II for college when her father passed away from cancer (Figure 1). At seventeen years old, she became the family's primary provider, often working several jobs and going hungry to support her mother, four siblings, and herself. Eventually, Hiede's English-language skills led to a position with the US Armed Forces at Camp Kumamoto and later on at both Itazuke Air Base in Fukuoka and Johnson Air Base in Tokyo. She continued her creative practice at the same time and became a skilled, much-sought-after Japanese Sumi-E artist, exhibiting widely and teaching classes in mainland Japan, the United States, Canada, and Germany. In the early 1960s, my Aunt Hiede met, and shortly thereafter married, my Uncle Gene. They were together for almost fifty-eight years. My first encounter with Germany, with German culture and the German language, was made possible thanks to my Aunt Hiede. In 1987, when I was fifteen years old, I flew to Germany to visit her and my Uncle Gene, who at the time lived in a small town in southern Germany near a US military base. I traveled alone transatlantically, with no German language skills and, quite frankly, a rather limited grasp of the English language as well. It was only my second time aboard an...

“Little History”: The Crisis in U.S. Academic History

A keynote speaker at the German Studies Association Conference in October 2013 was the renowned historian David Blackbourn, who—together with Geoff Eley—had originally made his reputation by challenging the well-entrenched Sonderweg interpretation of the course of modern German historical development. His keynote address, however, had the far less intellectually lofty, and certainly more humorous, title “Honey, I Shrunk German History.”1

Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger, eds. Views of Violence: Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials. Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association, Vol. 19

Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger, eds. <i>Views of Violence: Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials</i>. Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association, Vol. 19

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Confronting Hatred: Neo-Nazism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust Studies Today

ABSTRACT The six contributions to Volume 35, Number 2 of The Journal of Holocaust Research (2021), ‘Confronting Hatred: Neo-Nazism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust Studies Today,’ were first presented at events organized by Janet Ward (University of Oklahoma) and Gavriel Rosenfeld (Fairfield University), including a seminar at a conference of the German Studies Association (October 2019, in Portland, Oregon), and a roundtable at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting (January 2020, in New York City). By inviting a group of German and American scholars to collaborate and explore the complicated continuities between the fascist past and today, amid the rise of populism, racism, antisemitism, and white ethno-nationalism in the United States, Germany, and beyond, we deepened our collective understanding of the connections and challenges for our teaching, scholarship, and public outreach. Mindful of the need for a more effective scholar-activist approach, this JHR special issue offers the first grouping of research emanating from our discussions; and our other, equally urgent focus, ‘Fascism in America, Past and Present,’ is currently a work-in-progress (coedited by Gavriel Rosenfeld and Janet Ward).

Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany. By Elizabeth Harvey, Johannes Hürter, Maiken Umbach, and Andreas Wirsching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii+392. $120.00 (cloth); $96.00 (Adobe eBook Reader). Ruptures in the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground. Edited by Andrew Stuart Bergerson and Leonard Schmieding. Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association. Edited by David M.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPrivate Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany. By Elizabeth Harvey, Johannes Hürter, Maiken Umbach, and Andreas Wirsching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii+392. $120.00 (cloth); $96.00 (Adobe eBook Reader). Ruptures in the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground. Edited by Andrew Stuart Bergerson and Leonard Schmieding. Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association. Edited by David M. Luebke, volume 15. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. Pp. xii+330. $140.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).Michelle MoutonMichelle MoutonUniversity of Wisconsin Oshkosh Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 93, Number 1March 2021Travelers Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/712523 Views: 84Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany. Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and Joel F. Harrington, eds. Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association 20. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. x + 270 pp. $120.

Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany. Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and Joel F. Harrington, eds. Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association 20. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. x + 270 pp. $120. - Volume 74 Issue 1

Introduction: German Studies Go Global

This introduction to the special issue of Die Unterrichtspraxis, “Teaching German Studies in a Global Context,” discusses the origins and concept of this issue, which came out of an AATG‐sponsored seminar at the 2018 Annual Convention of the German Studies Association. It outlines both the questions with which seminar participants engaged over the course of three days and the loose definition of Global German Studies that arose out of the seminar. From there, it breaks down the issue into its areas of focus: looking back at the past, intercultural competence, globalizing German Studies at the undergraduate and graduate levels, decoupling language instruction from its traditional pairing with high culture, the engagement of high school teachers and university program directors with global German Studies, challenges faced by small programs, and rethinking how we engage with graduate students.

Archaeologies of confession. Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017. Edited by Carina L. Johnson, David M. Luebke, Marjorie E. Plummer and Jesse Spohnholz. (Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association, 16.) Pp. vi + 345 incl. 1 ill. New York–Oxford: Berghahn, 2017. £92. 978 1 78533 540 2

Archaeologies of confession. Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017. Edited by Carina L. Johnson, David M. Luebke, Marjorie E. Plummer and Jesse Spohnholz. (Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association, 16.) Pp. vi + 345 incl. 1 ill. New York–Oxford: Berghahn, 2017. £92. 978 1 78533 540 2 - Volume 70 Issue 2

A Multilingual Turn in German Studies: Premises, Provisos, and Prospects

In fall 2016, a group of scholars gathered at the 40th German Studies Association convention in San Diego, CA, in a space called the Eaton Room, for a seminar on multilingualism in German Studies. After three days sharing this space of dialogue, members returned home to their various teaching and research settings and, reflecting further on insights developed out of the group's collaborative work in the GSA seminar space, each formulated the maxims on multilingualism in German Studies presented in this article. Though the 10 subsections derive inevitably from the work and insights of these individual scholars and their programs of research, the entirety of the manuscript was counter‐read, commented, and emended by each member of the authorial collective, at several stages of the composition process, before and after blind peer‐review. Thus, in the spirit of collaborative inquiry – and indeed of multilingual practice itself – the members consider The Eaton Group to be the singular though multiple author of this piece. As such, The Eaton Group offer this collaboratively developed constellation of premises, provisos, and prospects for the future of multilingualism in German Studies teaching and research, not as a consistent and sequential protocol of directives but as a set of aspirations and provocations with which language, literature, and culture teachers may engage as they make their own curricular and pedagogical decisions.

How Great Wars End: Legacies and Lessons: German Studies Association Presidential Address 2018

How Great Wars End: Legacies and LessonsGerman Studies Association Presidential Address 2018 Mary Lindemann (bio) 2018 celebrated the centenary of the armistice that halted hostilities in WWI; it also marked the four-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. Such commemorative years offer the occasion for historical reflection and these two wars are no exception. There is, however, more reason to discuss the two wars and their aftermaths together, besides this convenient numerical coincidence of terminal digits. By examining the two "Great Wars" in tandem, I want to suggest ways in which scholars of both the modern and early modern worlds can benefit from each other's insights and bridge the divide that putatively separates them. In many ways, of course, the two wars could not have been more different. World War I (at least in Europe) was an industrialized war, of comparatively short duration, fought by national, often conscripted, armies, and pitted the nineteenth-century "isms"—nationalism, liberalism, socialism (and later Bolshevism)—and the great nineteenth-century powers against each other; it was also, for that matter, a world war or even a global conflict.1 The Thirty Years' War was, of course, eponymously long, yet neither a war of nations, nor ideologies, nor global. Thus, putting them in bed with one another may seem like creating a particularly unhappy relationship. These rather striking differences may be, however, as I argue here, not so striking as they first seem, especially when one considers not only the conflicts themselves but also their aftermaths and legacies. Of course, there has long existed a tradition of using the Great War of the seventeenth century to understand and contextualize events in subsequent German history, in ways that move far beyond the interpretation that the war contributed to German backwardness and set it early onto a separate and disastrous path: the Sonderweg. Still, and even if the historical memory of the Thirty Years' War may have become attenuated by the more recent, if not necessarily greater horrors of World War I and World War II,2 that of the Peace of Westphalia has not; in 2018 it became the Liebling (favored theme) of historians, politicians, and political pundits alike (in ways that the Treaty of Versailles certainly has failed to do). Just twenty-four hours after President Trump announced that the United States would pull out of the Iran nuclear [End Page 339] agreement (ironically on V-E Day), the political scientist/historian Herfried Münkler, in an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau, spoke of the Peace of Westphalia as a "success story" bearing lessons for peacemakers in today's Middle East.3 Münkler is not alone, by any means, in turning to that seventeenth-century European peace for guidance in seeking to solve the problems of today's world.4 At a podium discussion earlier that year, the then Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, suggested that "the Near East today needs a Westphalian peace," based on the principles of religious freedom, tolerance, and federalism.5 I hardly wish to review the lengthy debates on the Peace of Westphalia or assess its value as a model for solving contemporary problems; I will leave these debates and proposals to political scientists and policy makers and wish them well.6 I remain skeptical, however, that many of the lessons learned from that great peace will allow us to deal more effectively with current dilemmas. George Santayana's striking, and almost invariably misquoted, phrase—"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"7—has encouraged many facile conclusions and, unwittingly, perpetuated much foolishness. I have no desire to add to them by arguing that the history of the Thirty Years' War is a reliable guide through tangled contemporary political quandaries. Even the most subtle attempts to draw relevance from the peace concluded in 1648 will inevitably founder on the hidden sharp rocks of context and contingency. Moreover, the Peace of Westphalia and the much-praised "Westphalian settlement" have not been universally admired. In 1998 (another anniversary year), the then-secretary-general of NATO, Javier Solana, pointed out "the Westphalian system had its limits. … [Its] principle of sovereignly … also produce...

German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene ed. by Heather I. Sullivan and Caroline Schaumann

Reviewed by: German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene ed. by Heather I. Sullivan and Caroline Schaumann Timothy Attanucci Heather I. Sullivan and Caroline Schaumann, eds. German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 348 pp. The title of this volume of collected essays is as programmatic as it is succinct. The adjective "German" marks the disciplinary purview of the essays, which emerged from several conference panels organized by the Trans-Atlantic Network in the Environmental Humanities at the University of Washington and the Environmental Studies Network of the German Studies Association. More than a territorial demarcation, however, this disciplinary choice reflects the editors' desire to correct the historical belatedness of German Studies (or Germanistik) in embracing ecocriticism. As one can read in the preface by Americanist Ursula K. Heise and in the editors' introduction, "ecocriticism" first appeared in Anglo-Saxon contexts, and the reasons for Germany's hesitation are varied. Among other things, Heise suggests that the German tradition lacks the genre of "nature writing," but also that its ecological traditions are both burdened with the loaded history of concepts like Heimat and benefit from significant media resonance and political outlets (i.e., the Green Party), whose failure in the American context may explain a complementary boom in US-academic activism. [End Page 336] As the editors point out, however, "the concept of 'nature' has a long-standing and important tradition in German literature, though only few scholars have critically investigated the approaches, definitions, and ramifications of 'nature' in German texts in a theoretical and sustained manner" (11). If this is the case, then, as the editors readily admit, the situation is rapidly changing. In the German context, for example, two introductions to ecocriticism (Bühler, 2016; Dürbeck and Stobbe, 2015) now compete with several other collected volumes (Goodbody and Rigby, 2011; Wilke and Frost, 2013; Duerbeck et al., 2017; Novero, Obermayer, and Barton, 2017). Indeed, another volume published in 2017, Readings in the Anthropocene, edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone, also takes up the term "Anthropocene," which has become increasingly popular as a designation for our current state of environmental crisis. The preface and the introduction of this volume make a compelling case that the "Anthropocene"—an as yet unofficial epoch of geological time first popularized by Paul Crutzen, and now approved by a special working group of the International Union of Geologic Sciences—presents a significant challenge to environmental thinking and "ecocriticism" alike. In short, accepting that human activity has left a permanent geological record undermines the distinction between a human "inside" and an environmental "outside." We can thus no longer simply "critique" the human relationship to nature, imagined as an ecology without humans, nor the destruction of the environment, imaged as a space surrounding humanity. Or as Heise argues in her frequently cited monograph (Sense of Place; 2010), the Anthropocene forces a transition from a "sense of place" to a "sense of planet." In her preface here, Heise proposes that this "sense of planet" implies a provocation for cultural studies, which until now have relied on a notion of culture delineated by language, tradition, or nation. Without closing itself off to the global impact of the Anthropocene, the essays collected here meet the challenge of demonstrating the value of recognizing cultural specificity—in this instance, German, Swiss, and Austrian specificities, which are often engaged in complex forms of communication with other cultures. The first part of this book takes up the notion of "place" as an organizing principle. In her essay, "The Dark Pastoral: A Trope for the Anthropocene," Heather I. Sullivan argues that the literary category of the pastoral not only still has relevance for ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, but also can serve as a litmus test for the literary history of this new epoch. In tracing the "dark" side, or the "darkening" of the pastoral from Goethe to Storm and Trojanow, Sullivan shows how the growing consciousness of ecological change impacts the German cultural imagination of the idyllic "restriction" (Jean Paul) of ecological places. Simon Richter likewise situates Goethe as the starting point of an Anthropocene, but his "ecoliguistic" approach introduces an innovative marker of cultural change: in the semantic differentiation of...

The Future of Central European Studies

It is obviously difficult to envision the future of Central European studies with any precision. The broader context that surrounds historians, as well as scholars in other disciplines, influences the topics and methodologies they choose. In recent years (i.e., the post-1990, neoliberal era), transnational, global, and imperialism studies have had a significant impact on the historical profession at large. As David Blackbourn observed in a 2013 address to the German Studies Association, ambitious “deep history” projects that cut across multiple cultures and historical periods have recently thrived, prompting him to encourage historians of Germany to push beyond their narrow graduate training and embrace such undertakings. To be sure, historians of Central Europe have adapted to prevailing trends in the discipline (discussed later), but concerns about the chronological, spacial, methodological, and topical limitations of the field have arisen. Even if scholars of Central Europe utilize different methodologies and approaches, they rarely pioneer. Rather, they latch onto the innovations that other fields have spawned instead of breaking new ground.

Foreign Relations: Where Germans Sell

By now there is not much resistance to the notion that historians of modern Germany should pay heed to events outside the borders of theReichor nation-state (though, even now, Austria and Switzerland often remain an afterthought). At the 2006 annual conference of the German Studies Association in Pittsburgh, Michael Geyer spoke of transnational history as “the new consensus.” His keynote address bore the title “Where Germans Dwell”—a clear indication that the subject matter of German history must include transplants such as Jürgen Klinsmann and Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as the German diaspora of prior centuries. In keeping with this agenda, H. Glenn Penny has played a significant role in organizing scholarship on Germans abroad, whereas Kira Thurman is exploring how African Americans experienced German musical culture. The scope of transnational German history remains vast.

Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830 by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, and: Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson

Reviewed by: Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830 by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, and: Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson Heidi Schlipphacke Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830. By Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016. Pp. x + 202. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1571139597. Goethe’s Families of the Heart. By Susan E. Gustafson. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. vii + 199. Cloth $105.60. Paper $39.95. ISBN 978-1501315763. The topics of family and kinship have recently enjoyed a renaissance in German studies in light of new approaches to thinking about the relationship between the family model and the state. The shifting contours of modern familial and marriage paradigms, evident in recent legislation supporting marriage equality for same-sex couples, have surely informed reconsiderations of the nuclear family and its origins in the eighteenth century. In addition, the enhanced visibility of both nonbiological affective communities (adoptive, increasingly international, and even virtual) and purely biological relationships (for example, sperm donor families in which members have no connection beyond the biological) spurs us to rethink assumptions about the simple mapping of the nuclear family onto the (imagined) state in the German Enlightenment. For the past few years the German Studies Association has hosted a “Family and Kinship” network that has provided a highly productive forum for new reflections on the shifting connections between blood ties, economics, and politics in German-speaking countries. Sarah Eldridge’s and Susan Gustafson’s books respond to this call for nuance and reconsideration of the definition and function of “family” in the eighteenth century. Both Eldridge and Gustafson have chaired the “Family and Kinship” network, and each has written a book that intervenes in crucial ways with cutting-edge discussions about the intersection of family, economics, politics, and aesthetics. In Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830, Eldridge offers a nuanced study of the ways in which the form of the novel mirrors, responds to, and, in turn, helps shape conceptions about family and generation that emerged in the German states around 1800. Gustafson focuses explicitly on seminal works by Goethe: one play (Stella [1775]) and three important novels (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [1795], [End Page 158] Die Wahlverwandtschaften [1809], and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre [1821]), in order to elegantly show us how anathema these works are to any restrictive notion of love. On the contrary, Gustafson convincingly argues, Goethe’s works are not only nontraditional in their critical representation of nuclear families, they are likewise radically progressive (perhaps more so than our present age) in their consistently positive depiction of nontraditional affective bonds, including same-sex, polyamorous, and adoptive ones. In this sense, Gustafson’s monograph could be seen as a companion to Astrida Tantillo’s Goethe’s Modernisms (2010), in which Tantillo forcefully argues for the presciently modern nature of Goethe’s views on economics, education, and religion. Interestingly, although Eldridge’s work is not focused on Goethe per se, she concludes Novel Affinities with a beautifully astute interpretation of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, drawing out the ways in which it offers a subtle metareflection on the relationship between the genre of the novel and shifting notions of generation and testament—two concepts central to any understanding of the family. Eldridge shows convincingly in clear prose how we must think through the form of the novel together with that of the nuclear family, two “genres,” we might say, that are linked to emerging notions of subjectivity around 1800. Eldridge is particularly sensitive to the ways in which the novel—itself a malleable genre that becomes, as Eldridge argues, reflexive almost the minute it emerges as a dominant literary form—invites its readers to what she calls “imaginative engagement” with its material and form. The novel around 1800, she shows quite elegantly, is a literary genre that is not only concerned with the interior development of its protagonists but also with conceptions of generation and testament that are at the core of the bourgeois subject’s understanding of him/herself in the early nineteenth century. What is more, precisely by focusing on generation and testament, two concepts that link the...

Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017. Carina L. Johnson, David M. Luebke, Marjorie E. Plummer, and Jesse Spohnholz, eds. Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association 16. New York: Berghahn, 2017. vi + 346 pp. $130.

Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017. Carina L. Johnson, David M. Luebke, Marjorie E. Plummer, and Jesse Spohnholz, eds. Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association 16. New York: Berghahn, 2017. vi + 346 pp. $130. - Volume 71 Issue 3