German Studies Association Research Articles

The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments (review)

Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments Rolf J. Goebel The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments. Edited by Anke Finger and Danielle Follett. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pp. viii + 469. US $90.00. ISBN 978-0801895821. For many years now, concepts of visuality have stood at the fore of German cultural studies, centered on film, architecture, digital media, and so forth. As a result, visuality has tended to decenter script/writing/book culture from its traditional role as the hegemonic purveyor of aesthetic value, truth, and morality. Visuality seems also to have overshadowed its disciplinary Other, the aesthetics of music, and more generally, of sound. Only more recently has music left its comparatively marginal position in cultural studies, with musicologists assuming a more prominent role in fields outside their own academic discipline. (The German Studies Association Conference, for instance, every year features an impressive number of music-related panels.) Conversely, literary and cultural critics have steadily ventured into musical terrain, addressing interrelations between language, hermeneutics, and music (Albrecht Wellmer), Gustav Mahler and Jewish identity (Carl Niekerk), the Second Viennese School and New Music in twentieth-century fiction (Florian Trabert), and even the cultural perception and erotics of four-hand piano playing (Adrian Daub). The present volume on the aesthetic legacy of the total artwork is another welcome [End Page 413] addition to the field of musical culture studies. It traces the multiple and often contradictory affiliations of Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk concept with a wide range of other musical forms, literary movements, and political ideologies. The case of Wagner, of course, has become a synecdoche for the highly productive but deeply troubled trajectory of German music. Pushing late-romantic chromaticism beyond itself through a utopian program of artistic redemption and aurally overwhelming audience effects, Wagner’s multimedia art renewed musical language and performance practices in lasting ways even while suffering the fate, despite the composer’s own socialist leanings, of being misappropriated by the fascist aestheticization of political ideology. Responding to such contradictory tendencies within Wagner’s artwork project, the editors’ introduction outlines some of the volume’s guiding principles. The total artwork is seen as an internally dynamic and self-proliferating set of aesthetic possibilities, rather than as a strict program confined to Wagner’s own intentions and cultural context. It has no stable identity, but “describes an uneven cluster of aesthetic elements that can be regarded as common to some quite disparate artistic endeavors” (2). Although rooted in romanticism and its dialectic preoccupation with the fragment, as well as the infinite reunification of the dispersed forms of individual arts, the artwork concept reappears in “recurring debates on the autonomy of media and on the relation of art to life” (2), displaying an “aesthetic ambition to borderlessness” that encompasses a variety of artistic, political, and metaphysical levels (3–4). Ably discussed by the contributors, the reappearances, actualizations, reversals, and echoes of the artwork in other contexts seem to turn the Gesamtkunstwerk almost into a veritable master-concept of (post)romantic and (neo–)avant-garde aesthetics. It relates to romanticist variations of totality (Olivier Shefer) and the aesthetics of the fragment from Friedrich Schlegel to Thomas Bernhard (Justus Fetscher), but also inspires a passionate plea for new aesthetic unity (Jürgen Söring) even while being affiliated with the aesthetics of chance (Danielle Follett). It resounds in conceptual art (Anke Finger), interactive multimedia (Randall Packer) and avant-garde theatre (Christiane Heibach), in the image totality of Carl Einstein and Paul Klee (Reto Sorg), Expressionist architectural utopias (Maria Stavrinaki), the avant-garde projects of László Moholy-Nagy (Joyce Tsai), and even in polyglot poetry (Rainer Guldin). Last but not least, the Gesamtkunstwerk idea has of course affected newer developments in musical aesthetics itself, such as Arnold Schönberg’s (Simon Shaw-Miller) and, mostly in negative terms, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s (Ivanka Stoianova). The volume reflects the challenge besetting all such reception studies: how to perform a methodological tightrope dance between the open sea of salutary border-crossings and the abyss of complacent anything-goes relativism. Anchored, on the one hand, in a precise reconstruction of Wagner’s aesthetics...

Note from the Editor

Note from the Editor Sabine Hake With this issue, a new editorial team is taking responsibility for putting together the German Studies Review. I feel honored to have been selected in 2010 as the incoming editor by a search committee of the German Studies Association (GSA), and I will work hard to fulfill the high expectations and great responsibilities placed upon me. Over the next five years, I hope we can make the journal the leading venue for the interdisciplinary project of German studies. As evidenced by the different look of the journal, the change in editorship also brings with it a new working relationship between Johns Hopkins University Press and the German Studies Association. While the redesign of the journal’s interior and exterior and its annually changing colors pay homage to modern German design, including Bauhaus textile design and Edition Suhrkamp’s famous rainbow colors, the association with one of the most respected American university presses will allow us to benefit from the fundamental changes in publishing, including through Project Muse. Two colleagues are now in charge of the book review section, Andrew Port of Wayne State University, who is responsible for books on history, sociology, and political science, and Carl Niekerk of the University of Illinois, who is responsible for books on literature, film, musicology, and art history. Henceforth the book review section will feature a substantial review essay and a smaller number of longer reviews. Similarly, a new editorial board has been chosen to reflect the range of disciplines and perspectives represented in the GSA and now includes, for example, art historians and younger members who, after all, are the future of the association. We will continue to make every possible effort to serve the interests of the entire membership and to broaden the reach and scope of the journal. We hope to make the German Studies Review a showcase for the diverse topics and methodologies presented at the GSA’s annual conventions and to contribute actively to major trends in historical, literary, filmic, musicological, sociological, political science, and art historical scholarship. But we need your submissions and contributions to realize that ambitious goal. This transition is an appropriate moment to thank the previous editor, Diethelm Prowe of Carleton College, and book review editor, Elizabeth Ametsbichler of the University of Montana, for their many years of outstanding service to the journal and the association. We owe them all an enormous debt of gratitude. This and the next issue will still feature articles and reviews accepted during their editorship; marking the transition on the programmatic level, the third issue of volume 35 will include a series of position statements by members of the new editorial board. Please join me in thanking all colleagues who have agreed to volunteer their time as book review editors or editorial board members. We intend to serve you and the field well and hope that in the coming years you will consider publishing the results of your research in German Studies Review. [End Page x] Sabine Hake University of Texas at Austin Copyright © 2012 German Studies Association

The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity (review)

Reviewed by: The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity Yves Laberge The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity. Edited by Arnold D. Richards. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2010. Pp. viii +196. Paper $45.00. ISBN 978-0786444243. Scholarship on Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is rich and abundant, but countless dimensions still have to be studied. This impressive collection presents fourteen essays on Jewish identity, based on Freud’s writings on art, culture, history, myth, religions, and the unconscious. Most chapters quote from Freud’s essays, articles, and correspondence, with a clear preference for what would become his last book, Moses and Monotheism (1939), which is cited in almost every chapter. Like many studies on Freud’s works and ideas, this overlooked book is fascinating because it explores various facets within and outside psychoanalysis. Of course, this book is not the first to focus on Freud’s religious and cultural roots: the salient writings of Martin Bergmann on Freud’s Jewish identity are also mentioned (Salberg 6). Topics are varied: the influence of classical Greek culture on the young Freud, modernism, antisemitism in Austria, the early critique of psychoanalysis in Austrian media, Freud’s introduction to “The Moses of Michelangelo,” the links between Freud and Lévinas, Freud’s exile in London (from June 5, 1938), and finally suicidality in Freud’s life and work (171). In a chapter dedicated to “Freud’s Theory of Jewishness,” Eliza Slavet argues that the main question in Moses and Monotheism was “how and why individuals have been regularly convinced that they are Jewish and that they should practice Jewish traditions even as the ‘Jewish tradition’ does not itself satisfy any ‘material needs’” (98). The contributors’ approaches are often interdisciplinary, because Freud’s thoughts were in essence linked with an impressive number of domains. For example, Freud was aware that his own descriptive work on the psychoanalytic process during the cure was somewhat like writing a literary work in terms of narratives: according to Jill Salberg, “As early as the Studies in Hysteria, Freud writes that many of his case histories read like short stories, suggesting his awareness of the literary, associative, narrative quality of how people experience and speak about their lives” (5). Other chapters refer to Freud’s works on art, history, religion, and of course psychoanalysis. In terms of group identity, many contributors seem to agree that “Freud was a typical Viennese Jew” (e.g. 22, 35). However, it is obvious that the Viennese social context with its Christian dominant culture and Jewish minority culture influenced Freud’s worldview, subjectivity, theories, and writings (Salberg 5). By developing theories through cases and examples inspired by his everyday life and his patients’ experiences, he testified as well about his society and his own intimate, inner life. In other words, “Freud offered his memories and dreams as data for his own theories” (Salberg 5). [End Page 201] The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud is an important book because it links science to culture and religion, even though Freud was not a “believer.” For readers unfamiliar with Freud’s method or with psychoanalysis in general these essays are a treat, and can be read without any prerequisites since there is very little discussion related to the unconscious and Freudian theory. On the other hand, students will find here some interesting discussions about German and Austrian culture and collective identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Even for those who are resistant to psychoanalysis, these essays will be instructive because they aptly illustrate the importance and the solid ground of Freud’s thinking outside the domain for which he was famous. Yves Laberge Université de Haute-Bretagne Copyright © 2012 German Studies Association

Verdrängter Terror: Geschichte und Wahrnehmung sowjetischer Speziallager in Deutschland (review)

Reviewed by: Verdrängter Terror: Geschichte und Wahrnehmung sowjetischer Speziallager in Deutschland Katrin Paehler Verdrängter Terror: Geschichte und Wahrnehmung sowjetischer Speziallager in Deutschland. By Bettina Greiner. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010. Pp. 524. Cloth €35.00. ISBN 978-3868542172. Bettina Greiner’s book on the Soviet “special camps” in postwar Germany masterfully combines extensive primary research with a deep knowledge of the existing scholarship, thereby creating a lengthy monograph of great import that calls into question common assumptions about the nature of these special camps and their prisoners. The book also asks pertinent questions about their place, or lack thereof, in Germany’s contentious historiography. Bracketed by a well-conceived introduction and a short but thoughtful conclusion that strives to locate these special camps in the history of twentieth-century camp systems, the book consists of three lengthy parts. The first deals with internments and Soviet military tribunals (SMT) in the Soviet Occupational Zone. Its focus is on Soviet intent; accordingly, it is based on Soviet documents, where available, or on largely successful attempts to discern Soviet intent from the results of its policies. The second section, which relies on the prisoners’ accounts, deals with the experiences of those interned and those sentenced by SMTs. The last section considers the memories of imprisonment and their place in Germany’s many debates about history and memory, as well as German guilt and victimhood. The last section in particular is persuasive due to the author’s keen eye for detail and a finely tuned ear for discursive nuance. Greiner is most assertive in her argument that internments, trials, and eventual imprisonments in the Soviet Occupation Zone had nothing to do with de-Nazification. Internments and imprisonments after trials were not two separate issues, as many scholars commonly assume, but two separate expressions of the same basic issue: Soviet security concerns. The Soviets prioritized the security of their occupational regime above all other considerations, an approach that included prophylactic security measures and that was driven by short-term political needs and “Chekist logic.” Greiner argues that there was no particular interest in finding and punishing NS perpetrators, even though Nazis were, of course, among the camp inmates. The age structure of those who were interned and those who were sentenced by SMTs is illuminating in this context. The former, who were also released earlier, tended to be older and were thus more likely to have had an official function in Nazi [End Page 213] Germany. Men and women tried and sentenced by the SMTs tended to be younger, and while most of them had been organized in the Hitler Youth or League of German Girls (BDM), very few—if any—had held any positions of responsibility. The Soviet occupational forces nevertheless saw in those youngsters a security threat to the occupation regime. De-Nazification was clearly not the primary purpose of the system. Indeed, the Soviets’ interest in the prisoners ended with their imprisonment. There was also no official interest in putting the prisoners to work or adequately provisioning them, although it should be noted that food was scarce everywhere at this time. It is indeed a cruel joke that life in the camps improved after they came under the jurisdiction of the Gulag in the summer of 1948. Greiner’s attempt to provide a dense description of camp experiences is laudable, but the accounts she uses seem curiously uniform and strangely anecdotal. Yet the uniformity of the accounts, which Greiner relates to the former prisoners’ attempts to find a place to express their experiences and memories, is the focus of the book’s thought-provoking third section. It is a study of ambivalence and of the inability of most of the former prisoners and their putative audiences to negotiate the ambivalent meanings of these crimes, camps, and victims in a meaningful form. Katrin Paehler Illinois State University Copyright © 2012 German Studies Association

Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism (review)

Reviewed by: Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism Andrea Gogröf-Voorhees Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism. By Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek. London: Continuum, 2009. Pp. 202. Cloth $24.95. ISBN 978-1441191052. The fetching title of this book is misleading. Those who are interested in learning about mythology, laughter, and madness as constitutive concepts defining German Idealism are in for a challenging surprise. This book, divided into three parts (part one by Markus Gabriel, parts two and three by Slavoj Žižek), with each part divided into essays of unequal length, is for specialists of German Idealism exclusively. Academics with background knowledge only will gain, perhaps, some small insights of value concerning the debate between the (post)modern ontological argument and the one supporting traditional epistemology. The main argument, however, gets lost through Gabriel and Žižek’s conceptual virtuosity. Here is just one example: “The weird sounding syntagm ‘coefficient of adversity’ belongs to G. Bachelard who reproached Husserl’s phenomenology with ignoring the inertia of objects resisting subjective appropriation in its notion of noematic objectivity as constituted by the transcendental subject’s noetic activity” (Žižek 156). [End Page 155] However, the leading idea of the book is sensible. The authors posit Kant’s “critique of all possible metaphysics” (1) once more as the cornerstone of modern philosophy, to show how post-Kantian Idealism still represents the most sophisticated and, ironically enough, realistic way to think of philosophy and subjective consciousness and personal agency today. Countering the conservative school of analytical philosophy (i.e., Moore and Russell) that defends Kant as the last philosopher “who makes sense” against the “undisciplined regressions into meaningless speculation” performed by the main representatives of the post-Kantian turn, namely Schelling, Hegel, and Fichte, and weary of the “continental,” post-Hegelian deconstructionist, poststructuralist, and neopragmatist philosophers who see the post-Kantian turn as the central, yet untranslatable philosophical event always already on its way and yet to be deciphered, Gabriel and Žižek propose to tackle what they see as having so far been neglected by these two camps (the nature of the absolute and the concept of finitude) and to offer new and original perspectives on the problem of subjectivity in German Idealism. Simply put, their argument advances, and their examples illustrate, that contemporary philosophy, analytical and continental, fails to recognize that the works of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel contain in themselves and thus already anticipate the “alleged” post-Hegelian turn defined by the suspicion of any form of dialectical mediation as a process of world-, truth-, and self-formation. Neither Gabriel nor Žižek promote a return to (neo-) Hegelianism as a justification of the “necessity of contingency” (Gabriel 52). However, both debunk contemporary tendencies in modern philosophy, politics, and culture to naively or conveniently embrace indeterminacy and ethical relativism to the detriment of (all-too-often traumatic) concrete historical reality and personal accountability. Gabriel, in his defense of what I would call conscious mythology, defends self-reflexivity, the actualized, concrete paradox of subjective consciousness as the fundamental and positive, creative and “real” activity, in a welcome moment of clarity: “The world creates images of itself in the activity of our creation of images of the world.” This does not elevate the world to the realm of theory, but posits it as a (present and finite) creation out of our own doing in the here and now: “Our world pictures are not cheap copies of what there really is because they are an essential aspect of what there really is” (Gabriel 35). Similarly, Žižek’s insightful reevaluation of the Hegelian concept of “habit” as the saving “grace” from madness and his analysis of the Fichtean laughter as the expression of the Lacanian marker of humanness, “terrifying excess” as in the infamous “objet a,” shows his justified plea for an honest acknowledgement of (repressed) human self-limitation as the thing to be tackled anew and perhaps radicalized. [End Page 156] Andrea Gogröf-Voorhees Western Washington University Copyright © 2012 German Studies Association

The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered. 'Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association' 1

The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered. 'Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association' 1

Cosmopolitical and Transnational Interventions in German Studies

This Special Topic presents a collection of scholarly essays which emerged from a multi- and interdisciplinary panel series at the 49th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, and which represent the continuation of a collaborative thought process about transnational and cosmopolitical interventions that re-position the nation as text, performance, and pedagogy. From multiple critical perspectives, these articles examine anthropological, historical, cultural, linguistic, literary, and political reactions to German self-imagination and German imagination of the non-German/non-European “other,” thereby raising many questions pertinent to scholarly inquiry in the interdisciplinary field of German Studies.

Introduction: New Models for Indo-German Scholarship Within the Critical Reappraisal of Orientalism

Introduction: New Models for Indo-German Scholarship Within the Critical Reappraisal of Orientalism Robert Cowan The study of German Orientalism has had a conflicted relationship with the Saidian mode of inquiry, from Edward Said’s initial omission of the German role in Orientalism in his pioneering 1978 book to his later rejoinders to his critics, which further entrenched his stance on the issue. Despite this, German Orientalism scholarship has further extended the reach of Said’s critical apparatus, capitalizing on those deconstructive elements that have proven most useful in revealing personal biases, racial agendas, and overt and covert power dynamics. Yet, as Suzanne L. Marchand notes in the introduction to her new book, “those who have followed Said’s lead and adopted the Foucauldian tactic of analyzing only the surfaces of the texts they study end up simply reiterating what we know, namely that people make representations for their own purposes; too rarely do they ask about the variety of those purposes, or about the rootedness of those representations in weaker and stronger interpretations of original sources” (xxi). Much of the scholarship on German Orientalism in the past fifteen years or so, however, and Marchand is part of this, has attempted to refine that which is useful in the Saidian model, balancing it with hermeneutical theories and on-the-ground archival practices. German Orientalism scholarship has thus played a leading role in the critical reappraisal of Orientalism by addressing these aporiae in Said’s work and critically reflecting on his model’s efficacy, prejudices, and goals. Within these endeavors, the study of German Indology has proven particularly fruitful, for closer examination reveals that the intellectual relationships between Germany and South Asia provide instances of “colonial” contact that differ in some dramatic ways from the Anglo-French contexts that Said and others have emphasized, for Germans had very different agendas. Indeed, I would argue that the intellectual relationships between Germany and South Asia have had ramifications for Western thought that are more profound than any other Orientalist discourse. [End Page 47] In 2007, I organized a panel for the Modern Language Association convention in Chicago entitled “The Indo-Germans: The German Misappropriation of Indian Philosophy,” featuring Gabrielle Bersier, Sai Bhatawadekar, and Thomas Paul Bonfiglio. The German Studies Association president Sara Lennox then asked me to organize a follow-up panel for the Association’s 2008 conference in St. Paul, which I did, entitled “Re-Orientalism: Beyond Foucauldian Paradigms.” That panel featured Nicholas A. Germana, Bradley L. Herling, Douglas T. McGetchin, and myself, with Bhatawadekar as moderator and Peter K. J. Park as respondent. I felt that Herling’s, Germana’s, and McGetchin’s papers went very well together: Herling presented a challenge to the critical context in which this scholarship is taking place, and Germana and McGetchin served as excellent examples of refinements of existing models that are being taken in new directions. These three scholars are part of an important new wave of scholarship on German Indology, each with recent monographs, contributions to anthologies, and journal articles1—the articles in this cluster for The Comparatist grew out of those presentations at the 2008 GSA. The fact that I am a comparatist, Herling a religion scholar, and Germana and McGetchin scholars of intellectual and cultural history, and that we all work on German Orientalism is indicative of the topic’s polyvalent nature. German Orientalism is an area of inquiry has both expanded its scope and refined its modes of investigation rather dramatically in the past sixty years, and not only in response to Said. That this branch of Orientalist study finally should garner such tremendous attention is only logical, for it is an incredibly rich area for scholars in a variety of disciplines. Such comparative analyses are vital to the growth of German Studies as it seeks to hold its place institutionally, for while the study of German may be in severe decline as opposed to languages such as Chinese or Spanish, the role of German thinkers in the history of both European and global thought remains central. A Brief History of German Orientalism Scholarship Orientalism in Germany drew on two separate sources: the relationship between the Ottoman and Holy...

Goethe and Twentieth-Century Theory: An Introduction

Goethe and Twentieth-Century Theory: An Introduction Angus Nicholls The purpose of this special section—originally conceived as a series of panels sponsored by the Goethe Society of North America and held at the 2007 German Studies Association Meeting in San Diego—is necessarily more modest and less sweeping that its title may suggest. Its central research question is Goethe’s impact and influence upon twentieth-century “theory,” with that term being broadly understood to encompass not simply literary theory but also philosophy (at least in its continental, in this particular case German, manifestations). An explicit aim of the panels was deliberately to avoid readings of Goethe’s works according to various theoretical paradigms. An extensive examination of the twentieth-century German (not Anglophone) reception history of Goethe’s works, including some but not all of the theoretical dimensions of this reception, has already been undertaken by Karl Robert Mandelkow in the second volume of his Goethe in Deutschland: Rezeptionsgeschichte eines Klassikers.1 Unlike the approach of Mandelkow, these panels aimed to explore not how Goethe was interpreted by, but rather how he shaped twentieth-century theoretical discourses. It soon became clear, however, that the question of Goethe’s impact on theory cannot be separated from his reception through it, since these two questions constitute two sides of the same coin. Nonetheless, the predominant emphasis here is on impact and influence rather than on reception. Selected from the three panels that were convened—the first devoted to “The Life of Goethe and Its Relation to the Canon,” the second to “Goethe and Twentieth-Century Philosophy” and the third to “Debates in Twentieth-Century Theory”—the four papers in this special section can present only key instances of a subject which would require one or perhaps even several volumes to be treated exhaustively. What follows is thus a modest contribution to an important research question in Goethe studies. Since a good deal of the twentieth-century German theoretical reception of Goethe has been covered by Mandelkow’s study, in this introduction I shall confine myself to the question as to what the term “theory” actually meant in late twentieth-century Anglophone Goethe Studies. Or, to put this question another way, how did it resonate? One of the most direct late twentieth-century Anglophone engagements with the question of Goethe’s relation to theory can be found in the inaugural lecture delivered at Oxford University in 1989 by the current President of the English Goethe Society, T. J. Reed.2 [End Page 163] The title of this lecture—“Nobody’s Master”: Goethe and the Authority of the Writer, With a Reflection on Anti-Literary Theory—already functions as something like a statement of intent. The first part of its title is of course taken from one of Goethe’s best known contributions, if not to “literary theory” in our modern or post-modern senses of that term, then at least to the subject of literary composition: his “Ein Wort für junge Dichter,” which the editors of the Münchner Ausgabe describe as a “Resümee und Testament zugleich” (MA 18.2:988). As Reed’s title notes, the elderly Goethe (writing in 1832) insists in this short statement that, in terms of his own place within the then still nascent national literature of the German–speaking territories, he was a “Meister von Niemand.” A Meister, writes Goethe, ist derjenige unter dessen Anleitung wir uns in einer Kunst fortwährend üben, und welcher uns, wie wir nach und nach zur Fertigkeit gelangen, stufenweise die Grundsätze mitteilt, nach welchen handelnd, wir das ersehnte Ziel am sichersten erreichen. (MA 18.2:219) Such a definition of mastery would have suggested to Goethe the prescriptive aesthetics of Neo-Classicism against which the Sturm und Drang movement had rebelled. As Katrin Kohl also notes in her contribution to this section, Goethe insists that he was the Befreier of German literature rather than its Meister, since the junge Dichter of his age sind an mir gewahr geworden, daß, wie der Mensch von innen heraus leben, der Künstler von innen heraus wirken müsse; indem er, gebärde er sich wie er will, immer nur sein...

How much German in German Studies?

MARGIT M. SINKA Clemson University In an effort to promote an exchange of ideas and more collaboration between the AATG and the German Studies Association, the AATG Executive Council requested and received a special time slot for an AATG session at the fall 2003 GSA convention in New Orleans. As Chair of the AATG Research and Scholarship Committee, I moderated the panel discussion on much German in German Studies? Sabine Gross (U.of Wisconsin), Robert DiDonato (Department Chair, Miami U.), Hal Rennert (U. of Florida, and William Donahue (in 2003 Department Chair at Rutgers U.; as of fall 2005 member of the German Department at Duke U.) presented prepared statements which were followed by a lively, forty-minute discussion between presenters and an audience numbering around fifty. By offering brief summaries of the comments given by the first three panelists, we wish to share with the readership of German Quarterly some of the issues discussed during the GSA panel. Donahue's position paper, included in its entirety after the summarizing statements, represents recent reflections on the GSA panel. Though all panelists were aware of enrollment dilemmas and attendant curriculum concerns, DiDonato emphasized these as he advocated the retention of a substantial array of English courses among the course offerings of German departments. German Studies, DiDonato stressed, should not be blamed for the erosion of the use of German in advanced German courses and, by implication, of German skills in general. Rather than looking for scapegoats for our dissatisfaction with the fact that many students' language abilities to do not enable them to read and discuss level-appropriate texts in German, we should consider wider adoption of content-based instruction, assuring that students acquire higher levels of language proficiency at the same time that they are acquiring more sophisticated knowledge/content and are moving to higher level thinking skills. Intentionally departing from a balanced view focused on how to assure the survival of departments of German, Gross urged us to view language knowledge not as an obstacle (a stance frequently underlying discussions about foreign language teaching) but as an opportunity to foster inherent student fascination with foreign languages. Regardless of the course level, Gross insisted, language is inseparable from knowledge-that is, language is not simply added on to knowledge; it, in fact, constitutes knowledge. In a similar vein, Rennert challenged those who argue that an insistence on German proficiency had the effect of isolating German Departments, and who advocated a shift of the discipline towards Cultural/German Studies as a way out of this isolation (cf. Peter Hohendahl, The Past, Present and Future of Germanistik, Stanford Humanities Review, vol. 6.1, 1998). How can German not be central to German cultural studies, Rennert wondered. And he went one step further: Since culture is transmitted via language, German Studies without German is simply meaningless. Donahue's recent thoughts on the GSA panel raise additional issues and may serve as an invitation to GQ readers to continue the discussion on much German in German Studies? WILLIAM COLLINS DONAHUE Duke University question posed to the GSA roundtable-How much German in German Studies?-seems to presuppose that German Studies is to blame for a perceived decline in German at US universities. Yet attributing the undeniable downturn in student enrollments in German programs to the rise of the German Studies model may be too hasty a conclusion. Obviously our colleagues working in history, political science, or other disciplines with an interest in things German are off the hook entirely. What people who make this charge-and they were certainly well represented at this session -really mean is that the move toward German Studies in what were once traditional German language and literature programs has gone hand in hand with greater use of English in the curriculum. …

<i>Kolonie</i> and <i>Heimat</i>: Race, Gender, and Postcolonial Amnesia in Veit Harlan's <i>Opfergang</i> (1944)

After completion of her ground-breaking study Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany (1997), Susanne Zantop had begun to explore the legacy of colonial thinking in the shaping of German cultural identity, attributing its persistence in large measure to widespread ignorance of the colonialist past. In her bold exploration of Veit Harlan's deployment of gender relations at home as metaphors to mask colonial ambitions abroad in Opfergang (1944), Zantop demonstrates how this film reinvigorates the colonial fantasy in a way that also enables it to obliterate and forget the failures of Nazi Germany. The material in this essay was planned as a chapter in her book-in-progress, to be entitled "Postcolonial Amnesia." A shorter version was delivered at the German Studies Association annual conference in Houston, Texas, in October 2000. The version that appears here was prepared and lightly edited by her Dartmouth College colleagues Gerd Gemünden and Irene Kacandes after the author's death. (PH)

Hitlers Wahler

German Studies Association Review: [untitled] Author(s): Margaret Lavinia Anderson Reviewed work(s): Hitlers Whler by Jrgen W. Falter Source: German Studies Review, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Oct., 1993), pp. 565-566 Published by: German Studies Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1432174 Accessed: 30/12/2009 15:02 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=gsa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. German Studies Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to German Studies Review. http://www.jstor.org

Introduction: The Reunification Debate

In early October of 1989, just as the German Democratic Republic was celebrating its fortieth anniversary with torchlight parades in Berlin, GDR, the German Studies Association was holding its thirteenth annual conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the last session, on October 8, the day after the official anniversary, Robert Gerald Livingston, Ann Phillips, and David Childs got together to discuss the possibilities for the future in a session entitled The GDR at Forty. What ensued was a debate between Childs, who asserted that the GDR had no reason for existence other than 400,000 Soviet troops, and Livingston and Phillips,

German Studies Association Twelfth Annual Meeting: 6-9 October 1988 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

German Studies Association Twelfth Annual Meeting: 6-9 October 1988 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

German Studies Association Twelfth Annual Meeting: 6-9 October 1988 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

German Studies Association Twelfth Annual Meeting: 6-9 October 1988 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania