Things German Research Articles

The Call to Political Geography

This essay offers a capsule memoir of a part-time Germanist. It recounts the author’s experience of coming of age in the 1990s when it was salad days for All Things German in North America and the sheen of Weimar shone. This decade was followed by the years of the global war on terror and eventually the global financial crisis, when German studies seemed to lose the plot and many historians of German quietly exited the subfield. The essay concludes with a reflection on political geography as a way to engage with German history and the German contribution to the world of ideas. German history is dense with suggestive answers to the evergreen questions of what a state should be and what kind of world it should exist in.

Eberhard Kranzmayer's Deutschtum: On the Austrian Dialectologist's Pan-German Frame of Reference

Abstract: The present paper offers a close reading of Eberhard Kranzmayer's texts from 1925 to 1960 in an effort to isolate Kranzmayer's major methodological themes. One such theme is a pan-German (großdeutsch) framework, in which the unity of German with a single standard variety is maintained. It will be shown how Kranzmayer used this assumption, combined with his belief in the cultural dominance of all things German, to perform "linguistic land claims" for Germany before and during the war. While his post-war texts are identical in argument, with some democratic window-trimmings, any land claims are more muted and cultural similarity is now stressed. Kranzmayer's time as director of the Institut für Kärntner Landesforschung, 1942–45, will be reviewed in regard to his claim that a people is determined by a standard variety: a status that he granted the Friuli, but not the Slovenes (the Windisch) and, certainly and always, the Germans. It will be argued that such pan-German mindset necessarily influenced conceptions of a budding Standard Austrian German and that, today still, Germanistik is largely bound by the idea of a One Standard German Axiom, in striking similarity to the 1920s.

From Robert Keayne to Angola, Richard, and Grace: Bernard Bailyn and New England's Place in an Atlantic World

From Robert Keayne to Angola, Richard, and Grace: Bernard Bailyn and New England's Place in an Atlantic World

Ruth Klüger on Vienna and Austria: An Interview

Ruth Klüger on Vienna and AustriaAn Interview Mark H. Gelber (bio) and Ruth Klüger Ruth Klüger (1931–2020) passed away on October 5, 2020, in the United States. Born in Vienna and deported to Theresienstadt, she survived Auschwitz and the Shoah together with her mother. After living in Germany for a short time after World War II, she immigrated to New York. She was educated in the United States and received degrees in English literature as well as her PhD in German literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She taught at several American universities, including Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, the University of Kansas, the University of Virginia, the University of California, Irvine, and Princeton University. She finished her distinguished academic career at the University of California, Irvine. She has numerous scholarly publications to her credit, mainly in the fields of German and Austrian Literatures. She is also recognized widely as a poet, essayist, and feminist critic. She returned to Europe, where she was a guest professor in Göttingen and Vienna. Her memoir, entitled weiter leben (1991), a major bestseller, was a highly regarded autobiographical account and was subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages. It has also generated a vigorous critical discussion in its own right. Ruth Klüger received numerous prestigious literary prizes and other distinctions. In 2016 I was preparing a lecture that focused on Ruth Klüger's Zerreißproben (2013), to be delivered at a session on contemporary Austrian writing at an international conference in Europe. At one point I decided to ask her if she would agree to answer some questions about her relationship to Vienna and Austria, hoping that her replies would help me to understand her and perhaps [End Page 109] also her poetry better. I did not intend to publish the interview. After Ruth's recent death in 2020, I was going through some old correspondence and papers, and I came across that interview with her. I present it here in its entirety. ________ Mark Gelber: Please describe your feelings and relationship to Vienna and Austria today. If possible, please distinguish between the different periods of your life: childhood, after Anschluss, after deportations, during and after the war, in the U.S., after you returned to visit in Europe, and after your return to visit in Vienna, as well. My premise is that your relationship with Germany is much different from your relationship with Austria, and that your feelings about Vienna are complicated and conflicted. Ruth Klüger: Vienna was home only for the first years of my life. After I was six and a half, it became exile, a place one wanted to leave. That's significantly different from Walter Sokel and Egon Schwarz, who were older.1 They both had time to bond with classmates and come to know the city without restrictions. When I was about nine, I learned about Zionism, and from then on I was firmly committed to the idea and thought I knew where I belonged. After the war, before emigration to the U.S. in 1947, I visited Vienna briefly with my mother, and I didn't like it. I had an eerie feeling that I was visiting a graveyard and that the people living there didn't know it was a graveyard. MG: Walter Sokel wrote that he had nagging feelings of guilt when he took up the study of German literature in the U.S., given what had taken place in Europe during and after the Shoah. Did you have similar misgivings at any time? RK: When I decided to write a PhD in German literature, I already had an MA in English and a librarian's degree—and a job as a public librarian. But since I had little money and the German Department in Berkeley needed teaching assistants, it seemed to me to be a chance to spend a life doing something I would love. Still, it was like indulging a vice—the love of things German. And I lost friends as a result, specifically Jews to whom I became suspect. My mother never showed the slightest respect for my profession. And...

Habsburg History, Eastern European History … Central European History?

Germany and all things German have long been the primary concern ofCentral European History(CEH), yet the journal has also been intimately tied to the lands of the former Habsburg monarchy. As the editor stated in the first issue, published in March 1968,CEHemerged “in response to a widespread demand for an American journal devoted to the history of German-speaking Central Europe,” following the demise of theJournal of Central European Affairsin 1964. The Conference Group for Central European History sponsoredCEH, as well as the recently mintedAustrian History Yearbook(AHY). Robert A. Kann, the editor ofAHY, sat on the editorial board ofCEH, whose second issue featured a trenchant review by István Deák of Arthur J. May'sThe Passing of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914–1918. The third issue contained the articles “The Defeat of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the Balance of Power” by Kann, and Gerhard Weinberg's “The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the Balance of Power.” That same year,East European Quarterlypublished its first issue.

Modernism and Opera ed. by Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith

Reviewed by: Modernism and Opera ed. by Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith Allan Hepburn Modernism and Opera. Edited by Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Pp. xi + 378. $45.00 (cloth). Modernism and Opera should be required reading for every scholar of modernism. Finely edited and persuasively introduced by Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith, this superb collection of twelve essays offers lucid, thought-provoking insights on modernism as an intermedial and interdisciplinary practice. Various aspects of modernism are taken up by the contributors, with the result that "modernism" emerges as a complex, plural, and adaptable concept. The essays, arranged chronologically, brim with pertinent historical information. National operatic traditions—Czech, German, French, British, Finnish—are handled with scholarly care. All the essays in Modernism and Opera elaborate the meaning of "modernism" as it takes up different operatic instantiations from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century. As Begam and Smith state in their Introduction, collaboration "across the arts—indeed across the media of language, music, and visual representation—played a decisive role in the definition and development of modernism" (3). The essays in Modernism and Opera work out the implications of this statement. In his essay on Wagner's last opera, Parsifal (1878), Smith argues that a gestural vocabulary, in which on-stage singing bodies are increasingly detached from abstract consciousness, inaugurates a discourse that "will become central to the development of theatrical modernism, taken up and transformed by [August] Strindberg and thereafter by [Frank] Wedekind and the artists of the expressionist stage" (33). In other words, Wagner cannot be ignored by theater historians or by modernists of whatever stripe: he makes a central contribution to concepts of modernist selfhood. Wagner casts a long shadow over both opera and modernity. In his discussion of Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aaron, Begam speculates on the possibilities of reconciling Schoenberg's [End Page 414] musical modernism with his Jewishness in light of the Nazi stigmatization of so-called "degenerate" art and Wagner's infamous, anti-Semitic essay, "Judaism in Music" (1850; revised 1869). As Begam demonstrates with well-chosen musical examples, Schoenberg ironically cites Wagner's leitmotifs to reconfigure their meaning. Bryan Gilliam defines a post-Wagnerian, "third-way modernism" based on aesthetic content rather than musical innovation; as one example of this practice, Richard Strauss rejects nineteenth-century idealism for "the seemingly ordinary and everyday aspects of modern life" (131). In her revealing analysis of Béla Bartók's opera, Bluebeard's Castle (1911), Klára Móricz picks up on the gender implications of Wagner's histrionic female characters. Comparisons between the two composers "not only show Bartók's debt to nineteenth-century Romantic paradigms, but also reveal the modernist transformation of woman from Wagner's redeeming female into Bartók's paradigmatic fin-de-siècle femme fatale" (103). Wagner also influenced ideas of temporality in music. Claude Debussy's enthusiasm for Wagner in Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) was tempered by French hostility to all things German after the Franco-Prussian War. Debussy, working from Maurice Maeterlinck's eventless play of the same name, creates static tableaux, in which the explicit subject of the opera is stillness. The atmosphere of this symbolist opera is dream-like, in the manner of a painting by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes or Odilon Redon. In Debussy's score, time almost stands still. In one passage from Pelléas et Mélisande, Daniel Albright hears an English horn that "quietly, insistently traces a four-note figure that becomes a kind of soft clock, a drift of sand through an hourglass, as if the castle's stones were making a faint sound of crumbling" (93). Other composers and librettists follow through on Debussy's slowing down of operatic temporality. Gertrude Stein conceived the libretto for Four Saints in Three Acts as a suite of motionless tableaux. As Cyrena N. Pondrom notes, "When [Stein] turned to a play (or libretto), she sought to generate a 'landscape,' which she believed should simply be 'there,' a performance without chronological progression, having existence in the present moment" (250). Pondrom, quite rightly, identifies Virgil Thomson's...

Readings and Misreadings?: The GDR and the GSA

Readings and Misreadings?The GDR and the GSA Marc Silberman (bio) When the Western Association of German Studies (WAGS)—the forerunner organization of the German Studies Association—was founded in 1976, its vision was to provide a space for interdisciplinary encounters around issues of teaching and researching “things German.” In the mid-1970s there was hardly a consensus that “things German” included a focus on all German-speaking areas, as stated in the front matter of each annual conference program until 1993: “The interest of the Association spans the period from early times to the present German Federal Republic, German Democratic Republic, Austria, and Switzerland, and includes Germans and German culture in other countries.” By embracing the GDR from the outset in its mission, the association was in the academic vanguard and responding to a palpable upswing in this broadening of the geographical and political inclusiveness of “things German.” The end of World War II and the Allied occupation of Germany yielded the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) and in fall 1949 the GDR and FRG as two separate German states. But the combination of America’s postwar introversion, the cold war stand-off, and West Germany’s 1955 Hallstein Doctrine that divided the world into the friendly nations that did not recognize the GDR and unfriendly ones that did, contributed to the erasure of East Germany in the West. With the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958 the US government began to invest significant funding in area studies to guarantee a future pool of foreign language experts and scholarly expertise deemed strategic for US interests abroad. However, in this context the GDR was considered to be a German-German issue, with the result that it was excluded from eastern European studies because “Germany” was equated with West Germany, and treated as a footnote in western European studies because East Germany was considered to be in the Soviet Bloc. A few specialists in GDR affairs, journalists, and political scientists who worked generally on German issues, published the first books treating East Germany in the late 1960s, yet both the academe and the broader public knew virtually nothing about this terra incognita. The key year for GDR studies in the US was 1974, a full twenty-five years after the state was founded. What might seem like a dramatic onset of scholarly interest, [End Page 611] in retrospect emerges from a context growing out of various factors. First and foremost, the modification of cold war confrontation through a policy of détente in the early 1970s resulted in the signing in December 1972 of the Grundlagenvertrag, the “Basic Treaty” in which the two German states mutually recognized their sovereignty. Thereupon the US followed in September 1974 by officially recognizing the GDR. This in itself, however, cannot explain the remarkable concatenation of scholarly energies in the course of that year. The newly launched journal New German Critique published its second issue in spring 1974 as a focus issue on the GDR—the very first of its kind in the US—introduced by the editorial collective as “a first attempt of New German Critique to open discussion of this largely neglected moment in the development of socialism” (3). In April the first major conference on the GDR took place at Washington University in St. Louis with over 150 Germanists in attendance.1 Also in spring 1974 the literary scholar Robert Weimann of the Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte held guest lectures at the University of Virginia, and writer Christa Wolf and her writer-critic husband Gerhard Wolf were in residence at Oberlin College in Ohio, followed by Ulrich Plenzdorf one year later and Jurek Becker in 1978. In addition, a session arranged by the American Society for the Study of the GDR focused for the first time on the GDR in a conference of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG) at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Finally, at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual convention held in New York City at the end of December 1974 a GDR seminar was scheduled for the first time as part of the German literature offerings. The accumulation of events in 1974 did not...

Critical Theory and the German Studies Association

Critical Theory and the German Studies Association Lutz Koepnick (bio) In 1976 a number of historians and literary scholars founded the Western Association of German Studies (WAGS) to promote multidisciplinary approaches to teaching and researching German culture in North America. The moment was auspicious, given that in the same year Jürgen Habermas—the then most prominent representative of the Frankfurt School—received the Sigmund Freud Prize, a highly prestigious award granted by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung to honor the work of outstanding scholars and their contribution to the development of the German language. In bestowing the Freud Prize to Habermas, the Akademie endorsed the value of reciprocal relations between humanistic thought, critical social thinking, and literary culture, as well as between theory, literature, and history. In his laudatio, the writer Dieter Wellershoff noted: “Philosophy today has to open up toward the sciences and may thereby distance itself from poetry. However, I see the significance of Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy in the fact that his rational, modern, and informed language holds on to the dream it shares with the expressive language of the poets.”1 As they gathered in 1976 to inaugurate what in 1984 was to become the German Studies Association (GSA), many WAGS members were no doubt driven by a similar dream and vision: the hope to make the different languages of disciplinary research on things German porous to each other; the ambition to develop joined idioms of academic work powerful enough—as Habermas expressed it in his own acceptance speech2—to overcome one-track specialization and equip a larger public, including the one of current and future students, with various tools to question both the authority of tradition and the ongoing traditions of authority. In its foundational text, WAGS presented itself as an organization welcoming persons in history, literature, politics and government, geography, humanities, and other fields relating to German-speaking Europe. The interest of the Association spans the period from early times to the present German Federal Republic, German Democratic Republic, Austria, and Switzerland, and includes Germans and German culture in other countries.3 [End Page 553] The document sealing the transformation of WAGS into GSA in 1984 intensified this vision, introducing the GSA explicitly as both a “multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary organization” whose members’ interests involved “specific or broad aspects of history, literature, politics, and government, and other fields relating to German-speaking Europe.” Habermas’s prize-winning insistence on the permeability of disciplinary borders and the need of academics to speak to issues of larger political or cultural concern seemed to have borne fruit on the other side of the Atlantic. The GSA’s emphasis on both specificity and broadness, and its dedication to work connecting different branches of the academy, echoed some of the central tenets that German critical theory had embodied since its inception in the 1920s and that had motivated the Akademie to award the Freud Prize to Habermas. In this essay, I will probe this assumption in greater detail. In the essay’s first section, I return us to WAGS’s and GSA’s early years to explore the extent to which critical theory’s stress on collaborative work and synthetic cultural criticism indeed informed the association’s development. To expand and complicate matters, in section 2, I reconstruct the impact of French critical theory on WAGS and GSA convention programs and publication outlets during the 1970s and 1980s, and then—in section 3—I fast-forward the reader to the twenty-first century and discuss certain continuities and transformations in critical theory’s past and present place within the GSA. Beginnings in the 1970s Let us recall: In his famous essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” of 1937 Max Horkheimer, in his role as the head of the by then New York–based Institute of Social Research, defined critical theory as an exercise reflecting on theory’s own location in the historical process while being dedicated to the vision of a society overcoming the shackles of domination, capitalist exploitation, and the historical repression of nature. Unlike traditional theory and science, critical theory’s task was to understand the present, including the present of academic scholarship...

Kanokogi Kazunobu: Pioneer of Platonic Fascism and Imperial Pan-Asianism

Kanokogi KazunobuPioneer of Platonic Fascism and Imperial Pan-Asianism Christopher W. A. Szpilman (bio) In late 1946 Kanokogi Kazunobu (1884–1949), thin, frail, and looking much older than his sixty-one years of age, left Sugamo Prison, where he had been held for more than a year as a class-A war criminal. Diagnosed with terminal pulmonary tuberculosis and given no longer than three years to live, he was released on medical grounds, not because he was deemed innocent.1 He died two years later, by all accounts a broken and isolated man. It was a sad end for a onetime celebrity, the squalor of his death in stark contrast to the fame and prestige in which he had basked only a few years earlier. But perhaps such a contrast was to be expected, for Kanokogi, a former professor of philosophy at two of Japan’s imperial universities, a Ph.D., a doctor of letters, and a right-wing activist, had been a man of extremes—and extreme views. In the midst of the Great War he had campaigned to introduce sweeping totalitarian reforms in Japan; in the 1920s he had provocatively spoken of world revolution; and in the late 1930s he had even concluded his speeches with “Heil Hitler.”2 At first glance, he cuts a contradictory figure. Although at one time a Christian, he came to hold a distinctly un-Christian belief in the divine character of the Japanese imperial family. Although a Japanese fundamentalist, he showed great partiality for things German, for fascism, and for national socialism; while he insisted on Japanese authenticity, he wished to turn Japan into a latter-day version of Plato’s Republic. He was an ardent monarchist, yet frequently talked of revolution, and even though he [End Page 233] held Japan’s national polity immutable, he pioneered totalitarianism, an ideology that, if put into effect, would have transformed this national polity beyond recognition. These contradictions perhaps help account for the relative silence that has surrounded Kanokogi since the end of the Second World War.3 On closer look, however, the core of Kanokogi’s thought was remarkably consistent. He never deviated from his hatred of Western liberalism, materialism, individualism, parliamentary democracy, and laissez-faire economics; he never wavered in his belief that elitism, collectivism, dictatorship, and economic planning would transform Japan into a perfect totalitarian state modeled after Plato’s utopia. This dogged hostility to the values of the Enlightenment as well as predilection for dictatorship and authoritarianism pervade all of his writings. Kanokogi openly advocated national socialist ideas and waxed enthusiastic about Nazi policies after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933. Yet even before 1933 the ideas he propounded clearly shared much with Western varieties of fascism. Significantly, Kanokogi arrived at his proto-fascist system of thought at the end of the First World War, independently of Western fascism, even if the subsequent apparent successes of fascism in Europe contributed to radicalizing his views even further. This makes Kanokogi’s case highly relevant to the question of what constitutes Japanese fascism.4 It may even add to our understanding of this complex and opaque phenomenon in a global context, for it should not be overlooked that his ideology, which he first articulated in a number of lectures in 1917, anticipated Western totalitarianism and fascism by several years.5 Kanokogi’s case thus casts doubt on Eurocentric theories of totalitarianism and fascism. It instead lends weight to the view that fascism, far from being limited to the West, arose independently also outside Europe, albeit as part of the same global reaction to the unprecedented catastrophe that was the First World War. This is not to minimize Western influences on Kanokogi, who was educated in the West and throughout his career kept abreast of European political and intellectual trends, including the development of fascism. Nevertheless, the 1919 launch of Mussolini’s fascist movement had not yet taken place when Kanokogi, inspired by a similar combination of nationalist, militaristic, and anti-Enlightenment ideas, integrated a number of notions that had been common in Europe since at least the turn of the century, if not earlier, into his totalitarian ideology. In other words...

The failure of the schizophrenia concept and the argument for its replacement by hebephrenia: applying the medical model for disease recognition

The failure of the schizophrenia concept and the argument for its replacement by hebephrenia: applying the medical model for disease recognition

'In that dawn…': Revisiting the Wende

For today's students, the Wende is just history like any other bit of the syllabus. For older students of things German, it was a major event in our working and personal lives. The website for the series listed several types of memory, but did not specifically mention outsider memory: the view from over here as seen by sympathetic observers — sympathetic because we had strong emotional as well as intellectual ties to the country, its people and its culture. So I begin with a critical retelling of what happened in 1989 and immediately after as it looked from here, and as it looked over there, when as an outsider one went to a changed and uneasily un-reunited Germany. The last section discusses three recent novels by citizens of the former GDR (Werner Bräunig, Uwe Tellkamp, and Gottfried Meinhold) which offer a rich and complex image of their society.

A centenary celebration for Will Burtin: A pioneer of scientific visualization

2008 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Will Burtin (1908–1972), one of the foremost graphic designers of the 20th century. During his career, he had an enormous influence on the character of modern design, and more specifically to the point of this column, he was an early developer of what has come to be called scientific visualization. Burtin was born in Ehrenfeld, a suburb of Cologne, the only son of August and Gertrude Burtin. He successfully began his career in Germany, despite the dismal economic conditions of Germany after World War I and the Great Depression. In the summer of 1938, he fled Germany with his Jewish wife, Hilde Munk (1910–1960) after the rise of the Nazis. One event that must have weighed heavily in the timing of his decision to leave was Josef Goebbels’ 1937 request that he become the design director of the Propaganda Ministry. This request led his wife to ask her American cousin, Max Munk, to sponsor their immigration to the United States. His sponsorship led to permission that arrived just in time, because in 1938, Adolf Hitler repeated Goebbels’ request and Burtin could stall no longer. His departure from Germany was also a departure from most things German; Burtin adamantly refused to speak German. In 1946, he visited Albert Einstein as part of his research for a Fortune article, “The Physics of the Bomb.” Einstein was then actively trying to convince the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons that were not under international control. He would not speak English with Burtin, and Burtin would not speak German with him, so the interview was conducted bilingually. Despite his limited English, Burtin was an almost instantaneous success. Within months of his arrival, he won a contract to design the Federal Works Agency Exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. By 1939, he had designed the cover for the World’s Fair issue of The Architectural Forum magazine, which won the Art Directors’ Club medal for cover design. Thus began a rich career, which included a long relationship with Upjohn Pharmaceuticals. During this time, he was responsible for the design of much of the content of Upjohn’s magazine, Scope, which was focused on communicating technical material to physicians. A Centenary Celebration for Will Burtin: A Pioneer of Scientific Visualization

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. …

Globalizing German Studies: A New Border Action

Why should anyone study German or Germany in future? And if they are indeed interested, how should it be taught? These questions, for students in first case, and for teachers in second, seem most pressing (and interesting) as a century has come to a close in which Germany has had, to say least, a prominent role. These last hundred years have seen vicissitudes of German history and its subsequent place in European order of feet status of German in schools and universities. During World War I German was banned in many American schools, and seventy years later we celebrated with many Germans at reunification that seemed to be raising our enrollments, as well as our hopes for a successful united Germany Nothing needs to be said here about what happened in between those major events as to German's popularity in United States. Still, it is ironic that in later postwar period-the seventies, eighties, and nineties-courses on Nazi period, as well as Holocaust, seem to draw largest crowds. My very brief historical excursion is meant here to emphasize that political events, particularly in Germany, do indeed influence interest in things German, be they literature, culture, politics, history, economics, or language itself. The millennium itself may indeed have been prematurely initiated with fall of German Wall. Unfortunately, that peak of excitement has waned, and as language enrollments fall for all but Spanish, it is obviously important that we ascertain how to maintain curricular integrity (and FTEs) in our departments and in a university that is becoming increasingly corporatized and bureaucratized. The links between academic policy and marketplace are not to be forgotten, especially in integrated and convergent global markets. In last few years answer has been interdisciplinary German Studies, focusing precisely on various fields I mention above. Some universities have been fortunate enough, as Georgetown University, to have a of Excellence in German and European Studies that institutionally creates such intellectual opportunities for students and for faculty Even without such formal centers, most other universities and colleges have moved, at least in name, to a German Studies model that draws courses and faculty from multiple departments. The teaching of German language remains -properly so-a central support in such a program. The battles fought for many years against traditional Germanistik have, I hope, been settled, and while German Studies-if job descriptions are to be a gauge of our self definition-dominate German Departments today, literary critics and cultural studies practitioners have found an alliance in trying to save study of German and Germany And even latter, including myself, have become more critical about excesses of such approaches. Today, especially from my vantage point in Canada as Director of such a Centre of German and European Studies, landscapes of German Studies in particular and area studies in general have taken on a new contour. Perhaps it is unavoidably my view of our discipline, area studies, and international academic relations from a Center in what some would call the periphery. But in global processes traditional centers and peripheries rearrange themselves quite quickly, forcing us to reevaluate our own angles of vision, how they are constituted, and what they mean. This hermeneutics takes on a new urgency when German language and literature study is situated in interdisciplinary German Studies, in European Studies, and finally in an international studies that now needs to be globalized itself. Like Russian dolls that fit neatly one into next, these multiple parts can appear to glide in and out quite smoothly. But more often today, university policies are shaped by exigencies of global marketplace, making parts and wholes fit uneasily together, when they fit at all. …

Acknowledging the Beautiful

Things German, as we all know, have long been plagued by problems of identity. Writing about the changing Berlin cityscape in a recent issue of The New Yorker, Jane Kramer, as others before her, has added the new capital to the list, citing as one of its most profound dilemmas the fact that Berliners cannot really decide what they want their city to be. At the turn of the century, I suggest that a parallel dilemma is facing those of us involved in the study of German literature, language, and culture in the USA: even as we recognize that our disciplinary practices have diverged rather dramatically from those of Germanistik as practiced in Germany, any consensus on a disciplinary identity seems at present out of reach.' Kramer's article is testimony to her belief that Berlin has a chance to be if its citizens can only ascertain what that something is.2 If our profession exhibits similar identity problems, variously wrought by demographics, geographics, and historical contingencies, I would like to think that we also have some of the same opportunities. In that spirit I suggest here one direction in which the profession might move, whether in tandem with millennial forces for change-or not. Within the past three decades the academic study of German literature in the USA has been transformed, as scholars have made a convincing case for imaginative literature as an enterprise that is inlaid in culture and thus partakes of or contributes to numerous other disciplines. Further, Germanists have helped to develop new fields of research that have demanded innovative methodologies, many of which-such as feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and Holocaust studieshave become linked to German cultural studies in its widest definition, and have made the complexities of individual and collective identities an integral part of literary studies. Although these developments have often been embraced for pragmatic reasons, such as the hope of increased enrollments, they have also pushed our discipline in exciting directions, bringing us productive new ways to engage with our world. Important as this work has been, it has tended to avoid questions of aesthetics. The reasons for this avoidance are complicated, linked to history and to political alignments in the field;3 but regardless of the soundness of many of those reasons, the result has been that we have not articulated clearly enough, in my opinion, the singularity of literature, the distinctness of an imaginative text.4 We have paid much attention to thematic content, to subject matter, to the ideological entanglements of literary works. But we have been less successful, as a group, in making either to our administrators and students or to the social world outside the academy a persuasive case for the importance of literature and literary study per se. To be sure, literature does intermingle with other disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, history, and sociology-the disciplines that have been involved in the most productive interdisciplinary critical initiatives-but it cannot be subsumed by any of them. It is unique. By complicating issues and exposing ambiguities, it helps us think more broadly, more creatively, and in modes not fostered by other disciplines. But any attempt to attend to that uniqueness must at some point bring us into the realm of aesthetics, with its interrogation of value in literature and of the criteria by which imaginative texts might be judged -areas that many of us have come assiduously to avoid. Aesthetic matters have been submerged in analyses of the grotesque, for example, or of the ugly, but in many areas of our profession it is as though there existed a quarantine on the discussion of beauty, regardless of whether it is understood as aesthetic pleasure or as a form of cognition. Even the joy of succumbing to a beautifully written text has become, in Angelika Bammer's words, a guilty pleasure. 5 Although we may be convinced of its value, beauty-controversial though the concept may be, and whether manifested in image, content, or language itself-is one of the distinguishing qualities of imaginative literature that we must articulate to every new student generation. …

African Americans Who Teach German Language and Culture

IT MAY SEEM a bit odd and disconcerting to hear that African Americans have for quite some time demon? strated an affinity for, and even an attraction to, German culture. But long before the rise of German fas? cism, two world wars, and a century of stereotyping Germans as brutal, racist, and warmongering Huns, an edu? cated elite among African Americans had felt a special kin? ship with Germany and many of her heroes. According to Leroy T. Hopkins, a black Harvard-trained professor of German at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, the first significant intermingling of the two groups occurred during the American Revolution when runaway slaves and freedmen, lured by the prospect of a better life, joined the British army and fought against the colonists alongside Hessian mercenaries. When the war ended, a handful of these disap? pointed black troops followed their comrades back to Kassel in Germany. In two articles written in 1992 and 1996 Hopkins provided evidence that, prior to World War I, African-American intellectuals maintained a vision of Germany as a spiritual fatherland. In fact, the high regard liberal German thinkers generally enjoyed in this country caught the imagination of notables like NAACP cofounder W.E.B. Du Bois and Rhodes Scholar Alain LeRoy Locke who had both studied at the University of Berlin before obtaining their doctorates at Harvard. Other historians have confirmed Du Bois' preference for things German, particularly the extent to which he was influenced by the philosopher-poet Johann Gottfried von Herder and the composer Richard Wagner. Yet virtually ignored by scholars concerned with German cultural influences on black leaders are a number of other

German-American Cultural Interaction in the Jacksonian Era: Six Unpublished Letters by Francis Lieber and John Pickering to Wilhelm von Humboldt

The letters brought to light and printed here for the first time allow the reader of today a rare view into segments of a momentous episode in the history of German-American cultural relations that should be of particular interest to those who are engaged in German-American Studies. Traditionally, German-American Studies have been preoccupied with exploring the experiences and the history of the German-Americans and the diverse contributions they have made to the cultural and ethnic make-up of the United States and to American life in general. La Vern J. Rippley's important study The German-Americans typifies this approach. Another approach is committed to the notion of influence, and its practitioners have attempted to trace the various influences that German culture or literature are said to have enjoyed. Henry A. Pochmann's monumental German Culture in America is its most outstanding representative.1 What has been lacking until now is a recognition of the equally important domain of interaction between the two cultures, even though it is here that some of the substantive contributions Germany has brought to American civilization can be found. To change this situation, a shift is required away from the assumption of two seemingly fixed entities, German culture and American culture, and how one influences the other, and a move has to be undertaken by way of their mutual historization toward ascertaining the specific moments of their interaction. The seemingly inconspicuous transactions that are the subject of this contribution, therefore, should be seen as an introductory step toward such an interactive approach to German-American Studies. When the American Republic struggled to establish its national identity during the period of the 1820s and 1830s-named the Jacksonian age after Andrew Jackson's presidency (1829-37)-att ntion was focused not only on the arenas of national and international politics, but on the domains of culture as well. The age gave birth to the otion of a national culture and literature and saw in them the fulfillment of the ideal of an American nationhood.2 This process proved to be of singular importance for the introduction and creative recepion of German culture in this country. At no time before or afterwards would the impact of German culture in the areas of philosophy, theology, political thought, literature, and education in this country be more consequential than during this period. As surprising as it may seem, for some influential sections of the intellectual and social elite, notably in New England and the Northern States, the preoccupation with things German became an integral part of their struggle for a national culture. Franz or Francis Lieber (1798-1872), as he called himself after his arrival in this country as a political refugee from the Germany of the Metternich era, played an important part in both the development of American nationalism and the reception of German culture. He can be seen as an embodiment of the clo e relationship between these two events. Lieber, who was born in Berlin in 1798, fought

Untimely Observations on Using the World Wide Web in Teaching German Composition and Conversation

When I was an undergraduate German major in the 1960s, one of my professors decided to use Die Zeit as a basis for teaching third-year composition and conversation. I can remember my excitement when he handed me my very own copy of the newspaper. (It was only the overseas edition, but I was unaware of such subtleties at the time.) This was before my first trip to Europe, so the newsprint took on the status of a cultural artifact for me. In graduate school, I became a subscriber of Der Spiegel, and that provided--and continues to provide--a weighty tactile link with things German. About two years ago, something else happened which conjured up feelings similar to those associated with that first issue of Die Zeit: My office computer was equipped with Netscape, and I quickly discovered that this web browser gave me access to the Viennese daily Der Standard. In the course of the year, Die Welt, the Suddeutsche Zeitung, the taz, and numerous other German publications appeared on the screen. The selection will doubtless continue to grow. This is a bonanza for armchair observers of German affairs, but how can it be utilized in teaching German language and culture to American students? My teaching assignment for Spring 1996 included a senior-level composition and conversation course, and I decided to use reading selections on current affairs drawn from the World Wide Web. This decision led to a fundamental question: Is it advisable to let the students surf the net, guided only by their own interests and previous academic preparation, or should the instructor provide reading material and structure? As I found out in the course of the semester, some--but by no means all--students have both the knowledge of and access to computers needed to explore Germanspeaking cyberspace on their own. (Those who do, tend to undertake their explorations in their free time anyway.) In addition, it is legitimate to ask whether the instructor should relinquish primary responsibility for course content and learning strategy simply because new technologies are available. (L oking back some thirty years, one could have allowed students in language labs to listen exclusively to tapes they recorded themselves.) Rather than conducting classes in one of our fully-equipped computer labs, I chose to act as a filter, assembling those materials that I considered appropriate in the context of this particular course and its objectives. Other models are of course conceivable as well. For example, a traditional language class can meet once a week in the co puter lab. Students can be asked to find articles of interest to them and to write a brief summary or report on them in class. It should be emphasized that the course objectives do not remain constant time. Beyond the issue of which language skills to concentrate upon (passive, subjunctive, conversational vs. form l discourse, broadening active and passive vocabulary, etc.), advanced language courses are de fac empty vessels that can be filled with any content chosen by the instructor and/or the program based on certain intellectual (and often emotional) predilections. In this case, I gave full reign to my personal biases. As any intercultural mediator, i.e., language teacher, is painfully aware, most North American undergraduates are ill-informed about not only current events over there, but also the nature of their own society. When such individuals study abroad, they are invariably unprepared for the level of cultural and political discourse characteristic of the European academic milieu. (I hasten to add: still characteristic of this milieu. In the wake

Feminist German Studies across the Disciplines: Introduction to Grossmann, Ferree, and Cocks

The following three essays, written by historian Atina Grossmann, sociologist Myra Marx Ferree, and political theorist Joan Cocks, are a feminist contribution to ongoing debate about role of multi- and interdisciplinary work in emerging field of Studies. Defined in 1988 Studies Association Guidelines for Curricular Organization at American Educational Institutions as the interdisciplinary study of contemporary cultural, social, economic, and political life of German-speaking peoples in their historical and international context, Studies has been embraced most enthusiastically by scholars trained in discipline of literary studies. For literary scholars, Studies, often loosely associated with British Cultural Studies, has provided an opportunity to import Anglo-American methodologies developed over past several decades into their own field and to address a wider range of cultural products than was authorized by traditional canon of literature. Studies has found particular acceptance among younger, U.S.-trained Germanists poised to assume leadership of field as an older cohort of emigres whose intellectual production was oriented towards Federal Republic now moves towards retirement. To younger Germanists, Studies seems to represent a new, uniquely U.S.-American perspective on things German. As Marc Weiner put it in his provocative letter announcing policies Quarterly would pursue under his editorship: German Studies has begun to develop an identity different from that of its counterpart, (German) Germanistik, as manifested in a variety of intellectual paradigms that differ from those abroad. Despite claims to interdisciplinarity made in GSA Guidelines, then, Germanists have frequently considered Studies mainly purview of Departments, viewing it particularly as a vehicle that would allow them to broaden curricular offerings, teach courses in English, and hence reach larger numbers of students at a time of declining language enrollments. Unlike Germanists, however, proponents of Studies in fields like history and political science, other core areas of GSA, seem much more strongly committed to

The Two Governments and the Two Kingdoms in Luther's Thought

The facet of his thought commonly referred to as the doctrine of the two kingdoms has provoked some of the most intractable confusion and bitter controversy in post-war continental Luther scholarship, and the ripples of this debate which reached these shores have all too often amounted to a litany of sweeping statements which have done nothing to enhance the Reformer's reputation in England. Yet even before Hitler's war Luther had endured a century of disfavour among the leading academic and ecclesiastical circles on this side of the Channel. So marked was British — more particularly, English — distaste for Luther in the opening years of this century that the American church historian Preserved Smith devoted an article to the subject in 1917, listing Anglo-Catholicism, rationalism, socialism and — since 1914 — visceral hostility to all things German as four factors which had conspired to tarnish the Reformer's image in the minds of the English of that time. Fifteen years later the celebrated Modernist H. D. A. Major was to lament that, ‘Today Martin Luther, the greatest protagonist of the Reformation, is viewed as a vulgar, violent and mistaken man as hostile to humanist culture as he was to social democracy.’ The European conflict of the next decade provided the cue for the most damaging slur of all on the Reformer's memory, so that when in 1945 a third-rate pamphleteer denigrated Luther as ‘Hitler's spiritual ancestor’ his thesis had already been expressed by Archbishop William Temple, who had died the previous year.