To the Editor:
There is a certain irony to the timing of William Collins Donahue and Martin Kagel's call to counter the parlous place of German studies in the American academy by merging it into a more encompassing "transnational European studies"—never mind that the ties that bind the European Union have never seemed more tenuous ("Saving German Studies, via Europe," The Chronicle Review, January 6).
Their acute analysis of the sickness makes sense. It's less clear that the cure they prescribe can address the heart of the problem. For German studies, however defined, to remain vital, the teaching of German language and literature must remain central. Yet that is precisely what risks going by the wayside, and in many places it already has, even at institutions that ought to know better and where funding is not the critical issue.
In many humanistic disciplines, not just German literature, a command of German remains vital, yet to judge from applications for graduate-school admission, let alone for faculty fellowships, fewer and fewer American students realize that they need German until it is much too late. Philosophy, classical art, and archaeology, my own fields of art history and medieval studies ... the list could be extended considerably.
In turning a deaf ear to German, we impoverish our understanding not simply of "German culture"—a contaminated term that must be used with care—but also of many other cultures, as well as the history of the disciplines that first made us aware of their traditions and accomplishments. Without German, we will diminish our knowledge not only of Germany, but also of ourselves.
Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Professor of German Art and Culture
History of Art and Architecture Department
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.
William Collins Donahue and Martin Kagel's essay suggests that there is a problem in American German studies because of economic pressures, insufficient enrollment, and a crisis in the humanities more generally. All of that is true. Donahue and Kagel go on to suggest that the way to "save" German studies is to integrate it into interdisciplinary European studies. "The future," they claim, "may well lie in European integration." That is also undoubtedly true—in fact, "European integration" is arguably already the present, and we won't have to wait until "the future" for that integration to come.
However, there are problems with Donahue and Kagel's suggestions. The first is historical, in their conception of how German studies developed—"German language and literature departments" transforming themselves into German-studies departments over the course of the 1970s and 80s. The fact is, German studies as a discipline emerged at least as much from the work of historians as it did from the work of literary and cultural scholars; and the work of political scientists should also not be neglected.
When German studies in the United States emerged institutionally, in the late 1970s, in the form of the Western Association for German Studies (which is now the German Studies Association), it did so, at least at first, because historians, literature scholars, and political scientists living and working (mostly) in the western part of the United States wanted an interdisciplinary forum for their innovative work. In other words, German studies in the United States was not simply a metamorphosis on the part of one discipline; it represented a coming together of several disciplines, particularly those of history and Germanistik (German literary studies), but also the discipline of political science.
Yes, German studies had an impact on the field of Germanistik, but it also had an impact on the field of history, encouraging, for instance, the development of Holocaust studies, as the historian Christopher Browning noted at the 35th-anniversary conference of the German Studies Association. That interdisciplinary thrust has remained a part of American German studies to this day; by now we can add art history, musicology, performance studies, and film studies to the list of disciplines that contribute to German studies.
In addition to ignoring the interdisciplinarity that has always been at the heart of German studies, Donahue and Kagel's approach also has some pragmatic problems. At my own university, we have three specialists in the German language and German literature and two historians who specialize in German history. But we do not have a single full-time, tenure-track political scientist who specializes in either Germany or Europe. And I suspect that my university is not atypical in that regard.
What this means pragmatically is that even if the language-and-literature specialists decided to get together with the historians to form a European-studies center, we would have only one political scientist to talk with, a political scientist, by the way, who does not specialize in Europe. But I doubt whether my dean or the central administration would be on board with the creation of such a hypothetical center anyway: For decades the thrust in American political science has been away from, not toward, area studies. Donahue and Kagel do not seem to be aware of that problem, which is a reflection of long-term changes in the discipline of political science.
Finally, there is a logistical problem for language-and-literature scholars specifically (and for historians, for that matter). If Donahue and Kagel are right that interdisciplinarity has "undermined" the "disciplinary identity" of such scholars, then it is not at all clear to me how an additional broadening of focus to the entire European Union, not just Germany or German-speaking Europe, will solve that problem. Indeed, such an expanded focus would seem to undermine core competence in the field (specialization in the German language, German culture, and German history) even further. If scholars of German literature and culture are now to become political scientists and specialists in all of Europe, that strikes me as a further thinning out of subject-area competence.
None of this is an argument against European studies or against broadening it to include a focus on the European Union. However, given Germany's historical importance in the development of Europe and its current significance in helping to address the EU's various crises, it will, for the foreseeable future, be crucial to keep the "German" in German studies.
Stephen Brockmann
Professor of German
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh
From chronicle.com:
In my private institution's world-languages division (1,100 students, nine languages), we have learned that if all the languages play nicely together, we can amplify our strengths instead of dividing turf until it is irrelevantly small.
Language-and-literature faculty need to think deeply about the fact that our primary goal at the undergraduate level is not to reproduce ourselves but to educate intelligent and useful citizens. Until we acknowledge the failure of our past insistence that students master doctoral-level abstractions about theory before they have real language proficiency, and before they understand the cultural underpinnings (including history and current affairs—not just the arts), our language-and-literature departments won't be able to adapt to the not-very-mysterious decisions by students to look for ways to connect their studies with their impending need to be productive in the world. Donahue and Kagel's model points in the right direction, provided it is implemented thoroughly and not just as window dressing.
PMinMA
I appreciate Donahue and Kagel's proposal, and I agree that the discipline needs to redefine itself. Yet I also sense that there is much of value that is likely to be lost if we transition to the model of such larger umbrella disciplines. On the one hand, a transnational and European-centered focus risks losing its connection to history, as such studies and programs tend to concentrate on the 20th century and later. Yes, there is material from the medieval through the Enlightenment to discuss there, but most transnational and European studies in the German realm tend to rely on notions of the nation-state that, in German lands, were not a reality before the end of the 19th century.
And such studies tend toward area studies and social sciences and, by extension, risk occluding the humanities and the tools and modes of analyses unique to them. A focus on humanities in general, however, even with specific subspecialties, risks losing the particularity of German language and culture.
I'm interested in retaining something of our discipline, not only for the current job seekers and Ph.D. students in the pipeline, but also because German culture has made significant contributions to the modern world (Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, etc.) that can be understood from a broader European perspective but that also gain in richness when understood within their particular context. The contrast between German and European understandings of Romanticism is only one of many examples of how those two perspectives diverge. How do we retain such an awareness of German particularity while redefining the discipline?
jblyon
