DDGC Steering Committee solidarity statement with #BLM.

Todd Heidt reflects on the necessity for inclusive approaches to German studies.

David Gramling reflects on the lessons learned from the open letter to the AATG.

Regine Criser and Ervin Malakaj call for care and support in German studies during the time of a global pandemic.

Julia Ruck reflects on classroom work on discrimination and students’ roles and attitudes during this work.

By choosing Peter Handke, the members of the academy have indulged in an unflinching endorsement of a genocide denier. If they were trying to insult the literary readership, they have insulted themselves. Anyone who is celebrating this award is insulting the very dignity of human beings.

I would like to argue that German Studies scholars are not only particularly well positioned to engage with migration and its discontents; given the history of German-speaking cultures and the dire situation for migrants and asylum-seekers in the U.S. and worldwide, condemning xenophobic, anti-minority, and racist discourses is also our most solemn duty.

With young adults as my students, one of my responsibilities is to guide them toward deeper self-reflection. For that reason, I often include assignments in my courses that ask students to reflect on their own learning experiences and their own development as people who are able to find answers and teach themselves new skills. Such a practice also aligns with the overall educational goals of my institution, Northeastern University, and with the World Readiness Standards put forward by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

Today, with 40 million internally displaced peoples, 25.4 million refugees, and 3.1 million asylum seekers globally, the discipline has much to accomplish by addressing stories of escape, trauma, resettlement and expulsion, and the terms “precarity,” “fear,” “empathy,” and “intimacy,” as it has already begun to do.

It matters because it gives us the language to process these emotions and better understand how their expression shapes our world.

There seems to be a canon of cultural production (be it literature or film) that either depicts the GDR as a state of oppression as seen in the film The Lives of Others (dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006) or through the lens of Ostalgie, as seen in Good Bye Lenin! (dir. Wolfgang Becker, 2003). This leads to what I call an exoticizing of the GDR and its culture on the one hand and an oversimplification of what the East German state was on the other hand. In order to understand contemporary German culture and history, one has to continue examining the factors that shaped GDR legacies and resist such exoticization. In this short reflection, I would like to suggest two ways of diversifying our teaching and study of the GDR.

Many people are familiar with some of the basics about East Germany (e.g., single-party state, socialism/communism, Berlin Wall), but there is little common knowledge about my focus within GDR Studies: the experiences and depictions of lesbians and gay men in East Germany. In what follows, I will discuss some of the things we can learn from studying this subject and why these topics matter.

I wholeheartedly believe that there always are lessons to be learned from the past, and that the 40-year experiment that was the GDR continues to offer scholars a unique lens through which to ponder German Studies.

In this response, I’d like to reflect on why Black German Studies is necessary both in the US and in Germany. Ironically, it seems less pressing to make a case for Black German Studies in the US. Many of the scholars who have done pioneering work in this field, including Black Germans like Fatima El-Tayeb and Peggy Piesche, and African Americans like Tina Campt and Michelle Wright, have taught or continue to teach in the US. And I have received less push back to Black German Studies’ relevance in the US, than in Germany, where unfortunately Black German scholars face even more hurdles trying to enter academia and conduct research on critical race studies once in academia. Nevertheless, I will start by considering the US context, since that is the context within which I was trained and in which I teach. And despite being seemingly open to Black German topics of study, there is still room for improvement both in US African Diaspora as well as in US German programs at the K-16 level and beyond.

During the 2019 Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum Conference, a working group on contingent labor in German studies convened. The working group compiled a set of notes outlining guidelines for DDGC as it plans its programming, which are listed below. These guidelines also have implications beyond DDGC.

But it should actually be framed differently: why has Black German Studies not seemingly mattered before? The word matter is of particular interest here. To matter is to signify something of importance. Indeed, what matters in diverse academic settings, which are often the bastions of white cis-heteropatriarchy, is not typically reflective of what is of value to the broader population. What matters is that which is deemed worthy in terms of cultural cache and warrants knowledge production and circulation. Moreover, whoever is in control of that matter subjects it to scrutiny, limits its scope, and circumscribes its meaning. 

​Throughout 2019, we will feature blog posts by scholars working in Black German Studies, Queer German Studies, GDR Studies, German Women’s and Gender Studies, and German Migration Studies. These scholars will outline the relevance of the research in their specific fields with an eye to German Studies broadly, attending to questions of diversity and anti-colonization.

We acknowledge and appreciate the complex historical, financial, logistical, and political conditions under which volunteer leaders in the AATG work. Still, we can no longer accept the notion that any and all efforts at diversity are virtuous, especially when these are not conceived collaboratively with Scholars of Color and with other marginalized and marked scholars whom the organization wishes to represent.

The inherent value of defending the teaching of “foreign languages” in a so-called monolingualist United States is not sufficient justification for our representative organizations’ ambivalence and acquiescence toward ethnonationalism, settler colonialism, racist ideologies and uncritical reproduction of spaces and practices that create a hostile environment to marginalized people. Nor does the “foreign-language teaching setting” give justification for the patterns of cultural appropriation—of hip-hop, coffee culture, and klezmer, for instance—the likes of which have been shown to be unethical, as well as pedagogically unsound, in other areas of US American education. Celebrating ethnonational identity with flag-and-castle-emblazoned promotional materials, with a little multikulti on the side, is too high an ethical price to pay for a boost in enrollments.

We are convinced this is a misguided decision, which significantly weakens humanities education at McDaniel College. It also comes at a perilous time for the humanities. McDaniel College has boasted a commitment “to excellence in liberal arts and sciences.” Yesterday’s announcement sent a clear message that the leadership of McDaniel College, contrary to its mission, is actively dismantling core subject areas in the humanities and thus supports the national and international attack on humanist education.