THE ROLE OF THE GERMAN intellectual in shaping the thought and culture of nineteenth-century Europe has long been acknowledged, with significant influence evident from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. The cultural interface between the German-speaking lands and Great Britain was particularly rich, with key thinkers on either side of the North Sea—Goethe and Heine, Scott and Carlyle, to name but a few—engaged in a productive dynamic of mutual influence and often quite competitive comparison. As part of this exchange, in addition to the many literary works and cultural studies produced over the century, a number of writers penned lengthy and detailed travel accounts that brought the world—both near and far—to the reading circles of the emergent “Germany.” Celebrated figures like the Humboldt brothers, Georg Forster, and Ida von Hahn-Hahn produced hugely influential works that served to reshape the German understanding of the world from the periphery of Europe to the Far East, their views absorbed by a readership struggling to place the German-speaking lands in the global context driven by the colonial expansionism of their near European neighbors, with its concomitant mix of orientalist appreciation and exoticized, often threatening, otherness. As well as these household names, there was also a large group of now largely forgotten scholars and travelers whose work was equally crucial in broadening the horizons of readers across the German-speaking lands. Given the keen interest in all matters “English,” it is hardly surprising that the nineteenth century saw a steady stream of German travelers to the British Isles. They came in search of knowledge ranging from an understanding of the London theater scene, to the development of landscape gardens and country houses, to the expanding industrial power of the British Empire. This was the image of Great Britain already known to the German reading public, and each traveler added his or, occasionally, her input to the prevailing appreciative tone—often termed “Anglomania”— of the early-to-mid-century.

What happened when these German travelers found themselves off the beaten track? There was, after all, more to the British Isles than Covent Garden theaters or Edinburgh's New Town.

THE PROJECT OF tracing the legacy, influence, and value of German culture across national, linguistic, and historical contexts might imply that scholars need to look away from the traditional exemplars of German culture. That might involve, one might think, shifting our contemporary research and teaching priorities away from German writing and cinema, now the traditional stuff of German studies, attending instead to a wider range of cultural products that may have been forgotten, marginalized, overlooked, or are simply not contained within obviously Germanophone contexts, and examining these through an appropriately expanded set of methodologies. This volume seeks to map and promote this process of expansion, and the chapters as a whole testify to how far such developments have already come within different iterations of German studies around the globe. However, this collection does not shy away from returning to the traditional core of our discipline. Key to our project is a process of viewing canonical texts afresh and reviewing how we read them—opening out interrogations of how contemporary and historical Germanophone culture speaks to models of the “world” as a complex shifting entity that is cultural, political, economic, and the object of scientific inquiry.

One fascinating and invaluable characteristic of much pre-twentieth-century German literary and philosophical production, particularly from the period around 1800, is the fact that it not only wrestled with questions of Germany's identity as a nation but also explored, often quite explicitly, such notions as “world culture,” “world consciousness,” or “world belonging.” The first part of this volume seeks to continue a process of refocusing the products of German culture, taken from that period and indeed the epoch, to show how they can be used to explore matters of transnational and worldly concern. It begins with a cluster of chapters that revisit a sequence of what might be termed “older” canonical writers. John Noyes offers one of several contributions in the volume that draw on Goethe. Noyes seeks to “sketch the dimensions of Welt as Goethe explored it” in Faust, in the writings on Weltliteratur (world literature), and in the methodological considerations of his Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors, 1810).

FORTY YEARS AFTER the publication of Edward W. Said's study Orientalism (1978), widely seen as a catalyst for the rise of international postcolonial studies over the course of its first twenty years, postcolonial theory and postcolonial research are probably as well established in international German studies as they will ever be. There is a regular stream of publications in history, literary and cultural studies, and also in the political and social sciences that advances the “postcolonial project” (to take Bhabha's term) of critically “rereading and rewriting” wider German involvement in European colonialism and imperialism, as well as the specific memory and critique of German, Austrian, and Swiss colonial history overseas and domestically, including its ambivalent legacies today that range from multifaceted cross-cultural exchange to the backlash of residual racism and resurgent nationalism. There are dedicated research centers, websites, and academic book series, and postcolonial research has its place in many of the leading international journals in German studies, while research on German, Austrian, and Swiss (post) colonial history and culture are beginning to feature in courses and journals dedicated to international, mostly Anglophone, postcolonial studies that tend to focus on British and French colonialism. The substantial edited volume Postkoloniale Germanistik: Bestandsaufnahme, theoretische Perspektiven, Lektüren (Postcolonial German Studies: Review, Critical Perspectives, Readings, 2014), and the comprehensive mapping of the field in the German-language Handbuch Postkolonialismus und Literatur (Handbook of Postcolonialism and Literature, 2017), which contextualizes German postcolonial studies in the wider field of comparative literature, other arts and humanities subjects, and comparative postcolonial studies, mark the establishment of postcolonial studies in German academia some twenty years after German studies began to embrace this new paradigm in the later 1990s.

At the same time, the “postkoloniale Blick” (postcolonial gaze), as Paul Michael Lützeler calls it, pioneered by authors such as Uwe Timm, Hans Christoph Buch, and Hubert Fichte since the 1970s, has proliferated since the 1990s. Critical engagement with the legacies of European colonialism, the critical memory of Germany's own imperial history, and the critique of Eurocentrism and the rejection of racism and othering have since become normalized in contemporary German literature.

Introduction

IN 2014, I CO-ORGANIZED a conference at the University of Hawai‘i titled “Asia and the Pacific in German Culture.” Along with organizational responsibilities, I also helped design the poster and website for the conference. I clicked the photo that you see here and chose it as our logo. That's my mother and aunt under a tree on a beautiful beach in Hawai‘i. There were aesthetic reasons for choosing this picture: it provided a nonspecific landscape and figures that could fit many regions of Asia and the Pacific, and the sky provided a subtle color scheme and enough negative space for the text. But more important, it represented for me a kind of reversal, a “decolonizing,” if you will, of Caspar David Friedrich's 1818 painting The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Instead of a nineteenth-century white man standing on top of a mountain in Europe with active Wanderlust in his posture and feet overlooking a mysterious faraway landscape, I chose two brown women at sea level somewhere in the Asia-Pacific, sitting in a lotus position, contemplating the wanderings that brought them there. Caspar David Friedrich was the quintessential representative of Romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when German intellectual Wanderlust fueled exploration in the East, particularly India. German Romantic thinkers established a literary, linguistic, and philosophical kinship with the East, yet exoticized it as the birthplace of ancient mystical wisdom. And now, here I am, born and raised in India, educated in the United States and Germany, and working in Hawai‘i, where I find myself literally and philosophically between East-West currents that rise and flow within me in turbulent and pacific waves.

My reverse conference image was not meant as a counterattack on the colonial gaze; I did not mean that the Eastern perspective was somehow more down-to-earth (sea level) and hence superior to the high-and-mighty (mountaintop) othering Western perspective. To claim that would simply tilt the power to the other side rather than restoring a balance between them or showing a dynamic interplay, which was ultimately my goal in the “decolonizing” effort. My conference image was meant to be deeply self-reflexive, as my approach to cross-cultural German studies is inseparably intertwined with my personal journey.

WHAT IS THE STATE of German studies as an academic discipline in its national and global contexts as we move deeper into the twenty-first century? What future does it face, how does this relate to its past, and how are Germanists of diverse origins and persuasions around the world responding to such issues? These questions form the nexus of this volume. They are questions that demand we consider even larger topics: not just the status of our discipline but of interdisciplinarity as a model for the arts and humanities; not just the role of the canon but the decolonization of that canon; and not just the linguistic and geographic boundaries that we have traditionally used to contour German studies but also the temporal and disciplinary boundaries we use to determine (and limit) the scope of our work as Germanists. However influential in the world the German-speaking nations have been, and might still be, German language and culture, and their academic study, increasingly seem to be at the mercy of tectonic shifts (some required and sought, others not)—from changes in the way our universities are structured and funded to the reshaping of cultural and political discourse under the geopolitical forces of nationalism and globalization.

The question of how we can define and evaluate a specifically German- language culture in such a global context is thus a fraught one. In the wake of the so-called global financial crisis of 2008, and also of large migrational population shifts that saw communities moving in truly unprecedented numbers to cross borders into safer and more prosperous territory, driven by war, famine, and poverty, positively connoted narratives of globalization have fallen out of favor in many quarters. As the former British Prime Minister Theresa May's 2017 comment that “a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere” demonstrates, global thinking has been increasingly rejected in favor of resurgent nation-centered thinking. In the United Kingdom, the 2016 European Union Membership Referendum rapidly became about much more than Europe’s future, and “Brexit” developed into a protest vote against globalization and its manifestations.

THUS FAR, THIS VOLUME has primarily explored the ways in which German-language literature, and the disciplinary and canonical approaches that are often used to structure it, have nevertheless addressed notions of “worldliness,” whether that be in the ways in which German-language culture has contributed to world literature; in the ways it has been shaped by voices and cultures from around the globe; or in the ways in which postcolonial and transnational approaches have fruitfully destabilized any notions of “center” and “periphery,” or indeed of “nation”—that “deterritorialization” of German studies as a discipline outlined in the introduction to this book. Part 1 has thus explored what we argue is ultimately a productive tension between the local and the worldly, and the ways in which the traditional boundaries we use to delineate and describe our discipline are, in fact, already inherently permeable. Without ignoring the continued dominance of the nation and the canon, and the patterns of exclusion these undoubtedly still create, the preceding chapters have attempted to showcase this more “intrinsic” mobility of German-language culture across a range of regional, national, and transnational contexts.

Yet German studies is mobile in other ways. After all, it is not just texts and authors that cross boundaries and are shaped by wordily influences: the discipline itself is co-constructed across global locations, and we as its scholars are equally part of this global mobility through our careers across institutions, continents, and disciplines. In this second part, then, we seek to innovatively map this wider mobility by looking at the shape and scope of German studies across a range of diverse cultural and geographic contexts, and the agility of German studies in those contexts, even at a time of perceived disciplinary crisis.

Part 2 opens with Carlotta von Maltzan's chapter on German studies in a South African context. Picking up directly from Dirk Göttsche’s closing chapter in Part 1 on the development of a postcolonial German studies, von Maltzan explores how German studies has the “the dubious status of claiming the longest [disciplinary] history on the African continent” because of its roots in the colonization of the Cape and the early “paracolonial presence” of Germany through its settlements and missionary work.

IN 2017, THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR of espionage and thriller novels John le Carré gave a speech at an award ceremony for German teachers at the German Embassy in London entitled “Why We Should Learn German.” He recalled his early career as a German teacher and his love for the language, still trying to explain to himself “why it was love at first sound.” He fondly remembered his first teacher, Mr. King, who despite the anti-German propaganda during World War II, inspired his “little class with the beauty of the language, and of its literature and culture.” Le Carré then also explained why he learned and taught the language:

John le Carré echoes my personal enthusiasm for German and the reasons why I chose to teach the subject in South Africa at a time when foreign languages seem to have lost their appeal at tertiary institutions—small as it was in the past.

Moreover, in South Africa, German as a subject at tertiary institutions has the dubious status of claiming the longest history on the African continent because of its inextricable link to the colonization of the Cape, and thus to colonialism as practiced first by the Netherlands, then by the British Empire, and finally as practiced in the apartheid era. The end of the latter era is marked by two significant turning points that changed the political and social landscape in Southern Africa. First, the former German colony South West Africa became independent Namibia in 1990. It had been mandated by the League of Nations to the Union of South Africa in 1915 and was regarded as a fifth province by the Republic of South Africa despite the abolishment of the mandate by the United Nations in 1966.

IN HIS 2014 OVERVIEW of German environmental literary studies in the Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, the British Germanist and pioneering ecocritic Axel Goodbody notes that in the early years of the second decade of the new millennium, literary ecocriticism still remained relatively invisible in the German-speaking world, despite the comparative strength of environmental concern in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The German region has long been a leader in ecological science, politics, and philosophy, as well as a significant contributor to recent and current research in environmental history, theology, ethics, and aesthetics. Until recently, however, Germanistik (continental germanophone German studies) has been peculiarly resistant to ecocriticism. In part, Goodbody suggests, this could be related to the prominence of ecology and environmental thought in other fields. But he also observes that the core concerns of the kind of environmental literary studies that took off in the English-speaking world in the 1990s, foregrounding nature conservation, celebrating affective relations with place, and often deploying apocalyptic rhetoric, could have “seemed to skeptical academics [specifically, Germanists] a potentially dangerous throwback to Romantic and turn-ofthe- century forms of antimodernism” and irrationalism. Where ecocriticism had nonetheless found a small niche in the German academy was in English studies, or Anglistik, departments, primarily through the work of Americanists. The development of ecocritical Germanistik, meanwhile, was being undertaken by a geographically widely dispersed, and generally institutionally isolated, band of German studies scholars working outside germanophone territory. In addition to Goodbody and Colin Riordan in England, these included Jost Hermand, Heather Sullivan, Bernhard Malkmus, and Sabine Wilke in the United States, Serenella Iovino in Italy, and Nevzat Kaya in Turkey.

I also feature in this lineup of ecocritical scholars, and this chapter charts my own journey, at once intellectual and geographical, from Australian German studies into the inter- and transdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities as it emerged in Australia in the late 1990s and began to be institutionalized in Britain in the 2010s. This is, in part, a story of straying, testimony to my own inability to stay on the straight and narrow demarcated by disciplinary (and other) boundaries.

THE CONTRIBUTIONS IN THIS third part critically assess the importance and relevance of a German-language contribution to the world, where the world refers not merely to the geographical but to a plurality of cultural practices and forms of social transformation. Each explores how knowledge of German-language cultural products, ideas, and traditions has provoked and driven activity beyond the academy, and how this has impacted on the communities that come into contact with them. The chapters thus question what the world of art, culture, and society takes from German-language culture, exploring which language(s), which traditions, and which intellectual insights are required to undertake the work they do. In assessing these cultural and community contexts, these chapters also question what role, if any, academic work might have in supporting or articulating this cultural response to “Germanness”—and what academia might learn in turn from work undertaken in the cultural and community sectors.

In his opening chapter, James Hodkinson explores how processes of collaboration and co-creation have extended the reach of his research into two new worlds: first, “away from the physical space of campus and academic modes of discourse,” and second, “transnationally, by making culturally remote (German and historical) material relevant to the contemporary UK context.” Some of these materials indeed return us to a figure familiar from earlier parts of this book—namely, Goethe—with one of Hodkinson's most innovative examples of “impact” revolving around responses to the Hafez-Goethe monument in Weimar, inspired by Goethe's West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan, 1819) and his imagined encounter with the Persian poet Hafez of Shiraz. In looking at Goethe and others, Hodkinson's chapter thus demonstrates the “abiding value of German cultural products to make culturally specific contributions to contemporary debates.” At the same time, however, he showcases different models of impact and knowledge exchange, such as public lectures, exhibitions, work with schools, and artistic collaborations with figures such as the Bangladeshi artist Mohammed Ali and the Iranian-born Birmingham painter Mohsen Keiany. In exploring how we might “evaluate” these collaborations in quantitative and qualitative ways, Hodkinson ultimately argues that these collaborations and networks “beyond the world of the academy” reveal how “academics can equally benefit from engaging with nonacademic constituencies.”

“HIER IST ENGLAND! Hier ist England! Hier ist England!” This was the announcement Germans would hear if they happened to tune their radios to the BBC German Service during the Second World War. While technology enabled Britain to cross into enemy territory via the airwaves, actually speaking to Germans in a language they understood— in a tone to which they would respond favorably, about topics that interested them—required a complex combination of linguistic and cultural competence, knowledge, and creativity. It also required those working for the BBC German Service to consider carefully to whom and for whom they were speaking. Originally conceived as part of Britain's psychological warfare effort, the German Service continued to broadcast from Bush House in London well beyond the end of the Second World War, until its closure in 1999. What bodies of knowledge and intellectual insights did its employees draw on to maintain this transnational broadcasting effort? How did German listeners react to programs from the United Kingdom? What adjustments were necessary to transition from wartime to peacetime broadcasting? This chapter explores transnational exchange between Britain and Germany by focusing on the ways in which the BBC chose to address its German target audience in the 1940s.

Scholarship on the BBC German Service has focused primarily on the war years and neglected its role in subsequent periods of German history. Drawing on hitherto unexamined archival sources, this chapter presents the first analysis of the German Service's role during the Allied occupation of Germany (1945–49)—a crucial period for the development of the German media landscape. The transition from war to peace in the mid-1940s saw a renewed negotiation between external, internal, and bilateral British and German voices on the BBC German Service, at a time when Britain was very directly involved in efforts to rebuild, control, and reshape the German media. Accessing and broadcasting authentic German voices became crucial to attracting and retaining listeners during this period, as did the question of how to position the German listener in relation to an extraterritorial speaker. In these ways, the BBC German Service's development during the immediate postwar years serves as a case study for two nations’ attempts to redefine their position in the world after a period of embittered conflict.

ONE OF THE MOST influential academic hypotheses regarding the relationship between Germany and the world is put forth in the introduction of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). There, Said draws a distinction between nineteenth-century German scholarship of the Orient on the one hand, and French and British attitudes towards the region on the other. Whereas France and Britain pursued active imperial interests in the Middle East—playing a “great game” of sorts that culminated in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916—Germany, lacking similar investments, took a much more abstract view of the region: “There was nothing in Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the Levant, North Africa. Moreover, the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical, Orient: it was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never actual.”

Said's distinction was carefully delimited both temporally and geographically: he never meant it to apply outside of the nineteenth century or to areas other than the Middle East. But because Orientalism became the de facto founding text of postcolonial studies, and postcolonial studies, in turn, was for several decades the dominant humanistic paradigm for discussing relations between Europe and the rest of the world, the idea that Germany's interest in the world was primarily academic or belletristic rather than strategic or power-political took unexpected roots. Only over the last fifteen years or so have scholars begun a concerted pushback, focusing both on the destructive consequences of German colonialism (such as the brutal suppression of the Boxer uprising in 1900–1901, or the Herero and Nama genocides of 1904–1907), and on the inadequacies of Said's hypothesis itself. These efforts have, in turn, led to more vigorous discussions of Germany's colonial past within the public sphere.

This chapter is inspired by such corrective measures, but nevertheless departs in a different direction. For, as it turns out, the thesis that Germans relate to the world in a fundamentally different way than the Western European powers (i.e., through cultural rather than military means) is by no means original to Said. It can be found in many canonical German literary and academic texts from the period between 1800 and 1945 as well.