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).

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.

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.”

IN JANUARY 2017, the British playwright David Hare found himself at the center of a debate about the state of UK theater. In an interview with Jeffrey Sweet, Hare expressed his concern over the extent to which British theatrical traditions were being eroded in the face of corrupting influences from abroad: “Now we’re heading in Britain towards an over aestheticized European theater,” he told Sweet, “and all that directorial stuff that we’ve managed to keep over on the continent is now coming over and beginning to infect our theater.” Hare's comments gained considerable attention in the British press, coinciding as they did with a wider debate about Britain's relationship with Europe, the result of the UK’s 2016 referendum on its membership of the European Union. In particular, Hare's theatrically “Eurosceptic” tone stood in opposition to the predominantly pro-European stance of the UK's creative and cultural sector. The largest network of UK-based theater professionals, UK Theatre, published a briefing note in 2017 that voiced its members’ concern that Brexit “may lead to a decline in the sector's ability to produce world class art,” with one-third to half of theater staff in Britain being non-UK European citizens. This, combined with the potential loss of European funding and the end to freedom of movement, could, according to UK Theatre, potentially result in the UK “losing opportunities for cultural and artistic exchange.” In a direct response to Hare in the Guardian, theater critic Lyn Gardner similarly emphasized the politically peculiar timing of his comments, highlighting how, “with a hard Brexit on the horizon, the arts world is working hard to strengthen its ties with Europe,” rather than withdrawing into an “insular” national culture that “feels threatened by other forms.”

Hare's interview not only appeared to demand a form of cultural secession for the United Kingdom; it was also voiced, problematically, in terms that chimed with wider anti-European rhetoric. Invoking the image of an island nation that has successfully defended its theatrical borders against foreign invasion, his comments echoed a form of conservative cultural nostalgia for the political tradition of splendid isolation.

Embracing the full performative potential of Shakespeare's Globe, the Bremer Shakespeare Company's (BSC) production of Timon aus Athen (Timon of Athens) retained an essential spatial fidelity to the Globe, even as their adaptation deviated radically from Shakespeare's text. Although the production remained faithful to the emotions and moral argument of the original, the adaption shook its audience with a litany of contemporary allusions, linking the play directly to the current European financial crisis and German politics: ‘Bankrupt bankers, please increase your bonuses. Politicians, give up your positions early, enjoy your severance package or pension. And if you still want to play a role, switch sides to business.’ Such moments demonstrate what Dennis Kennedy has called the ‘direct access to the power of the plays’ paradigmatic of the experimental mode of ‘foreign Shakespeare’, and also reflect Ton Hoenselaars’ argument that translation can ‘[make] Shakespeare into a contemporary interlocutor capable of addressing the issues that concern us today’. Timon's problems with liquidity directly played on the political frisson generated by the fact that a London audience were watching Germans performing a work about a Greek financial crisis. Yet the direct concerns of that audience were also referenced, when Timon instructed the groundlings to ‘burn down the Globe and replace it with a bank’, since, ‘after all, another bank is exactly what London needs!’ Here was a typically Brechtian call to action which contributed to the sharp political tone of the production. Intriguingly, the BSC's version of Timon was not the only version playing in London as part of the World Shakespeare Festival to make such contemporary political allusions. The National Theatre's production similarly pursued the theme of financial crisis, albeit in the wholly updated setting of contemporary London with allusions to city sponsors, the Occupy Movement and street people.

It Is A Curiosity Repeatedly Noted in secondary literature on Gustav Freytag that, despite his extensive commercial success during the mid-nineteenth century, he does not hold a more prominent position in the German literary canon. Today best known for his social novel of business, Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit, 1855), Freytag remains something of a secondary figure in German literary history. He is dismissed respectively as a minor representative of German realism, as an author more concerned with bourgeois politics than literary aesthetics, and, in certain circles of criticism, as an anti-Semite. Literary surveys of the later nineteenth century tell how Freytag was quickly eclipsed by authors such as Theodor Fontane, Gottfried Keller, and, not least, Thomas Mann, who published that other great novel of German business, Buddenbrooks, in 1901, less than fifty years after Freytag’s own work. By the mid-twentieth century, Freytag’s popularity had all but vanished, both among the German readership and in the field of Germanistik. Nevertheless, Freytag remains a central figure for any discussion on the nature of the German bestseller. As T. E. Carter has demonstrated, Soll und Haben was one of the most widely read novels in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, its success is often seen as paradigmatic of a shift in popular reading tastes away from the consumption of novels in translation and toward novels originally written in German.

This chapter examines the status of Soll und Haben as a bestseller by considering three specific aspects of the novel that potentially helped secure its contemporary success. First, it will examine the role of bourgeois business practices in the novel. How did this theme—at first glance unlikely to capture the popular imagination—contribute to the novel’s appeal? Second, it will explore the tropes of the colonial adventure stories that dominate the second half of the novel. Why does Freytag change the narrative direction of his text, removing the reader from the carefully constructed and lovingly evoked business milieu of the first three volumes, and transport them to the protocolonial Polish setting of the final three volumes? Finally, the chapter will consider the love stories and their unusual role in depicting class relations.