by Claire E. Scott (Grinnell College)
I don’t know about you, but over the last couple of years I have felt particularly emotional. As a scholar of German Studies currently working in the United States, I have watched with anger and sadness as political divisions escalate and populist movements rise. In our contemporary world there is a lot to be upset about and there is also, thankfully, a lot of love and support to be shared. Why does German Gender Studies matter right now? It matters because it gives us the language to process these emotions and better understand how their expression shapes our world. In the field of German Studies we often work with fictional texts and therefore have to articulate the relevance of these cultural products to the “real world.” One of the foundational questions of Gender Studies is the relationship between the body and social identity. During her lecture at the 2019 Feminist Theory Workshop at Duke University, Lauren Berlant described a genre as an “affective convention.” Just like when someone tells joke, understanding genre expectations requires a certain degree of intimacy or reciprocity between teller and audience (Berlant). Following the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins, affect refers to the way the body experiences emotion and how those experiences connect us to other people. Describing genre as an affective convention then, links cultural products both to individual and collective bodies. Storytelling, like gender, becomes something that matters in a corporeal sense as well as an intellectual one. In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed writes that, “If sensation brings us to feminism, to become a feminist is to cause a sensation” (39). We sense that something is unjust, and we act on those feelings. What Women’s and Gender Studies ultimately teaches us to do is to turn emotions into activism. It gives us the tools for transforming our sensations into something sensational, something that generates attention and cannot be ignored. No matter where you are in the world, all you need to do is open a social media account in order to be reminded of the power of emotions. In an era of truthiness and fake news, we have seen feelings dramatically color our worldviews and damage our relationships with one another. However, we have also seen the rise of hashtag movements, which serve as contemporary examples of Ahmed’s feminist sensation. #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, and in the German context #aufschrei have all given voice to untold stories and bottled up emotions. By linking these stories together, we are able to shed light on structural injustices that are built into the very fabric of our institutions. My individual experiences are always a part of structures bigger than me, and digital activism enables us to draw these connections on a global scale. As the German feminist activist Anne Wizorek writes in the book Weil ein #aufschrei nicht reicht, “Wir teilen nicht nur unsere Geschichten, sondern auch den Schmerz dahinter — genauso wie die Wut darüber, dass es uns immer wieder als ‘normal’ eingeredet wird, solche Dinge durchmachen zu müssen” (188). By compiling our stories and making an archive of our emotions, we are performing sensational feminist actions that have the power to change what is considered “normal.” The danger here, however, is the one at which Wizorek’s title hints. Simply sharing our emotions may never be enough to create profound structural change. Emotions have been used to shut down just as many conversations as they have started, particularly conversations about intersectionality and race. All too often white fragility drowns out the stories of people of color because their experiences generate the same kind of discomfort for white women that the stories of #aufschrei and #metoo generate for men. This needs to change in order for the political potential of these sensational feminist movements to be fully realized. Since emotions have stereotypically been classified as the domain of women (in contrast to masculine logic and reason), Women’s and Gender Studies has often led the way in terms of scholarship on emotion and affect. Now, perhaps more than ever, it is crucial that we participate in the process of analyzing and thinking deeply about our emotions and their consequences for our bodies and for our communities. If we want to transform German Studies and move away from violent, ethno-national understandings of German-ness, if we want to combat the enforcement of limiting gender categories in our society and in our language, then we need to drastically upend the status quo. This process will inevitably be an emotional one, which will require us to think long and hard about how we process our emotions through cultural products and ultimately, force us to rethink how we interact with one another. References Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke UP, 2017. Berlant, Lauren. “Sex in the Event of Happiness.” Feminist Theory Workshop, 22 March 2019, Duke University, Durham, NC. Keynote Address. Tomkins, Silvan S. Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition. Springer, 2008. Wizorek, Anne. Weil ein #aufschrei nicht reicht: für einen Feminismus von heute. Fischer, 2014.
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by Anna Hájková (University of Warwick) The Holocaust rightly belongs among the canonical events of the twentieth century. However, over the past seventy years, our way of narrating this genocide has become monolithic. While it has been possible to incorporate certain new approaches to this historiography — e.g, perspectives on women and gender, studies of Jews as agents rather than passive victims, Jewish history of the Holocaust rather than perpetrator-centered narratives — victim accounts are largely identical. They tell a story of oppression, solidarity, and family bonds. If there are ever stories about conduct among the prisoners that deviate from received and sanctioned narratives about survival, survivor testimonies usually dismiss the people in question or paint them as monsters. We are all familiar with stories about the capo, the sex worker, the Jewish functionary, or the homosexual. It was my fascination with the perspective of what is considered the deviant that set me to ask: where are the stories of the queer Holocaust victims? This approach allows for a very different way of analyzing and understanding the prisoner society of Nazi camps and ghettos. In this enterprise, I build on the recent scholarship by Christa Schikorra, Robert Sommer, Dagmar Lieske, Julia Hörath, Helga Amesberger, Sylvia Köchl, and Frank Nonnemacher, among others, who study the socially marginalized victims of Nazi Germany: the “asocials” and “habitual criminals.” This courageous research has revealed difficult stories about people who were not allowed to join a survivor association, apply for reparations, or bear a testimony. That this is a difficult enterprise I learned early on when I studied sex work in Theresienstadt. Several survivors were angry that I asked questions that should not be posed. In response, they attacked me personally, stating that I did this wrong research because of “my problems in love” – meaning that I am a lesbian. This aggression is based in the profound homophobia of a prisoner society that has shaped the postwar narratives. I often hear that history of sexuality of the Holocaust is not a valid line of inquiry but rather a scandalizing interest. What is part of such a statement is in fact the history of queer sexuality in the Holocaust; heterosexual love has been part of the canon all along. Recently, it has even become possible to address sexual violence in the Holocaust. However, queer sexuality (romantic, consensual, or enforced) has, to date, remained a lacuna in Holocaust Studies. I seek to change that. Drawing on Dagmar Herzog’s and Simon Watney’s statement that sexuality is a much of muchness, a key to understanding the values and logic of a society, I believe we should pay close attention to how sexuality is narrated: What is everyday about sexuality, and what is wrong? How do sexuality and gender roles play out in single sex camps? And, how do these change over time in survivors’ narratives? In the terrifying, violent, and often deadly world of the camps, sexuality was associated with a range of things: comfort, bonding, barter, and pleasure. It also served as proof of social hierarchy and as a tool of dehumanization. Finally, marking someone as sexually “wrong” has been a powerful instrument to destroying their personal integrity. In observing sexuality and same sex desire in the camps, we understand society in extremis, in terms of gender roles, and on the basis of human solidarity as well as its boundaries. Rather than rejecting the human community in the camps as totalitarian, and thus not a real society, these insights help us understand that social relations continue in the most impossible circumstances, until the end. In the age of populism, austerity, and extreme racism, these are trenchant insights. References
Helga Amesberger, Brigitte Halbmayr, and Elke Rajal, eds. "Arbeitsscheu und moralisch verkommen": Verfolgung von Frauen als "Assoziale" im Nationalsozialismus. Wien: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2019. Anna Hájková. “Den Holocaust queer erzählen,” Sexualitäten Jahrbuch(2018): 86–110 ---. "Queere Geschichte und der Holocaust," Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 68/32–33 (2018): 42–47. Translated in Notches as “The Queer History and the Holocaust.” Elizabeth Heineman, ed. The History of Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Dagmar Herzog. Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-century History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Julia Hörath. "Asoziale" und "Berufsverbrecher" in den Konzentrationslagern 1933 bis 1938. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017. Sylvia Köchl. "Das Bedürfnis nach gerechter Sühne": Wege von "Berufsverbrecherinnen" in das Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück. Wien: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2016. Dagmar Lieske. Unbequeme Opfer?: “Berufsverbrecher” als Häftlinge im KZ Sachsenhausen. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2016. Frank Nonnemacher. Du hattest es besser als ich: zwei Brüder im 20. Jahrhundert. Bad Homburg: Verlag für akademische Schriften, 2014. Christa Schikorra. Kontinuitäten der Ausgrenzung: "asoziale" Häftlinge im Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück. Berlin: Metropole Verlag, 2001. Robert Sommer. Das KZ-Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009. by Katrin Bahr
In their introduction to the volume The GDR Today: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to East German History, Memory and Culture (2018), the editors Stephan Ehrig, Marcel Thomas, and David Zellask if GDR studies has run its course. While current research on the GDR (including the aforementioned volume) proves otherwise, there is stillroom for incorporating GDR Studies into the German Studies curriculum.In teaching the GDR, 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. 1. Diversity Through Different Voices Today there are a number of texts by a younger generation of East Germans who grew up in the GDR (for an overview see Bahr and Lorek, 2016), which present a more complex picture of GDR life. One example is Jana Hensel’s 2002 autobiographical book After the Wall. However, this developing canon still remains primarily white and only focuses on white East Germans. Texts featuring non-white experiences in East German literature or in literature about East Germany are rarely included in reading lists for courses or are the target of research. Nonetheless, those texts exist and inform about various lived experiences, such as those of Black East Germans. Autobiographies by Black East Germans not only expound on the narrative of the Black German experience as a whole, but also challenge the narrative of what it means to be East German. Additionally,in order to understand how structural racism works in today’s Germany, it is important to not only consider the history of Black West German lived experiences but also the history of Black East German life. The Black East German canon contains, among others, work from Gerd Schramm’s Wer hat Angst vorm schwarzen Mann (2013), Andre Baganz’s Endstation Bautzen II: Zehn Jahre Lebenslänglich (2010), Detlef D. Soost’s Heimkind, Neger, Pionier (2005), and Abini Zöllner’s Schokoladenkind: Meine Familie und andere Wunder (2003). In addition to Black East German experiences, other People of Color of non-European descent also lived and worked in the GDR as so called Vertragsarbeiter (contract workers), students, refugees and children (most famously the Schule der Freundschaft [SdF] in Stassfurt). Studying their lived experiences through histories or cultural products provides not only insights into complex transnational encounters and exchanges with countries in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America, but also sheds light on the practical implementation of international solidarity as a concept of success and failure in East German political and private life. Some of the texts in this canon are Ibraimo Alberto’s Ich wollte leben wie die Götter. Was in Deutschland aus meinen afrikanischen Träumen wurde (2014), Stefan Canham and Phuong-Dan Nguyen’s Die Deutschen Vietnamesen (2011), as well as the edited volume Mosambik – Deutschland, Hin und Zurück. Erlebnisse von Mosambikanern vor, während und nach dem Aufenthalt in Deutschland (2005). Additionally, documentary films have proved to be a great medium for teaching everyday life experiences. They provide instructors and students with access to witnesses in order help undergraduate students connect with new and unknown lived experiences and perspectives. Some example are: the Webdoku Eigensinn im Bruderland(2019) about the lives of migrants in the GDR; Claudia Sandberg’s documentary film Películas escondidas. Un viaje entre el exilio y la memoria (2016) about DEFA’s ‘Chile’ films; and the production Omulaule heisst Schwarz (2016), a documentary by Beatrice Möller, Nicola Hens, and Susanne Radelhof; Christoph Schuch’s documentary Namibia – Return to a New Country - Namibia – Rückkehr in ein neues Land (1997) about Namibian children sent to the GDR as refugees. Including those voices into the teaching of German cultural history expands commonplace narratives about the GDR by considering the complex lives of people informed by race, gender, cultural, and generational divide. 2. Include Cultural Material by East Germans rather than Material About East Germans In Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (2009), Katherine Pence and Paul Betts suggest that the GDR was “a uniquely modern state,” thereby challenging a more singular idea of modernity as part of liberal capitalism (3). This research has inspired scholars to not only look differently at political, cultural, and social structures within the GDR, but also to consider the private aspect in order to understand ways of living in the GDR. GDR popular culture is a particularly rich resource in this regard because it can shed light on previously undervalued dimensions of GDR life. A detailed retrospective description of daily life, which comments upon various components of GDR socialist modernity and innovation, takes place in Thomas Brussig’s Das gibts in keinem Russenfilm (2015). But material produced by the DEFA film studios and GDR television also introduces viewers to different meanings of socialist life, while offering contemporary critiques towards the state as people were living it. For example, this has already been studied in the so-called banned films, those censored DEFA films that only came to light after the wall came down (for a full list, please see the DEFA Film Library’s Themes and Genre section). Further use of genre cinema, avant-garde cinema, and television may expand on this approach to studying the GDR. East German media not only gives insight into the society from within but also challenges the narratives of an oppressed society that was silenced to challenge the states’ political and social issues. So, why do GDR studies matter now? By bringing in different examples of the many lived experiences of GDR cultural and social life, we will enrichen ongoing debates about and interrogations of Germaneness, identity, and shared values in contemporary Germany. By studying GDR material and literary culture alongside other canonical texts, students will be able to learn and discuss different ideas of societies and lived experiences without putting one over the other. References Katrin Bahr and Melanie Lorek. “Ja, wohin gehen sie denn?”- Die ‘3. Generation Ostdeutscher’ zwischen Suchen und Finden am Beispiel des 1.5 Generationskonzepts.” In Die Generation der Wendekinder: Elaboration eines Forschungsfeldes, eds. Adriana Lettrari, Christian Nestler, and Nadja Troi-Boeck. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016. 255–77. DEFA Film Library. https://ecommerce.umass.edu/defa/films?category%5B%5D=28 by Kyle Frackman (University of British Columbia)
For several years, my research has focused on the history and culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany). 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. Who is remembered and how? Already before the GDR’s founding in 1949, the East German regime and officially sanctioned organizations declined to consider homosexuals to be victims of fascism. This was most overt in the 1940s and 1950s, but arms of the government, including the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, enforced this position in the 1970s and 1980s as a part of their targeting of lesbians and gay men. The reasoning was that (male) homosexuality was considered a crime under §175, which prohibited certain sexual acts while the Nazis were in power in Germany. Thus, the argument goes, homosexuals are qualitatively different in their persecution from, for example, the Jews persecuted by the Nazis. The Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes, VVN) was unwilling to count homosexuals as eligible for membership, since, in the VVN’s perspective, they did not struggle against the Nazis as part of the antifascist resistance. Who is a criminal? From the GDR’s founding in 1949 until 1968, same-sex sexual acts among men were criminally prohibited. Even after 1968, however, same-sex relationships remained publicly unacceptable and taboo, and were still criminalized through the difference in ages of consent of homosexual and heterosexual relationships. The law which criminalized male same-sex acts (§175) was finally repealed (in 1988 in the GDR) and removed in all forms from reunified Germany’s laws in 1994. Efforts toward reparations for the individuals these laws targeted continue slowly. (This is an issue in other countries, like Canada and the United Kingdom, where various forms of anti-homosexual discrimination were present.) Whose relationships are acknowledged? East Germany was a heterosexist state, based on a system of compulsory heterosexuality. The GDR’s first constitution of 1949 set out to address sexism and to codify the equality of men and women. In doing this, however, the constitution also systematizes women in the position of wife and mother, setting up the heterosexual, marital, family-based model of East German society. The GDR’s efforts to create and maintain sex/gender equality also established an important triad—man-woman-family—which would further serve to ostracize lesbians and gay men, who could not be a part of this social structure upon which the GDR’s “real-existing socialism” was based. Although the German Democratic Republic is now extinct, its legacies remain. Many who experienced discrimination and oppression in East Germany are still alive and have memories of these events. Recent documentary films have engaged with the topic of lesbians and gay men in East Germany: Among Men – Gay in the GDR (2012) and Out in East Berlin: Lesbians and Gays in the GDR (2013). Coming Out(1989), the only feature film produced in East Germany that focuses on homosexuality, remains a popular addition to film festivals, especially queer film series and events held around anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall or Reunification. Beyond the direct connection to the GDR, however, studying these events and their aftermath can teach us more about marginalized communities, whether in a system of state-sponsored socialism and totalitarian control or under democratic institutions. by Carol Anne Costabile-Heming (University of North Texas)
When asked to contribute a piece on “Why GDR Studies Still Matter,” I immediately flashed back to the early to mid-1990s. I had just started my career and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany were recent events—overall an exciting time to be working in GDR Studies. Then, I had the sense that I was working on something important, as archives were opened and scholars were just beginning to assess government documents. It seemed there was much to learn about the true inner workings of the German Democratic Republic. Nonetheless, a senior colleague approached me to inquire when I was going to do something interesting, noting that after all, the GDR was dead. This comment gave me pause— scholars study “dead” things all the time, for instance the Civil War or even the medieval Minnesang. Rather than accept this unsolicited advice, I chose to continue my fascination with the GDR, analyzing texts and writers, documenting the authorization process and censorship of fictional works, and trying to make sense of secret police files and the State’s fear of its own citizenry. With that long ago conversation in mind and nearly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, now is an appropriate time to take stock and ponder seriously, why GDR Studies still matter. Notice, I chose not to use the phrase, “if GDR Studies still matter,” because 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. The East German state was particularly fearful of artists, writers, and intellectuals, and through intricate processes for authorizing films, texts, even works of art, managed to engage in censorship even though it was expressly prohibited by the East German constitution. As the Czech Cultural Minister, Antonin Stanek, noted at the 2019 Leipzig Book Fair, literature has a subversive power. But, he noted, this power to subvert does not rest solely in the domain of authoritarian societies. Recent and repeated accusations of fake news showered on journalists in democratic nations share the insidious desire to silence critical voices that typically have been associated with authoritarian regimes. Media images of the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig and other East German cities in the fall of 1989 depict a fearless citizenry demanding freedoms and willing to face down the all-powerful state, its militaristic police force, and the secret police. Thus, one lesson that study of the GDR teaches us is the power of democracy. The main function of the East German Ministry for State Security (the Stasi) was to protect the GDR, both from external security threats as well as threats from within. To accomplish this goal, the organization developed an extensive network of informal operatives who provided the Stasi with all kinds of information from the most banal to the most scandalous. The Stasi, in turn, manipulated such information in order to exert pressure and keep the citizens in check. Though this system of spying and surveillance was not very technically advanced when measured against today’s standards, it nonetheless was incredibly effective. Surveillance is ubiquitous in today’s society, and individuals regularly, whether willingly or unwillingly (or even naively and unknowingly) grant permission to entities like Facebook to track information. For instance, during the recent social media fad, the Facebook 10-year comparison challenge, Facebook users eagerly posted pictures. Though I use social media, particularly Facebook, quite regularly, this challenge made me uneasy, even suspicious. What can someone do with the comparative data generated by those pictures, I wondered. Not normally prone to believing in conspiracy theories, I also wondered where this skepticism came from. Truth be told, it derives from researching the East German secret police, the Stasi for the last 20 years. What could an organization that amassed thousands of pages of documentation, an old-fashioned analog spy ring, possibly have to do with Facebook, you ask? Plenty, and it is a lesson that I believe we can still learn from the now defunct GDR. The storage, analysis, and exploitation of personal data should concern everyone, for countless studies of the Stasi and its tactics have shown that information can easily be manipulated to fit any crime. This is just one example of an important lesson that can be gleaned from studying the GDR, and just one reason why I believe GDR Studies remains relevant today. by Priscilla Layne (University of North Carolina)
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. Why the US Needs Black German Studies In the American academy, Black German Studies has the potential to contribute to both German Studies and African Diaspora Studies more broadly. Within German Studies, I think the benefits of including Black German perspectives are that they help decolonize the discipline and dismantle certain assumptions people have about Germany, the German language and German culture. As someone who has no German heritage or family and became fluent from learning German in US schools, first in the Chicago Public Schools system and then in college as an undergrad at the University of Chicago, I know from being in those classrooms that most students felt German was a foreign language for people with some ethnic connection to German. However, I think the notion that the people interested in taking German are white Americans with German grandparents is very narrow. In the US, I meet all kinds of Black people who have some connection to Germany. My African American hairdresser spent several years there as a child, because her father was in the military. I recently met a Jamaican woman with a law degree who currently lives in the US, but is thinking of moving to Germany because her brother works for a German company. I have visited places in the US, from Pittsburgh to Milwaukee, with African American high school students learning German. One of my best undergraduate students first started taking German at her high school in Atlanta. So when a student writes on an evaluation form that German is a “white language” and therefore the question of valuing diversity is irrelevant in a German classroom, this disturbs me, because, first, it is not true and, second, it invalidates the experience of hundreds of thousands of Black Germans, as well as many other German-speakers who are racialized and considered non-white, and the many Black people I have encountered in my life who speak German. It is time to stop perpetuating the myth that equates Germanness with whiteness and instead acknowledge Germany’s diverse past, present and future, as countless Black German scholars like El-Tayeb and Piesche have called on us to do. Teaching Black German Studies in the US can help us do that. And it can begin in K-12 and not just happen at the college level. Secondly, I think Black German Studies can be useful for teaching students of Black Studies in the US about the diversity of the Diaspora. I am an African American of Caribbean descent. Growing up in the US with Caribbean parents familiarized me with what it’s like to be considered “not Black enough” for some people, but definitely “too Black” for the white majority. This is what resonated with me when I first discovered Black German texts. I could relate to how the construction of Blackness in different contexts can influence how people read you, and how frustrating it can feel when people try to fit you into a box instead of accepting you as an individual with a complicated history or identity that may not fit one narrative. Studying the Black diaspora in Germany opens American students of Black Studies up to the centuries-old history of African Americans traveling to Germany as scholars and artists and activists, from W.E.B. DuBois to Martin Luther King Jr and Angela Davis. It was not until I had been studying German for some time that I learned of these previous cultural exchanges. And I remember how empowering it felt to know that I was not the only onewith an interest in Germany and that in fact I was part of a long tradition of intellectual and cultural curiosity that took African Americans across the Atlantic. Learning about the different ways African Americans were perceived in Germany, from DuBois’s positive experiences in the 1890s to Black GIs’ description of Germany as a “breath of freedom,” also helped me better understand the constructed nature of Blackness and that, despite being given a very limiting and denigrating image of Black people in the US, we were capable of a lot more than I was taught in school. Furthermore, with the right means we could also travel the world and step beyond the confines of US racism. Indeed, I have also encountered racism in Germany. And I find it important to prepare Black students for that reality if they, too, choose to visit or study there. Nevertheless, it is a powerful thing for students to imagine their world to be much larger than the confines of their neighborhood or their home state. Why Germany Needs Black (German) Studies I am going to frame these comments around the larger issue of why Germany needs Black Studies in general, with the assumption that establishing the discipline of Black Studies in Germany would necessarily include Black German Studies. Last fall, while in Berlin, I attended a symposium entitled Netzwerk Schwarze Perspektiven organized by Each One Teach One (EOTO), a Black cultural center located in the district of Wedding. The event took place at Humboldt University and was intended to address how and why Black Studies could be formally introduced into German academia. While there were several riveting panels of Black German scholars and activists of multiple generations who shared their challenges and experiences of studying and teaching in Germany and abroad, one panel in particular was a thorn in my side. It was a panel on how to integrate Black Studies in Germany. Two of the panelists were white, Rainer Stocker from Antidiskriminierungsstelle des Bundes and Editha von Colberg, Beauftragte für Forschungsmanagement, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB). I point out their whiteness merely because they were also the only two individuals to question the legitimate need for Black Studies in Germany. Stocker’s comments seemed to suggest that one didn’t need a Black Studies department in Germany, because the Antidiskriminierungsstelle already addressed the issue of anti-Black discrimination. But Black Studies isn’t just about studying racism and discrimination. You also cannot simply hang anti-Blackness onto some other extant research group about some other phenomenon, like neoliberalism, which was the suggestion put forward by von Colberg. Black Studies might be transdisciplinary, but it is also its own, separate thing. As Alexander Weheliye says in Habeas Visicus, Black Studies is the study of the human condition. Why? Because for a long time Black people weren’t even seen as human. Therefore, the battle around who or what is human has been carried out on the bodies of Black people for centuries; it is enmeshed in the history of Black people. And that’s why Black Studies is, in part, a struggle around Humanism; defining and redefining it, or even rejecting it for something else. So, if Humanism is such a valued part of German cultural history, then Germany needs Black Studies, and in particular Black German Studies. Black Studies is also about valuing Black experience, history, creativity and intellectual labor. It’s about decolonizing the mind and challenging Eurocentric, white supremacist ideas that are simply passed on and glossed over whenever a Black student in Germany is asked to read Kant or Hegel without any conversation about race. It’s about challenging the alleged objectivity of white academics. It’s about representation not just of Black people more generally, but representation of Black German people as well. That’s why when von Colberg tried to defend her institution by highlighting its internationalism, suggesting they tried hard to bring in Black scholars from around the world, this was really just a cop out and an excuse to keep doing the same old thing: namely to deny the historical presence of Black Germans and maintain a homogenous view of German culture and history. At the symposium Nana Adusei-Poku gave a presentation that addressed the fact that there is so much Black history that is buried; that people never learn about. And this is a systematic process. Black history is systematically erased and undervalued in both the US and in Germany. And in Germany, one of the challenges to solidifying Black knowledge is that Black academics tend to be spread out across disciplines and across universities, which makes it difficult to collaborate, like Maisha Maureen Eggers who teaches in the Department for Kindheit und Differenz at the Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendahl or Louis Henri Sekua who is faculty in the Department for Social Work at the HAW in Hamburg. But Black scholars have not yet infiltrated all fields. What kind of an impact would it make to have a cluster hire of people of color in a Germanistik program? And if that seems too daunting, one could begin by hiring a Black German professor in a Germanistik department who works on Black German history and culture specifically. But that would just be the beginning. The goal would be to establish a Black Studies department that allows scholars to acknowledge all of the breadth and depth of Black achievement, including Black German achievement. If they won’t teach students about Anton Wilhelm Amo in philosophy, then Germany needs Black (German) Studies to teach about him and break the cycle of silencing and repressing Black German history and culture. 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. If you would like to share thoughts on individual components and/or add ideas to the notes below, please be in touch.
Primary principle: The aim is not to make contingency more sustainable but to reduce contingency: number of people in contingent positions, ways in which positions are contingent. --Visibility is important: contingent faculty should neither be swept under the rug nor be obliged to blend in with non-contingent members of the profession Our thoughts were grouped into three overlapping areas: Programming for/work at DDGC events/conferences/workshops: --finance presence of contingent faculty at DDGC events --include panels on alt-ac/non-academic positions and on making the decision to leave academia by individuals who have made this decision and are in these work environments --gather information: who are contingent faculty, where are they, and what demographics (disproportionately BIPOC, women) do they belong to? (Perhaps a task for the "Personalia" section of Monatshefte) --discuss institutions, policies, contracts that contingent faculty can use for leverage Activities for DDGC/its members outside conferences --gather information (see above): important that those NOT contingent take on this labor --collect and post contracts and policies (redacted as necessary) as well as resources re governance, representation, and power structures at different kinds of institutions for shared learning; bring disciplinary training in careful reading and critique to bear on them --share knowledge about what decisions happen at the state level, department/school/college level, university level; strategies for how to work with each At other institutions/conferences: --organize, promote, and attend panels for, by, and about contingent labor and labor practices within the academy (also a visibility issue) --reflect on ways of interacting with structures such as unions; discuss options for collective action; state-level lobbying or activism, Committees on Political Education --discuss how (for example) AATG can advocate for contingent faculty members using its existing status in the profession. Other organizations (GSA, ACTFL, AFT?) by Vanessa D. Plumly (Lawrence University) and Tiffany N. Florvil (University of New Mexico)
Why does Black German Studies matter now? The question is an interesting one. 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.
In many ways, matter is tied to orientation and space, and it dictates what types of representations can exist. To quote cultural studies scholar Sara Ahmed, Women of Color in higher education/academia are viewed as “‘space invaders’, as invading the spaces reserved for others” (Ahmed, On Being Included, 13). The same conception of invading space could be argued for research conducted by, on, and in collaboration with the Black German community, as well as the growth of the field of Black German Studies within the discipline of German Studies. This research is often seen as an invasion of normative white spaces that are “not reserved” for People of Color (Ahmed 13). It is also rendered as insignificant and lacking in rigor in comparison to more established subfields in German Studies. This is due to the “myth of racelessness” that permeates discourses and practices within and beyond academia and Black German Studies’ minoritized orientation to German Studies that shapes the spaces it inhabits and how it is understood. In this way, Black German Studies is a radical act of emplacement, especially as it shifts its orientation and embeds itself within a predominately white field. Matter also carries weight. In German, the word matter has many affiliated words from material to body and from substance to content. Thus, Blackness as simultaneously matter and non-matter is inscribed into and onto the body and contributes to its ontological makeup. For those whom racism impacts daily, its matter manifests on and in the body in ways that become destructive and problematic. Yet, it also necessitates responses to take matters into one’s own hands in order to actively combat racial discrimination. Here, matter is compounded with the Black body as well as responses to that same othered body. Referring to the United States, Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor writes in From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation, “[t]oday, we are told, that race does not matter” (Taylor 4). And yet, as we know, race is often a matter of life or death in the United States. In postwar Germany, similar claims were made that racism ceased to exist after the fall of the Third Reich. But the Rostock Riots (1992), Solingen (1993), and Oury Jalloh (2005) prove that it is also a matter of life or death in Germany. That is why changing the state of race and racism and advocating for a commitment to social justice and equality must be attended to in the here and now. And Black German Studies affords us an opportunity to do this by forcing us to recognize the persistence of everyday forms of racism in all levels of German society. By doing so, it will embolden us to think and act in a way that matters and incite critical change. Matter has different properties. Black German Studies certainly has different properties that contribute to its formation. It is capable of dispersal and bringing in complex interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives as well as new ways of seeing and viewing that have been ignored, or worse, erased, in a field where whiteness dominates. If we are to reconfigure German Studies—and Black German Studies is in this constant process of undoing and redoing—and comprehend it as a liquid or fluid, rather than as a solid or fully formed object, then, as scholars, we must bring in other ways of mattering beyond white cis-heteropatriarchal ones. The solid state of German Studies that is perpetually anchored in whiteness and Christianity must be turned into new matter. In this respect, German Studies should not be seen as an already accomplished fact, but as never complete and always in process–much like Black German Studies. In order to do so, we must change its properties and dominant ways of thinking in the field must experience a paradigm shift. Black German Studies may not have mattered within the field of German Studies until the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries because that space was one that whiteness had and continues to occupy relentlessly, in which it has coopted, silenced, and exploited. The clasp of whiteness and Christianity on Germanness is also solid matter. Given this, it has made it quite difficult to decolonize the field and to bring new forms of mattering into the picture. It is not without a struggle for space (and place) that Black German Studies comes to matter. Black German Studies’ slow inclusion in German Studies has not come as a given on either side of the Atlantic. This is especially interesting despite the fact that everything that comprises the field is inherently imbricated in the histories of race and racism, colonization, and empire. Moreover, it is Black Germans themselves who have made the subfield come to matter and solidified its existence. Equally, it is their work, labor, art, culture, activism, ideas, theories, futures, pasts, and presents that have engendered matter for Black German Studies. Their national and international grassroots efforts have often taken place outside the ivory tower of academia and have led to symbolic and social changes. But junior scholars in the United States have also helped to sustain and develop the subfield. As theorist Michelle Wright argues in Physics of Blackness (2015), what she theorizes as “Epiphenomenal time, or the ‘now’” that produces Blackness through a “when” and “where”, the now is not relegated to the present alone, but rather draws on the past and looks to the future (Wright 4). As scholars in the field of German Studies, we must fully assess the past, understand how it impacts the now, and look to a not yet manifested future to envision and produce a decolonized discipline. Since molecules in solids are close together, much like whiteness and the desire to maintain proximity to it, they move and change state slowly. Thus, the decolonization of solid matter is an arduous and slow process, but certainly not an impossible one, especially if we look to other ways of being in matter. German Studies has the potential to take on a more fluid or malleable form that can extend through and beyond the field to bring in more nuanced ways of knowing/perception/cognition. So Black German Studies matters. In fact, it has always mattered. 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.
Thus far, the following posts have been published with others on the books for the summer and fall:
If you would like to participate in the discussion, we invite you to reach out to us. We are eager to work with scholars at various stages of their careers and feature their take on the relevance of their field of study for German Studies in particular, but also for the liberal arts broadly speaking. The fields listed above are not exhaustive and are only the beginning. We are eager to support work by scholars working in diverse fields. This cover letter accompanied the "Open Letter to the AATG: A Ten-Point Program of the Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum (DDGC) Collective." The AATG Leadership Responded to this letter with a statement.
Dear Board of Directors of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG): As you are now likely aware, more than 200 college, secondary school, and university teachers of German (many of them longstanding AATG members) in North America, as well as several additional critical friends from other disciplines and from Europe, have signed this appended Open Letter to the leadership of the AATG. The Letter was originally conceived by the 67 attendees of the 2019 Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Studies Curriculum (DDGC) meeting (March 1–3, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN / USA). This is a complex document, composed collaboratively by scores of professionals with varying experiences, and from various generations and backgrounds as teachers and learners. It seeks to be broad and specific, critical and assistive at the same time. Many of the claims within it are reasonably applicable to other national professional organizations as well, and these will be conveyed to them in due course, in a similar form. We begin with the AATG because it is the organization that has the widest educational reach, from K-12-college-beyond. Moreover, this letter is directed to the AATG because of a number of recent troubling experiences between Scholars of Color and AATG leadership, though we do acknowledge that many other AATG members have been supportive of projects to dismantle racism. We understand that it will take time, research, reflection, and dialogue for AATG leadership to develop substantive and considered transformative action toward shaping the future of the organization and its diverse membership / stakeholders, as they express themselves in this Open Letter. We also understand that some of the propositions herein will strike various among you, on first inspection, as true or untrue, fair or unfair, realistic or unrealistic, germane or tangential. We encourage you to take time to discuss these differences of viewpoint over the coming months. But we also ask you to explore the propositions in the Letter on their merits, and to presume the credibility of the experiences to which they attest. This means setting aside habits of defensiveness that so often overwhelm such moments of reflection. The ideas conveyed in this Letter have resonated deeply with over 200 of our professional colleagues in the field, already in the three days since its public consideration, including many leaders involved in organizations like the GSA, WiG, CAUTG, and MLA. This overwhelming response reveals something profound and important about this moment in our educational landscape nationally and internationally, a moment for which we all share responsibility as teachers. It also illustrates the high expectations that our 200 signatories desire to invest in our national organizations—as critical trusts, models for institutional leadership, and guides accompanying us in rigorous ethical action and advocacy in times of ongoing injustice and impunity. Some of those signatories appear, over time, to have lost interest in national organizations like the AATG, and we hope their voices (in the form of this letter) indicate their willingness to participate anew in the transformation of the organization and the profession. We hope for an ongoing, holistic, public conversation that involves all of us, all of our professional organizations, and all of our institutions. We are here to help, to dialogue, and to imagine the future of our work together with you and the AATG as a whole. Considering the importance of this moment for our profession, we encourage you to take the time you need to engage the Open Letter substantively and in its complexity—and to do so by way of the public venues available to you. We do not expect any immediate response, nor is a response to the Letter itself the most important next step. Rather, we suggest that August 31 of this year would be a good juncture for AATG (and any partner organizations) to publicly address transformations it is undertaking, or planning to undertake, in correspondence with the substance of this Letter. This moment is important enough not to rush hasty or top-down solutions. Again, we offer you our experience, time, and assistance in developing a plan of action. We have designated contact persons for our Collective below for ease of communication. We look forward to our continued conversation. Thank you again for your time and consideration. Sincerely, Beverly Weber ([email protected]) Ervin Malakaj ([email protected]) Priscilla Layne ([email protected]) David J. Gramling ([email protected]) Regine Criser ([email protected]) Andrea Bryant ([email protected]) |
Editorial Collective & Submission Information
The DDGC Blog is edited by an editorial collective. For more info about the collective and extensive submission information, click here. We want to amplify your ideas. Have an idea for a short or long post? We'd be glad to talk about it and help you get it published. Archives
January 2023
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