Rob Burns

German cultural studies : an introduction

Major changes have been taking place in the context of German Studies in both secondary and higher eduction, with the focus shifting to a broader range of cultural forms. Based on the view that cultures are the products of class, place, gender and race, German Cultural Studies: An Introduction takes account of these changes and adopts an interdisciplinary approach in its wide-ranging study of German culture and society since 1871, emphasizing recent and contemporary developments. Chronological sections on Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic chart the growth of modernisation and the culture industry in Germany, and examine the extent to which culture in any given period functions as an instrument of ideological manipulation or critical enlightenment. Throughout, the emphasis is on the interactions of culture, society and ideology, and the role of culture in both public and private consciousnesses. Copiously illustrated, and with guidance for further reading, the volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern and contemporary German society and its culture.

German cultural policy: An overview

The most important aspect of cultural policy in Germany is its federally devolved nature. Hence the article begins with an examination of the different levels of cultural policy, from the all-important municipal authorities to the relatively autonomous regional government and, finally, the national government, which discharges certain responsibilities in cultural matters through a number of departments, including the recently created ministry of culture. Certain exemplary structures of coordination in the cultural sphere are examined in some detail and the major phases in the development of German cultural policy since 1945 outlined. Discussion then focuses on selected case studies of cultural policy since the unification of Germany in 1990, reflecting the federal, municipal and regional levels of policy-making. The concluding section considers some of the advantages and disadvantages of the German model with its hugely expensive commitment to the importance of culture.

The Politics of Cultural Representation: Turkish–German Encounters

This article considers the development of Turkish-German cinema, situating it in relation to both the early manifestations of a diasporic literature in Germany and the attempts by filmmakers associated with the New German Cinema to represent the experience of migrants in the Federal Republic. These films were frequently criticised for reducing their protagonists to stereotypes, portraying the migrant as victim and focusing excessively on conflict of an intercultural or intracultural kind. The 1990s saw the emergence of a younger generation of Turkish directors in Germany intent on breaking away from this ‘cinema of the affected’ by not foregrounding the problematisation of alterity. The article concludes by examining the recent work of one of these directors, Thomas Arslan, and assesses its success in representing ‘life in, as well as between, two cultures’.

Towards a Cinema of Cultural Hybridity: Turkish-German Filmmakers and the Representation of Alterity

This article considers the development of “Turkish-German cinema” and situates it in relation to the attempts by filmmakers associated with the New German Cinema to represent the experience of migrants in the Federal Republic. These films were frequently criticised for reducing their protagonists to stereotypes, portraying the migrant as victim and focusing excessively on conflict of an intercultural or intracultural kind. The 1990s saw the emergence of a younger generation of Turkish directors in Germany intent on breaking away from this “cinema of the affected” by not foregrounding the problematicisation of alterity. The article examines the work of two of these directors, Fatih Akin and Thomas Arslan, and assesses their success in representing “life in, as well as between, two cultures”.

INTELLECTUALS AS CULTURAL AGENDA‐SETTERS IN THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC?

This article argues that intellectuals in Germany post‐1945 have had, and continue to have, an important influence both on the political culture in general and on cultural policy in particular. Our thesis has been structured in three parts. The first traces the introduction of the term “intellectuals” into German, sketches out how they have variously been defined and sets out the reasons why they have been polemically abused as well as critically lauded. Parts two and three are dedicated to case studies on Jürgen Habermas and Hilmar Hoffmann respectively. Between them they are seen to embrace the two aspects (cultural politics and cultural policy) of the term Kulturpolitik: Habermas by discursive interventions in a changing terrain of values, mentalities and institutional frameworks determining the lifeworld of an ever changing modernity and Hoffmann by theoretical reflection about the parameters and tasks of cultural policy as a field of professional administration and decision‐making. To what extent, in connection with what issues and areas of public life and at what stages in the development of the Federal Republic they can be deemed to be agenda‐setters is critically assessed throughout.

Critical Intellectuals as Extra-Parliamentary Custodians of Democracy

Within a study of extra-parliamentary opposition in the Federal Republic, special consideration must be given to the role of the critical intellectuals for, in one way or another, their spirit of vigilant democratic intervention, with appeals addressed both to the politicians directly and to the public at large, pervades all the protest movements discussed in this book. Anyone given to explanations of history in terms of conspiracy will find such an assertion commonplace. In order for any protest to be publicly effective it must be verbally articulated and the intelligentsia is the only social grouping possessing in its membership individuals with the ability to handle language in a manner that will fit the need for innovative conceptualisation in a fast moving scene of social, ideological and political change. Joseph A. Schumpeter’s basic description of the intellectual as one who ‘wields the power of the spoken and written word’1 without holding positions of responsibility in practical public affairs still applies. Intellectuals, in this sense, may be the originators and purveyors of ideas which inspire and energise social movements. The intelligentsia of the Enlightenment as the precursor of the French Revolution has, rightly or wrongly, remained the model. The young Marx’s notion that ‘thought, like a stroke of lightning, electrifies the naive body of the people’2 tacitly conjures up a Romantic tradition in which the common folk are conceived as an earthen matter that is only brought to life by the individual genius as the bearer of Geist (spirit).

The calamitous perspective of modernity : Sebald's negative ontology

This essay argues that Sebald’s entire work is informed by a negative ontology which has gained particular force and visibility in ‘modernity’, a period beginning, according to Sebald, with Napoleon ‘at the latest’. In a secular echo of the Bible’s teaching that nature is ‘fallen’ Sebald repeatedly hints that Being is misconstructed and that humans, with their apparently limitless capacity to inflict suffering, are subsumed under this verdict too. As possible sources for this view, this essay makes use of Sebald’s papers in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv at Marbach am Neckar (DLA). It then discusses some of the ways in which this negative ontology appears in Sebald’s work and concludes by showing why the author finally considers that the task of art, particularly literature, is to engage in creative activity as a labour of mourning and a demonstration of solidarity with those who suffer.

The Protest for Peace: Opposition to Remilitarisation and Nuclear Weapons (1950 to 1969)

When in October 1983 over half a million West Germans assembled in the Bonn Hofgarten to be addressed by such renowned public figures as Willy Brandt, Petra Kelly and Heinrich Boll, the spectacular nature of this event was such that the West German peace movement, for the first time the recipient of wide-scale international attention, was seen to have established itself as a significant new force within German politics. In fact, the German peace movement of the 1980s has historical roots which go back not just to the early years of the Federal Republic but to the last decade of the previous century. Even before then the German philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, notably Kant (Zum ewigen Frieden — On Perpetual Peace), Herder (Briefe zur Beforderung der Humanitat — Letters Concerning the Furtherance of Humanism, and Jean Paul (Kriegserklarung gegen den Krieg — Declaration of War Against War), had demonstrated a persistent fascination with the idea of peace. That it was at the end of the nineteenth century when this philosophical interest first assumed organisational form is undoubtedly related to the emergence at that time of a German imperialism which, fuelled by the reactionary and militarist traditions of the Prussian Junker class, pursued from the outset a foreign policy based on aggression and aiming at aggrandisement.

The Protest for Peace: Mass Opposition to Nuclear Arms (1980 to 1986)

The rebirth of the West German peace movement was brought on by a special meeting of the NATO foreign and defence ministers in Brussels on 12 December 1979, when the so-called ‘dual track’ decision was taken. The strategic shifts in NATO defence policy had moved from ‘massive retaliation’ in the early 1950s via deterrence by ‘graduated response’, dating from 1957, to the notion of ‘flexible response’ which had been the agreed position since 1967. The concept of ‘theatre nuclear war’ had emerged, with Europe as the stage for what was euphemistically termed a ‘limited nuclear exchange’. This policy was now substantially confirmed by a wide-ranging modernisation programme of weapons systems which was to involve the stationing of 572 American medium-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe, to be deployed from 1983 onwards unless, in the intervening period, the necessity for doing so was obviated by agreements on arms limitations. Nachrustung was now the order of the day. By this term was understood in the first instance a ‘reply’ to the Soviet SS-20s by matching weapons but, in effect, this programme inaugurated an extensive updating of the entire military arsenal. Since more than a third of the missiles (108 Pershing IIs and 96 cruise missiles) were destined for West German territory and given the key role played in the decision by the Federal Chancellor — for it was Helmut Schmidt who, in a speech delivered in London at the end of October 1977, had first publicly mooted the superiority of the Soviet nuclear potential — it is hardly surprising that reaction to this policy in the Federal Republic was particularly vehement.

Citizens’ Initiatives: Grassroots Democracy and the Growth of Environmentalism in the 1970s and 1980s

The beginnings of the 1970s marked a distinct hiatus in the history of the West German protest movements: the APO was to all intents and purposes defunct and the student movement ebbing, the peace movement seemed in abeyance as a campaigning force, and the women’s movement was as yet barely more than a dot on the political horizon. Also, the installation of an SPD/FDP coalition government committed to detente abroad and social reform at home no doubt nourished the hope that parliament might show itself more receptive to the aspirations and concerns of all individuals and groups whose protesting voices had hitherto been dismissed by those in power. And yet, for all that, the early 1970s was a period of intense extra-parliamentary activity, for it witnessed the growth — unparalleled in Europe either at the time or since — of what came to be known as Burgerinitiativen (citizens’ initiatives). This was the term applied to ‘spontaneous, loosely organised association of citizens, normally in existence for a limited period of time only, who, directly affected by a specific issue, intercede outside the traditional institutions and participatory forms of representative party democracy and who seek, either by way of self-help or by way of influencing public opinion and exercising political pressure, to prompt action on the part of the authorities with regard to the citizens’ particular concern’.1