Russell A. Berman

Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary

Political Inversions attempts to understand the forces at play in conflations both theoretical and cultural of homosexuality and fascism. Taking its cue from Adornos assertion that totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together, the book examines how aberrant political and sexual economies have been equated across a variety of literary, visual, and theoretical discourses in contemporary debate. At the same time, the author explores the ways in which queer theory and historiography have responded defensively to such conflations, thereby excluding from current discussions much important material. Thus, for example, Political Inversions reassesses the work of German masculinist writers of the early part of the century thinkers whose definitive (but politically troubling) contributions to the construction of homosexual identity have been overlooked by a history heavily invested in the liberal Weimar tradition represented by figures such as Hirschfeld. Rather than reconstructing a history of gay identity, the book reads its texts as interventions in the broader political crises besetting democratic institutions in the first half of this century.

Modern Art and Desublimation

Close to the beginning of Death in Venice, Thomas Mann sets up a relationship between aesthetic production and social context that bears strongly on the parameters of twentieth-century cultural life. After introducing his central figure, the fictive writer Aschenbach, Mann goes on to offer some exposition which, as always with Mann, is much more than exposition, since it draws attention to one of the central philosophical questions of the text: “It was a spring afternoon in that year of grace 19--, when Europe sat upon the anxious seat beneath a menace that hung over its head for months. Aschenbach had sought the open soon after tea.

Troping to Pretoria: The Rise and Fall of Deconstruction

Deconstruction combined a theoretical skepticism toward language — no meaning is fully fixed or exhaustively definable — with a practical realism in pursuit of institutional power. The radical doubt, on the one hand, permitted the deconstructive critic to claim an oppositional stance, an ostentatious hostility to authoritarian structures, reason and universalism, logocentrism and Western metaphysics. The conservative Realpolitik of the deconstructive academy, on the other, permitted it to occupy positions of considerable authority in many of the most prestigious American universities during the deconstructive decade: from the publication of the English translation of Grammatology in 1976 to the public debate in 1988 over Paul de Mans collaborationist activities in Nazi-occupied Belgium.

Opposition to Rearmament and West German Culture

West German opposition toward the NATO rearmament plans has developed rapidly into an important mass movement that has begun to reach sectors of the population outside of the traditional leftist subculture and which is posing an increasing threat to the stability of the social-liberal coalition government. In September some 50,000 demonstrators gathered in West Berlin to protest the visit of Alexander Haig, and commentators did not fail to draw the obvious contrast with the Kennedy visit two decades earlier, which attracted large, pro-American crowds. In October the participants in an anti-war rally in Bonn numbered over 250,000, and Reagans planned trip to the Federal Republic in June is certain to lead to further demonstrations against United States foreign policy.

Politics: Divide and Rule

Established literary judgments are anchored in arrays of corollary claims, not the least of which pertain to the contours of history, in which literature is presumed to play itself out. For scholars and critics, and even for the lay reader, the path to the work or the author passes through a landscape of periods, the timing of literature, which structures the possibilities of reception. The importance ascribed to the period or the “historical context” of a work is so great that it shapes the reading altogether. Indeed, a constitutive element of contemporary reading is the need to integrate into our “horizon of expectations” the expectations of an earlier period.1 It is a truism only because it is an unquestioned habit that Shakespeare is read as Elizabethan, and hardly a performance of Brecht goes by without reflections on the Hitler era: two examples of explicitly political periodizations that set boundaries for sanctioned receptions. Other periodizations may not stamp the face of a sovereign on the coin of literary judgment, but they nonetheless order and regulate reading in ways that are equally influential: Hugo in the Romantic period, or Woolf and modernism. If periodization functions as the road map for literary judgment, then it is only logical that revisionist literary historiography calls it into question, as two recent examples of critical scholarship demonstrate. To dismantle established claims regarding literary accomplishment, it can appear necessary not only to subvert individual judgments of qual-

Cultural studies of modern Germany : history, representation, and nationhood

The opening of the Berlin Wall uncovered a host of political, cultural, and historical concerns. The German past, which seemed frozen beneath the divisions of the Cold War, has re-emerged, eliciting both enthusiasm and apprehension. Russell A. Berman argues that, for the Germans, national unity will mean either encompassing democracy or exclusionary politics - a dilemma that is far from new in German history. Berman probes the ambiguities of German nationhood. Taking the theoretical perspective of cultural studies, he looks at literature, painting, and film from the 19th and 20th centuries, to consider how nationhood is constituted and how it can be represented, what separates it from other populations, and how the legacy of history frames the definition of identities and institutions in the present.

The Routinization of Charismatic Modernism and the Problem of Post-Modernity

Tong before Thomas Mann leads Gustav von Aschenbach whom I L understand as paradigmatic representative of authorship in the bourgeois nineteenth century to his death in Venice, symptoms crop up indicating that all is not well in hegemonic literary life. The novella begins with an account of a frustrating writers block; Aschenbach perceives his highly regulated routines to be increasingly restrictive; and the description of his background suggests a considerable degree of repression as the basis of the successful authorial personality. More important, Aschenbachs writing itself registers its integration into the system of cultural and political authority in Wilhelmine Germany. The narrator describes this model prose in the following manner:

our predicament, our prospects

Our Predicament For several decades, Germanists in the United States have been worrying about the state of the field. Our discussions have responded to two distinct phenomena: the statistical decline in German enrollments from their high point in the late sixties and the challenges of methodological debates which called into question established practices of criticism. Arguments frequently link these two concerns by suggesting that if certain reforms in our teaching or scholarship were to take place, then the problem with enrollment numbers would be solved. If only we were more theoretical, or perhaps less so; if only we would teach more in English, or less narrowly; if only we were more American and less German, then, so the arguments went, our predicament would improve. In retrospect those suggestions appear comprehensible only in light of the panic that the drop in enrollments elicited; by now we can also recognize the various claims as outdated and dubious. What took place in German in the last third of the twentieth century was to a very large extent not a result of Germanists making mistakes. On the contrary, it was only one small piece of an enormous transition in American college education, an epochal student migration out of traditional humanities concentrations. All the languages have been losers, particularly if one looks at numbers of majors graduated, rather than gross enrollment statistics. The winners have been social sciences, as well as vocationally-linked curricula. The point of this remark is not to suggest that we should ignore our situation, nor that we refuse to consider alternate strategies, but that we take a broader view of the historical transitions in higher education and especially in undergraduate education. The future of German Studies depends on our success among undergraduates, above all. Neither innovative scholarship nor (over)productive graduate programs will do us much good, if the undergraduate programs fail to thrive. It is impossible to overlook the growing national concern with the quality of undergraduate education. In part, the attention to undergraduate teaching reflects broad-based shifts away from research funding (including basic research in the sciences) and a concomitant shrinking of graduate education. In addition, for some time already, the public has been wondering about the value it receives for the ever-higher college tuition it is forced to pay Institutions respond by reviewing the quality of undergraduate programs and teaching. In a more positive vein, given the recent success of the current American economy and, particularly the low unemployment, undergraduates today are under less pressure to focus on the immediate vocational relevance of their college education. Humanities majors, generally regarded as least linked to career paths, may be regaining some of the plausibility they lost after the sixties. German Studies can never win a game of pure numbers. Other languages will always attract more students, and other fields will always be more attractive than languages and literatures. However in the present context, there is an opportunity to focus on quality: to provide highest quality instruction in all classes, language and literature, and to build programs that retain students and lead to strong major populations. The intellectual vitality of German Studies, combined with as much individualized attention to students as possible, should make our programs attractive to energetic and ambitious students. German language enrollments hover around ten percent nationally Given the demographic make-up of the West Coast, the figure at Stanford is closer to five percent. Nevertheless, last June ( 1999), more than twenty percent of Stanfords BAs in foreign languages were in German. All universities have to pay attention, of course, to overall enrollment patterns, but no college or university can afford to ignore educational success. Cultural Transfer The intellectual energy of the study of German in the United States has always derived from the position of the field as a medium of cultural transfer between Germany and the United States. …

Beyond Localism and Universalism: Nationhood and Solidarity

In the early 16th century, as humanists like Erasmus were attacking the Church with increasing ardor, it was left to Luther to phrase the call for reformation in decidedly national, even patriotic tones. Facing the onslaught of clerical plundering, he lambasted foreign exploitation: “Now that Italy is drained dry, they are coming into the German countries, and beginning with calculated restraint, but let us watch, for the German countries will soon become like Italy. Already we have a few cardinals. They think the drunken Germans will not understand what the game is, till there is not a single bishopric, monastery, parish or benefice, not a cent or farthing, left for them.”

The Empire Strikes Out: A Roundtable on Populist Politics

Taves: This roundtable is predicated on the notion that the state has struck out in its gameplan to regulate social life while safeguarding an active political life. New Deal liberalism and the resulting supremacy of individual rights over the common good, together with related phenomena such as a considerable social mobility and the homogenizing effects of mass culture, have undermined the social and cultural bases of traditional communities. The strategy was to create an ever-increasing number of individual rights, enforced by a constantly expanding New Class bureaucracy, which eroded community autonomy and any vestige of local self-determination. Thus there are constant calls for a new politics in response to the undemocratic and unrepresentative character of the political system.