Take Me Heim? Interdisciplinarity in the Age of the Global Academy

Susan Ingram

For me, Michael Saffle’s work raises a question that is likely to become increasingly central as the academy continues to restructure in response to the pressures of globalizing: the question (or perhaps better – the problem) of location, the insistent persistence of place: as tropes in texts (whether musical, literary, filmic or new media), but also as sites enabling or inhibiting specific forms of academic production.

When I first met Michael – at that most Schnitzlerian of settings: the hotel Panhans on the Semmering –, I felt transported to another realm of possibility by the transatlantic group of scholars gathered there. Interested in the mostly musical cultural heritage of “old Europe” as it was in the process of being re-signified as the “new” Europe, they took me by surprise, accustomed as I was to what I took to be hegemonic in the field: the flag-waving, concert-staging, ceremonial approach that dare not speak its name. This group, on the other hand, consisting primarily of Central European musicologists but bolstered by a few Americans and cultural studies scholars, pursued the phenomenon’s historical traces and tried to locate its emergence and subsequent transformation as it traveled to the “new” world and back and forth again, going global somewhere in the process. The question Michael posed in the title of the paper he presented on that occasion – “Do You Ever Dream of Vienna?” – was programmatic. He identified the “other scene” of this heritage, to speak with one of that city’s more notable sons, in tandem with which Vienna was learning to present itself as the “city of music”: precisely the “new” world that had had to learn to adapt to Europe’s resignification of the globe in relation to (as opposed to: in opposition with) itself (cf. Dainotto). In further contributions, Michael elaborated on case studies of this process: depictions of musical Vienna in the New York Times, 1918-1938; the Trapp Family Singers’ immigration narratives; and the Vienna Philharmonic’s Neujahrskonzerte, always teasing out the relational, mutually constitutive qualities of the places involved.

What particularly intrigued me about these examples was their ambiguous relation to the high-low division of cultural practices (Rubin; Levine). Suddenly I realized how perverse it was to view the Fledermaus as highbrow, as it had been presented to me growing up in the new world, simply because it came from Europe and was performed in circumstances which dictated, as they mimicked, the wearing of formal attire. Yet it wasn’t exactly middlebrow either; its distance to Andrew Lloyd Webber was, literally, considerable, palpable, but deucedly difficult to locate institutionally. Particularly in North America, such a subject does not measure up on the scale of subjects of sufficient seriousness to merit imparting to our students in European Studies. It’s neither Bildung nor popular culture, but rather in an interminable grey zone in between.

What is to become of that zone, and how are we to understand it? I have been tugging at the concept of Bildung of late and have unraveled a few threads that might prove productive.[1] Bildung is, of course, one of those words that is ferociously difficult to translate, and unfortunately it has not yet made its way into the English language, at least not officially (cf. Assmann). Unlike “Schadenfreude” and “Bildungsroman,” it is not to be found in English-language reference material like the OED. Bildung is not simply education, as is evident in the slippage between the Council of Europe’s declaration on their English-language website that 2005 was the “European Year of Citizenship through Education” and the Austrian Ministry of Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur’s parallel announcement of it on their website as the “Europäisches Jahr der politischen Bildung,” the slogan of which was “Demokratie lernen und leben/ Learning and living democracy ist der Slogan des vom Europarat ausgerufenen European Year of Citizenship through Education 2005”. A refined kind of education, Bildung is a linguistically, culturally and historically specific, and specifically modern concept – in the first instance about the creation of enlightened citizens, who have, à la Kant, overcome their self-inflicted immaturity by acquiring knowledge, and also what Bourdieu termed cultural capital in the process.

One can usefully distinguish between the traditional notion of Bildung understood as the canon of the modern Humboldtian university and the development of a strand of comparative literature-oriented German Studies which has found in the work of Walter Benjamin ways of sublating that canon without rejecting it wholesale, as has been for the most part the approach of the cultural studies that takes its cues from Raymond Williams and the Birmingham School. One can understand this contrast by juxtaposing A New History of German Literature (Wellbery, Ryan and Gumbrecht), which is exemplary of Benjaminian Bildung, with German Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Burns), Contemporary German Cultural Studies (Phipps) and A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies (Denham, Kacandes and Petropoulos).

Wellbery claims in his introduction that “neither ‘history,’ nor ‘German,’ nor ‘literature’ means quite the same thing here as in the standard works” (xxi). Literature, in particular, appears to have undergone the kind of sea-change that Hannah Arendt, quoting from The Tempest, refers to in her introduction to Illuminations, Harry Zohn’s original translations of Benjamin essays, which appeared in 1968 with Schocken Books:

Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime was irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past,... that in the place of its authority, there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of ‘peace of mind.’ (Benjamin and Arendt 38)

The selections in Wellbery’s collection are intended in this spirit of unsettling, particularly in unsettling traditional ideas about literature. The volume’s first entry – about “magical formulae in Old High German [that] are recorded on an empty codex page” (1) and its last entry about W.G. Sebald’s last novel, Austerlitz (970) – are both quite uncontroversial examples that accord with the traditional understanding of literature (as high “lit tra cha”). In between, however, one finds entries that are considerably less so. Perhaps there are arguments for considering a 1782 “Proposal for a Magazine of Empirical Psychology” (409) as literature, or the record of a meeting in 1145 between an Armenian bishop and the Pope at the time about the merits of undertaking a second crusade (44). Perhaps there is even a case to be made for approaching Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction essay, discussed by Lindsay Waters under its new title “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (790), as literature. But what is one to make of entries on Berlin’s twenty-first-century Carnival of Cultures (965)? What about the 1916 opening of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich (708)? What about a celebration on Whitsuntide in 1184 to mark the coming of age of Frederick Barbarossa’s sons (76)? What about the competition to design an “Extension of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum Department” that Daniel Libeskind won in 1989 (952)? What about Goebbels’ selection of works for the “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich in 1937 (800)? What about the murder of Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Trieste in 1768 (376)? What about the 1921 American premiere of Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr Caligari (718) or the 1935 triumph of Leni Riefenstahl’s will?

The sea of literature here has quite definitively suffered a change into something rich and strange, namely into culture, and yet it is not a “Cultural History” or a “History of German Culture,” but A New History of German Literature that is on offer here. Why? For an answer one need look no further than two volumes published by Oxford University Press, the first in 1995: German Cultural Studies: An Introduction, edited by Rob Burns and described on OUP’s website as follows:

Major changes have been taking place in the context of German Studies in both secondary and higher eduction [sic], 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. (italics added, http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject /LiteratureEnglish/WorldLiterature/Germany/?view=usa&ci=019871503X, accessed 1 August 2005)

The volume’s readership is given as likely to consist of: “Undergraduate students (all levels) of German studies; anyone with a broad interest in modern and contemporary Germany, German culture and history and/or cultural studies. All students of German culture, language and literature; teachers/tutors of German, European Studies/sociology.” Seven years later, Oxford published a second, follow-up volume entitled Contemporary German Cultural Studies (2002) edited by Alison Phipps. The rationale for the volume is described on the publisher’s website as follows:

As the study of German comes under the influence of other disciplinary approaches, the notion of culture has evolved from one focused largely on the arts to an approach which understands culture as the way of life of a people or a period. This introductory book examines contemporary German culture not only in the context of its intellectual life – the media, the arts, political figures and events – but also in the context of the theories and methodologies of cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology (implying these are if not mutually exclusive, then separate theories and methodologies.) Providing a critical assessment of the diversity of German culture and identity, Contemporary German Cultural Studies focuses on the contemporary period and at the same time considers the influence of the past and forces such as globalization. The emphasis is on the interpretation and analysis of the varieties of German cultures – the processes, the practices and the performances. The book also explores intercultural issues, including the implications of studying German culture from an anglophone perspective. (italics added, http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/WorldLiterature/Germany/?ci=0340764015&view=usa, accessed 1 August 2005)

One particularly notes the national and contemporary focus of these two volumes, something which is also true of their American cousin, A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies published by the University of Michigan Press in 1997 in between the two Oxford volumes under the editorship of Scott D. Denham, Irene Kacandes and Jonathan Petropoulos. Its blurb reads:

The German-speaking world has spawned some of the most extreme contrasts between products of culture--the endlessly fascinating, if clichéd, Beethoven-Hitler dichotomy--and thus provokes compelling questions about culture and identity. A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies is an invitation to explore the rapidly expanding scholarship in cultural studies within the German context.
This collection brings together more than twenty-five essays from top-notch scholars and astute cultural critics who examine diverse questions in both broad outlines and specific instances. A literary scholar investigates multiculturalism in German literature; a political scientist asks which past Germans live with after reunification; a historian studies the revival of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1829; a journalist wonders how we learn to stop hating the Germans. (http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=11133, accessed 1 August 2005)

What does it mean to “do” German Cultural Studies? Judging from the offerings I’ve just enumerated, it means a great many things, and many of those who self-identify as Cultural Studies practitioners are no doubt itching to argue that much of what I have just listed is not Cultural Studies at all but rather Landeskunde. What’s important for the purposes of the distinction I am trying to establish here between Benjaminian Bildung and German Cultural Studies is that “What exactly German Cultural Studies is and what it can and should be?” is a battle Wellbery and his editorial team chose to avoid. Rather, in naming their volume A New History of German Literature, they are clearly placing themselves on the Bildung side of culture, that is, on the capital “K” as opposed to the small “c” side, which is why it is not so much ironic as unfortunate that much of the capital K Bildung crowd, the New Criterion types, tend to dismiss “theory” tout court, whether it is associated with Cultural Studies or this kind of Benjamin-inspired history of culture.

Why I think it’s worth delineating Benjaminian Bildung from both Bildung in the Humboldtian spirit and contemporary German Cultural Studies is for what it can do that the other two can’t: namely, it can bridge the polarities that the two other positions represent. In other words, Benjaminian Bildung can hyphenate, meaning that it is the academic equivalent of Hong Kong, which Ackbar Abbas has described as:

not as a ‘third space’ that can be located somewhere; not as a neither-nor space that is nowhere; not even as a mixed or in-between space, if by that we understand that the various elements that make it up are separable. Above all, hyphenation refers not to the conjunctures of ‘East’ and ‘West’, but to the disjunctures of colonialism and globalism. (Abbas 143)

These disjunctures work something like Benjamin’s dialectical images in which past and present are both present but only fleetingly.[2] These disjunctures, not of East and West but of colonialism and globalism, have led to “uneven cultural developments” and point to the need to recognize Hong Kong culture as a “postculture,” something of great relevance to the current indeterminacy of interdisciplinary studies. A postculture, in Abbas’s understanding, is:

a culture that has developed in a situation where the available models of culture no longer work. In such a situation, culture cannot wait or follow social change in order to represent it; it must anticipate the paradoxes of hyphenation. A postculture, therefore, is not postmodernist culture, or post-Marxist culture, or post-Cultural Revolution culture, or even postcolonial culture, insofar as each of these has a set of established themes and an alternative orthodoxy. In a postculture, on the other hand, culture itself is experienced as a field of instabilities.... (italics in original, 145)

As is the study of that field, to which Benjamin’s historical understanding has proven encouraging to scholars like you and me, Michael, who recognize that the available models not only of culture but also of the academy no longer work and that we cannot wait and must anticipate by neither projecting or rejecting as much as recognizing, as Abbas notes, that “[o]ne of the most important implications of colonialism in the era of globalism is simply that there is no longer a space elsewhere” (146). Who understood better than Benjamin that “[t]his means that instead of thinking in terms of displacements, a movement somewhere else, it is important to think in terms of dislocation, which is the transformation of place” especially over time? He also understood that “[s]uch transformations, even after they have taken place, are often indiscernible and hence challenge recognition” (146). That is why, as Fredric Jameson notes, “Benjamin took his snapshot of the nineteenth-century arcade at the moment of its decay—and thereby developed a whole theory about history: that you could best understand the present from the standpoint of an immediate past whose fashions were already just a little out of date” (Jameson).

Am I suggesting that the work of Michael Saffle is Benjaminian Bildung? Not necessarily, but I do think it shares a feeling of elective affinity with the increasingly dislocating academic and cultural vicissitudes, which has allowed for, and hopefully will long continue to both create and help negotiate, exciting and productive transformations. Certainly one of the merits of Michael’s work is that it recognizes the realities of post-culture with a self-reflexive (and therefore implicitly political) attitude towards both the past and the future and that it helps to chart a course of interdisciplinarity at home wherever it happens to be.

Susan Ingram
Division of Humanities, York University

Notes

[1]The ideas that follow were first floated at a workshop on “Hyphenated Histories, Cultural Theory and the Humanities Tradition in the Contemporary Academy,” held at the University of Alberta, 3-5 May 2005 (http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/history/Hyphenated Histories.cfm) and have since been presented in a variety of contexts but have not yet appeared in published form.

[2]Bildung’s root is, after all, Bild (image). Bildung conceived in this way is not about cultural capital but about being able to recognize, as George Steiner put it, “correspondences between Wort und Bild, gesture and emblem. A semiology of translatability” (18).

References

Abbas, M. A. Hong Kong : Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Public Worlds ;. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Assmann, Aleida. Arbeit Am Nationalen Gedächtnis: Eine Kurze Geschichte Der Deutschen Bildungsidee. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1993.

Benjamin, Walter, and Hannah Arendt. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.

Burns, Rob. German Cultural Studies : An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

National Identity, Cultural Hierarchy, and the Middlebrow Disposition in Postwar American Film. microform :, 1993.

Dainotto, Roberto M. "A South with a View: Europe and Its Other." Napantla: Views from South 1.2 (2000): 375-90.

Denham, Scott D., Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos. A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies. Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Jameson, Fredric. "Future City." New Left Review, 2003. Vol. 21.

Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow : The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization ;. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Phipps, Alison M. Contemporary German Cultural Studies. London, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middle/Brow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Wellbery, David E., Judith Ryan, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. A New History of German Literature. Harvard University Press Reference Library. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.