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GUEST COMMENTARY: Where Has Literary Learning Gone? On German Studies’ Loss of Meaning

From Neue Zürcher Zeitung · () German

Translated from German and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Opinion Named sources Context piece
  • The commentary argues that German studies has lost much of its cultural and political influence because passion for literary tradition has faded.
  • It contrasts today’s academic interests with the strong commitment to German-language literature shown by prominent scholars in a 1972 collection.
  • The author says the discipline still produces important scholarship but has moved increasingly toward topics distant from literature itself.

Where has the passion for literature gone? That question anchors Manfred Schneider’s critique of German studies, which he says has fallen from a postwar leading discipline to “a shadow of its former self.” After the Second World War, German studies sought meaning in the badly fractured ideals of beauty, truth and goodness. For decades, it also offered cultural and political orientation.

Schneider looks back to 1972, when Suhrkamp publisher Siegfried Unseld assembled essays under the title “How, Why and to What End Did I Become a Literary Historian?” Sixteen prominent Germanists from Germany, France, England, Austria and the United States contributed. Their biographies differed sharply. Some had once been Nazi Party fellow travellers and kept silent about it. Others had fled Hitler or fought in the Resistance, matters they also treated discreetly.

What united them, Schneider writes, was an unreserved passion for German-language literature. Unseld expected readers to share that interest and planned an initial print run of 15,000 copies. Schneider suggests that a similar survey conducted twenty years later, or today, would produce a different picture and a smaller edition.

How, Why and to What End Did I Become a Literary Historian?

· Siegfried UnseldTitle of the 1972 collection of essays by prominent Germanists.

The academic descendants of those professors, he argues, are divided or indifferent in their relationship with literary tradition. Many have turned toward subjects further removed from literature, including Marxist theories, popular literature, film, media, gender, cultural history and, especially in the United States, Holocaust studies. Excellent dissertations and demanding books continue to appear, but the discipline’s literary passion has cooled. Schneider sees German studies in a rapid descent toward cultural and political insignificance. Its one consolation, he adds pointedly, is that nobody steals the books anymore.

He recalls that German studies originally emerged more than two centuries ago as a politically cheerful discipline, intended to warm the “patriotic hearts” saddened by Napoleon’s rule. The contrast with its present condition forms the central concern of this guest commentary.

patriotic hearts

· Historical formulation cited by Manfred SchneiderPhrase describing the original political purpose of German studies under Napoleon’s rule.
About this summary

Originally published by Neue Zürcher Zeitung in German. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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