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Default Hermann and the Death of German Studies

Hermann and the Death of German Studies

Trudie Pert

January 17, 2010

"In the U.S., German scholars are constrained to teach only the works of Germans of Jewish background, their courses dwelling on persecution and genocide. Indeed, it is not too far fetched to suppose that German culture as a culture of Germans has disappeared entirely, replaced by the culture of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has not only become a quasi religion capable of eradicating the remnants of German culture, Jews have become sanctified as a people. (Kevin MacDonald, Preface to the paperback edition, The Culture of Critique).


The city of New Ulm, Minnesota, founded in 1854 by a group of German
immigrants, is home to an imposing statue of the Germanic chieftain,
Hermann. In the year 9AD, a coalition of Germanic tribes under Hermann
for the first time in the history of the Germanic tribes ambushed and
defeated three invading Roman legions commanded by Quinctilius Varus.
The defeat, in the Teutoburger Forest, caused Caesar Augustus and his
successors to forego conquering north central Europe. A new imperial
policy changed European history for the people of central Europe, who
developed independently of Roman rule.

In 1897, the Sons of Hermann, an American national fraternal
organization of German Americans, proud of its heritage and desiring
to keep it alive for future generations, commissioned a monumental
statue of Hermann to be erected in a New Ulm city park. The Hermann
Monument is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On
September 24, 2009, a two thousand year ethnic celebration
commemorating the victory of Hermann the German against foreign
aggression took place in New Ulm, MN.

The Hermann Monument, New Ulm, Minnesota

The Hermann celebration was an isolated example of German ethnic
identification in this country, even though Germans represent the
largest ancestry group in the US. California and Texas have the
largest populations of German origin, while the states of the Midwest,
North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have the most concentrated
German populations.

In spite of their numbers, however, the study of the language and
literature of the German people has dropped drastically nationwide. In
2006, only 6% of students learning a foreign language nationwide were
enrolled in German. Many schools no longer offer German as a subject
of study. Some colleges have eliminated whole departments of German
and replaced them with departments of non-European languages. The
University of Southern California, for example, after dropping its
doctoral program about a decade ago, recently eliminated its entire
German department. Spanish, of course, continues to grow, though most
of its speakers on this Continent are of non-European descent. The
languages that are experiencing tremendous growth nationwide in
numbers of learners include Mandarin, Japanese, Urdu, and Arabic.

What does this mean for people of European descent? Unfortunately, it
means a serious loss of connection to their European heritage and
culture. Language is intrinsically connected to ethnic identity and
allegiance to the group with which one shares ancestral links. Even
where modern day ethnic groups can claim no country of their own, as
in the case of the Welsh, the Basques, and the Kurds, retaining their
language has enabled these groups to remain viable.

The elimination of German from the curriculum is occurring even in
those areas of the country which have a majority German-American
population. Notwithstanding Garrison Keillor’s stereotype of Minnesota
as majority Lutheran-Norwegian, Minnesota is actually home to 36.7%
people of German ancestry. Those of Norwegian background total 17.3%,
Irish 11.2%, Swedish 9.9%, and English 6.3% (US Census Bureau Report
June, 2004). A significant number of mestizos have taken residence in
Minnesota since the last census, and the Federal Government has placed
large numbers of Hmong, a South-east Asian people, and Somalian
Negroes into the Twin City area, no doubt altering the proportions
somewhat. The largest faith group is Catholic. Jews comprise .9% of
the population.

Suppressed during the two World Wars, German re-established its place
as one of the two most popular languages after each War. Until
recently, many of the students in German language courses were
“heritage learners,” students who wanted to remain connected to the
language of their forefathers. In addition, German, along with French,
has always been considered a language of research and cultural
refinement. Now, however, English has become the language of research,
cultural refinement is passé, and economic interests have displaced
cultural connections for Whites. Perhaps school districts are
receiving directives to remove German. Possibly also the continuing
revilement against Germans caused by the unceasing barrage of venomous
anti-German Holocaust memoirs, films, and television programs has
contributed to the decline in German language learning.

For whatever reasons, the result is that German has all but
disappeared from public high schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Currently, of the seven public high schools in Minneapolis, all offer
Spanish (multiple classes at each level), 6 offer French, 3 Mandarin,
2 Japanese, 1 Arabic, 1 Latin, 1 Ojibwe, (a Native American language),
and 1 German. (See here.) The situation is similar in St. Paul. (See
here.)

Like the public schools of the Twin Cities, the University of
Minnesota, Minneapolis, is a tax-supported institution and many of its
51,000 students are residents of the State. UM does not appear on the
Hillel list of the 60 colleges and universities with the largest
Jewish student enrollments. In the past, significant numbers of high
school German teachers were trained at this campus. Students who
obtained their Ph.D. were frequently offered positions on the
faculties of smaller Midwest colleges.

As mentioned earlier, a number of colleges in the country have
eliminated their German departments entirely. Others have rescued them
from extinction by changing their concentration away from the
traditional study of language and literature to the vocational study
of “Business German.” UM retains a foreign language requirement and
the University’s German Department (German, Scandinavian and Dutch)
continues to offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in language and
literature.

The focus of its teaching and research has shifted, however, from
analyzing literary merit to promulgating politically correct social
causes. The following is a comment not only on the state of German
studies, but an excellent case study of what university departments in
the humanities have become — bastions of the left influenced deeply by
Jewish concerns and by Jewish intellectual movements, particularly the
Frankfurt School. The following dissertation titles, course
descriptions, and faculty publications all reflect the change in
direction which the study of German literature has taken.

Some recent representative dissertation titles include:

Toward a Multiculturalism for the 21st Century: German and
Scandinavian Literary Perspectives, 1990–2005

Projecting Deviance/Seeing Queerly: Homosexual Representation and
Queer Spectatorship in 1950’s Germany

Reading and Revising the Topography of German cultu Christina
Reining on Gender and Sexuality

Representing the Afro-German in Early West German Cinema

The Space of Words: Diaspora and Exile in the Works of Nelly Sachs

Off the Road: Remapping the Shoah Representation from the Perspectives
of Ordinary Jewish Women

Negotiating the German-Jewish: the Uncomfortable Writing of Karl Emil
Franzos

Writing against Objectification: German Jewish Identity in the Works
of Grete Weil and Ruth Klueger

Represented here are the favorite topics of “cultural criticism”:
sexism, racism, homophobia, diversity, immigration, multiculturalism,
and Jewish victimization. No work from the rich canon of German
literature is the subject of a dissertation. Sadly, the literary
criticism that grew out of the Frankfurt School and has monopolized
the interpretation of literature in English and foreign language
literature departments for the last thirty years will no doubt
continue. Complacent non-Jewish graduate students are being recruited
and trained to enshrine the politically correct ideology permanently
into the American University system.

Banner for the University of Minnesota Department of German,
Scandinavian, and Dutch, with Star of David

Below is a quick overview of some key faculty members — all graduates
of elite Eastern universities, who publish, teach graduate courses,
and advise grad students on dissertations. They also recommend
students for grants and fellowships and future employment. Quotations
are from the annual magazine of the German Department.

Professor Ruth-Ellen Joeres, Department of German

“She has a vision about how to open up the canon of German Literature
and a determination to rewrite history to include women….In Nov. 2006
an interdisciplinary conference titled, ‘Gender, Genre, and Political
Transformation’ was held in her honor… (on teaching Goethe’s Faust)
she has the students read through the lens of their choice: Bakhtian,
Freud, gender theory, or queer theory’…. I don’t believe in
objectivity.”

Courses include:

Women Writers in German Literatu Writings and Films of Minority
Women. “In this course the contributions of ‘German’ women of ethnic
heritage such as Afro-German, Turkish-German, Japanese-German women
are studied. What does it mean to be called, ‘German”?

Topics in Literature and Diversity: Diversity Troubles. One of the
required texts for this course is the novel, Der Vorleser, by the
contemporary German novelist, essayist, and judge, Bernard Schlink.
Published in English in 2008, as The Reader, it was recently made into
an American film. The novel deals with the guilt of an illiterate
German woman for her actions in a German concentration camp. In 2005,
while filming The Reader, Kate Winslet, its star, stated, “I don’t
think we need another film about the Holocaust, do we? ... No, I’m
doing it because I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the
Holocaust (you’re) guaranteed an Oscar.” (She was right!)

Incidentally, in one of his essays, the author, Bernhard Schlink, son
of a Protestant minister, makes the theologically astonishing claim
that German guilt for the Holocaust is hereditary and will be carried
by subsequent generations of Germans (Vergangenheitsschuld, Diogenes,
Zürich, 2007). This inverts a fundamental teaching of Christianity.
Christianity teaches that the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are the
central events of history and that the Jews are forever responsible
for the unforgivable crime of deicide. Schlink, however, suggests that
Germans are and will be responsible for the Holocaust for all time,
thus ostensibly substituting the Holocaust for the Crucifixion as
history’s greatest crime and central event.

Professors Rembert Hueser and Richard McCormick, Department of German

These professors of German Film Studies specialize in feminism, Nazi
Cinema, Weimar culture, and gender studies. Recent publications
include, “Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity.

Courses include:

German Cinema of the Weimar Republic: Aesthetics and Politics, Gender,
and Sexuality, Modernism and Modernity. “Of importance is the question
of Weimar sexual 'decadence;' was it ... something that facilitated
the rise of the Nazis? Or was it about the emancipation from rigid
gender and sexual identities, something that threatened the Nazis and
their sympathizers? Something 'postmodern' — or even 'queer' in a
positive sense?"

In addition to courses in the German Department, students of German
are strongly encouraged to participate in classes of affiliated
departments. Recommended faculty of affiliated departments include:

Prof. Gary C. Thomas, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative
Literature

Specialties include: 17th- and 18th-century German literature, gender/
sexuality studies, and cultural musicology

Publications include: Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and Lesbian
Musicology

Courses include: Queer Theory

Professor Richard Leppert, Department of Cultural Studies and
Comparative Literature

Publications include: Theodor Adorno – Essays in Music

Courses include: Adorno/Aesthetic Theory

It is indeed puzzling why so many non-Jewish faculty members have
adopted the teachings of the Frankfurt School, promoting its agenda to
degrade Western culture by glorifying deviancy, multiculturalism and
Jewish victimization. One wonders whether they are actually adherents
of a position totally inimical to their own White racial interests, or
have chosen to be academic Uncle Toms for the sake of tenure and the
dependable pay check. Some are clearly part of the homosexual-left
culture that is so prominent at the university these days. Their
identity as a homosexual victim of cultural oppression is far more
important to them — and far more lucrative professionally — than
identifying as a White person and having a sense of White interests.

Incidentally, the glorification of Jewish victimization has achieved
official academic legitimacy in the rather new discipline of Jewish
Studies. Begun only about thirty years ago at colleges with majority
Jewish faculties and student bodies, Jewish Studies has quickly grown.
The Association of Jewish Studies is now a large network of 1800
members with independent departments on most campuses across the
country.

Two influential German Department professors specialize in Jewish
Studies and are exceptional in the large number of works they have
published, in the number of grants and fellowships they have been
awarded, and in the range of affiliated departments to which they
belong. Unlike the previously mentioned non-Jewish professors, who
corrupt their own ethnic Western interests by adopting the tenets of
the cultural revolution, these Jewish faculty members overtly and
militantly employ the Frankfurt School’s ideology and methods to
promote their specifically Jewish interests. The promotion of
specifically Jewish interests was not shared by Jewish professors of
the former generation. Until they were replaced by the individuals
described below, three German-born Jewish professors, because of their
vast knowledge and love of their subject, were highly regarded members
of the German faculty. More German than Jewish they promoted German,
not Jewish, culture.

Professor Jack Zipes, Department of German (recently retired)

At the present time Amazon is briskly selling an amazing 21 of Jack
Zipes' books about fairy tales, including several pricey compendia.
Pertinent to the discussion here are two types of his works about
fairy tales: the theoretical, dealing with Frankfurt School
deconstruction of fairy tales, and the practical, the use of fairy
tales in the public schools.

In Breaking the Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, Zipes
provides a Marxist interpretation of folk and fairy tales through the
filter of Frankfurt School criticism. His aim is to interpret the
socio-historical forces that shaped the tales and to deconstruct and/
or reconstruct them to influence and help form the society of the
future.

An early chapter in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature is
devoted to a discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno about
the Marxist utopian function of the fairy tale.

With the manual, Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing
Lives, Zipes suggests practical ways to encourage children to
deconstruct traditional tales. Co-founder of the theatrical method
named, "The Neighborhood Bridges Project," Zipes has introduced a
technique of re-interpreting fairy tales. Used by Minneapolis Public
Schools since 1997 it seeks to expose the sexism, racism, and classism
in the traditional value system of the fairy tales and of society. For
his outstanding contributions to the field of Children's Literature,
Zipes has won several significant awards plus an honorary degree from
the University of Bologna!

Prof. ipes specialties include: Critical Theory of the Frankfurt
School; Fairy Tales (or rather their deconstruction); Jewish Studies

Publications include

Political Plays for Children

Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion

Don’t bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales

Down with Heidi, Down with Struwelpeter: Three Cheers for the
Revolution: Towards

A New Socialist Children’s Literature in West Germany

The Potential of Liberating Fairy Tales for Children

Don’t Bet on the Prince: Feminist Fairy Tales

Walter Benjamin and Children’s Literature, in The Germanic Review

Marx as Moralist

Negating History and Male Fantasies through Psychoanalytic Criticism

Adorno May Still be Right

Marx and Engels Without Frills

Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis 1945-2000 (with
Leslie Morris, below)

The Yale Companion of Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture

Germans and Jews since the Holocaust

The Operated Jew: Two Tales of Antisemitism

Disparate Jewish Voices and the Dialectic of the “Shoah Business” in
Germany

Holocaust Survivor as Literary Pope in Germany

Jewish Life as Stigma, in: Simon Wiesenthal Center Report

Germans and Jews since the Holocaust

Lessons of the Holocaust, in: New German Critique

The Operated German as Operated Jew, in New German Critique

The Negative German-Jewish Symbiosis

Contested Jews: The Image of Jewishness in Contemporary German
Literature

The Holocaust and the Vicissitudes of Jewish Identity in New German
Critique

Professor Leslie Morris, Department of German

While Prof. Morris holds a tenured position in German, she is also a
member of four affiliated centers. Two of these affiliations are
especially noteworthy. She is a member of the Center for Holocaust and
Genocide Studies, and a member of the Center for Jewish Studies, of
which she was director from 2002–2009

Prof. Morris specializes in 20th and 21st (sic) German/Austrian
Literature and in Jewish Studies.

According to her biography in the German Department Magazine: “She is
interested in issues of exile and Diaspora that are central to the
experience of Jews, especially since the 1930’s… to gain a deeper
understanding of what ‘Jewishness’ means. (The name) Morris morphed
out of Moskowitz.”

Publications include:

Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000
(with German Prof. Jack Zipes)

Berlin Elegies: Absence, Postmemory and Art after Auschwitz

How Jewish is it? The Question of Contemporary German-Jewish Writing

Der modifizierte Jude als Stigmatext

In her book, Unlikely History, the Changing German Jewish Symbiosis,
Prof. Morris addresses the topic of holocaust memoirs. She has two
concerns. Not only is there a problem with future supply since the
last holocaust survivors are succumbing to old age, but Prof. Morris
finds many of the memoirs to be intrinsically dull and of limited
literary value. She compares the authentic memoirs to the many
fraudulent “memoirs,” originally marketed as first person accounts,
but later found to be fakes, much to the embarrassment of their
publishers. She judges these fake “memoirs” to be more imaginative,
moving, and of greater literary value than the genuine accounts.
Disregarding standards of academic ethics she suggests that the
fraudulent accounts ought to be redeemed and accepted into the body of
holocaust literature as genuine memoirs. Not only are the fakes better
than the genuine accounts, but their production is unlimited!

Courses include:

Approaches to Analysis: Required readings — “Archive Fever”: Derrida,
“History of Sexuality: Foucault, “Moses and Monotheism”: Freud, “Three
Case Histories”: Freud

Seminar in 20th Century German Literature and Cultu Listening to
German Anxiety — “We will think about the specificity of German
anxiety — anxiety about modernity, anxiety about the Jews…”

~Required readings — “We will start with Freud’s, ‘Problem with
Anxiety,’ and move to works by Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida,
Schoenberg…”

So close is the German Department to the Center for Jewish Studies,
with which Prof. Morris is affiliated, that the two Departments
recently jointly sponsored a University of Minnesota tour titled,
“Jewish Life in Berlin and Prague.” The informational meeting for the
trip was held at a community center in the Minneapolis suburb of St.
Louis Park. Affectionately known as “St. Jewish Park,” by both Jews
and gentiles, this modern day Jewish ghetto has been the home of many
successful Jews. These include Thomas Friedman, New York Times
journalist, Al Franken, the junior senator from Minnesota, and the
Coen Brothers, film makers. In fact, the newest Coen Brothers film,
“The Serious Man,” is set in the St. Louis Park of the 60’s. Ari
Hoptman, UM German instructor, plays a department head.

The nine day University of Minnesota tour to Berlin and Prague was
jointly led by German Department, Prof. Leslie Morris and History
Department, Prof. Gary Cohen. Prof. Cohen is also Director of the
Center for Austrian Studies, and a faculty member of the Center for
Jewish Studies. The UM-sponsored tour included visits with the chief
rabbis of both Berlin and Prague, with members of the Israeli Council
in Berlin, and Shabbat services and Shabbat dinner with Berlin
congregations. Lunch was planned at kosher restaurants.

A Center for Catholic or Christian Studies does not exist at the
University of Minnesota. Therefore, there will be no University-
sponsored trip titled, “Christian Life in Europe,” with Mass at the
Cologne Cathedral and an audience with the Pope.

The most recent issue of German Quarterly, from summer, 2009, explores
the possible reciprocal effects of German and Jewish Studies.
Responding to the title of this issue, “How Jewish is German Studies?
How German is Jewish Studies?” Prof. Morris states in the
introduction:

VERY….What I hoped to do with this special issue was to move the
discussion about Germans and Jews beyond merely establishing
affinities between historical expression and cultural expression. Part
of the ‘thought experiment’ behind this special issue was to see what
might happen if we were to slip within the hyphen separating ‘the
German’ and ‘the Jewish’ and begin a ‘queering’ of German-Jewish
Studies that would rupture the intact diacritical mark of the hyphen
and destabilize the markers of ‘German’ and ‘Jew.’

Rethinking the links and the ruptures contained within the ‘German
Jew’ also necessitates a new conceptualizing of Jewish and ‘queer’
identity; to pull apart the hyphen that sutures the ‘German Jew’ is at
the same time to expand ‘queerness’ beyond sexual practice and
‘experience’ and to disrupt what R. block has termed a ‘geographic
transversal’ that links Germany and Zion. My calling for a ‘queering’
of German Jewish Studies is a strategy to move us away from
‘constructions of the Jew or the German as either positive or
negative, stereotyped or ‘authentic,’ and to consider an approach to
German Jewish text that will push the very boundaries of the German
and the Jewish. I propose instead that we consider German Jewish
writing as inhabiting a new space of a trans-, or a newly imagined
community that exists in a border zone of textual and historical
memory, projection and fantasy, pathology and desire, and that will
always exceed the geographic, linguistic, and ethnic/national markers
in which they are enacted.

The next activity jointly sponsored by the University of Minnesota
German Department and the Center for Jewish Studies is scheduled in
the spring. On April, 13, 2010, Prof. Leslie Morris will present a
public lecture titled, “Why Germany Loves the Jews.” The lecture will
be delivered at Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul.

HERMANN, BE THERE! "


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