DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar 2012: “The Futures of Interdisciplinary German Studies”

The future of the Euro zone has been much under discussion in recent months. Yet there is abundant evidence to suggest that the concept of “the future” may itself be subject to broad social and critical revision in this increasingly global world that practitioners of German Studies inhabit in various ways. Long considered a defining structural feature of European modernity, the notion of an open future that could and would be different from the past—and ideally represent an improvement as compared with past and present alike—is being newly interrogated by thinkers as diverse as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Nach 1945—Latenz als Ursprung der Gegenwart, 2012), Hermann Lübbe (Schrumpft die Gegenwart? Über die veränderte Gegenwart von Zukunft und Vergangenheit, 2000), Hirokazu Miyazaki (The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge, 2004), Amir Eshel (Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, 2012), and Arjun Appadurai (The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition, forthcoming 2013). Cosponsored in alternating years by Cornell University’s interdisciplinary Institute for German Cultural Studies and the University of Chicago’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture (with focal topics and seminar directors varying each year), the DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar convened for six weeks again in 2012, this time at Cornell University under the directorship of Leslie A. Adelson, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies and current director of the Institute for German Cultural Studies. Under the generous auspices of the DAAD, which annually provides participant stipends to allow qualified postdoctoral candidates from North American institutions to take part in summer seminars designed to advance both their careers and German Studies in the United States and Canada, the substantive aim of the DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar in 2012 was to focus critical attention on “The Futures of Interdisciplinary German Studies” from a range of scholarly, historical, and even temporal perspectives. The DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar in 2013 will be conducted at the University of Chicago under the directorship of Eric L. Santner, Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies, on “Economies of Desire: Political Economy and Libidinal Economy in German Culture and Thought.” Seminar details and application instructions will be available as of October on the DAAD Web site at http://www.daad.org.

Futurism was once an artistic and political movement, with multifaceted and contested ties to the historical avant-garde in Europe. Via Turkey and Russia, futurist motifs and legacies circulate in contemporary German literature and installation art through the phenomenon of late twentieth-century migration. Yet in the wake of 1989, the end of state-sponsored communism in Europe, and twenty-first-century manifestations of globalization, many questions arise, in new configurations across the disciplines and socially, about the status and conceptualization of “the future” in German culture and European life in an interconnected and precarious world; about utopia, hope, progress, optimism, potential, predictability, probability, and risk in public life, virtual worlds, and critical thought. This historical juncture served this year’s DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar as a springboard for reflecting more broadly on the analytical yield of “futurity” as a critical point of entry for understanding both German culture over time and interdisciplinary German Studies in relation to the humanities and social sciences today.

Focal readings were exemplary rather than comprehensive, and selections were based in part on participants’ research interests and disciplinary expertise. While the seminar took its cue from new approaches to German culture and its influences in the academy and the world today, scholars concentrating on any historical period or cultural medium were welcome to apply, and the interdisciplinary specializations of actual participants reflected historical expertise from the eighteenth century to the present. Current debates about the proper place of area studies and national disciplines in educational institutions provided an additional frame of reference for seminar discussion, and the future of German Studies in North America was one of many “futures” discussed. However, the seminar’s analytical focus was on highly differentiated uses to which diverse understandings of the future and futurity (as discrete, albeit related terms...