Transnationalism

German studies has been invigorated over the past decade by the broader turn in the humanities and social sciences toward transnationalism. Scholars have begun to situate German studies in multiple global contexts, emphasizing the flow of people, ideas, capital, culture, and goods across national borders to and from Germany. This growing body of scholarship draws on older international studies, such as comparative history, diplomatic history, or the history of international relations, but combines these more state-centered approaches with methods from cultural studies and Alltagsgeschichte to explore international interconnections, “contact zones,” networks, and so on. Transnational studies have not only pushed scholars to explore new perspectives on the field from a global standpoint, but also brought new intellectual challenges to major narratives of German studies.

In 2006, H-German featured a forum in which commentators lauded the fruitfulness of transnational studies, but also called for more precise definitions of the term transnational.¹ The same year at the German Studies Association meeting, there were three series of panels dedicated to transnational themes (“Deutschland Postkolonial,” “African-Americans and/in Germany,” and “Islam in Europe”) and an address by Michael Geyer on “Transnationalism in Theory and Practice.” More than thirty panels focused on transnational issues, especially relating to German colonialism, while others interrogated the term “transnationalism” itself. The “transnational turn” was clearly taking Germanist scholars by storm. The 2012 GSA program now features nine series or pairs of panels related to transnational themes: “Rethinking Migrants and German Culture,” “Germans in East Africa,” “Intercultural Transfer,” “German and Balkan Encounters,” “The Muslim Turn,” “Recent Expressions of Heimat,” “DEFA at the Crossroads: International Approaches to East German Film History,” “Talking Past Each Other/Talking to Each Other: Disjunctures in Communication between German, American, and British Historians,” and, for the fourth year in a row, “Asian-German Studies.” More than thirty panels again this year reflect the fact that scholars across German studies have taken up the challenge of transnationalism to move their fields in new theoretical and thematic directions. We might now ask where this has brought us, and what challenges or limits we have discovered in our turn to the transnational.

One especially important question is how transnationalism differs from earlier international approaches, including comparative studies, history of diplomacy or foreign relations, or other analytic concepts such as borderlands or cosmopolitan, global, world, or international studies. Transnational studies borrow from all these concepts, but current scholarship emphasizes the various types of flow across national boundaries in a fresh way, while questioning “the nation” as an analytical category. Comparative studies is one field that transnationalism has brought under especially intense scrutiny. Some scholars of transnationalism, including Sebastian Conrad, have suggested that the discrete nation, the basic unit of comparative history, has been at least partly invalidated by transnational history.² Other scholars, including Jürgen Osterhammel, have suggested that transnational history has refined the nation as a unit of analysis, but not made it obsolete.³ Certainly not every topic lends itself to transnational treatment. Local or subnational analyses remain important. By untangling German studies from Eurocentrism, transnational approaches will enrich the hermeneutics of individual texts for which Lutz Koepnick makes an important plea in his contribution to this forum. We hope that transnational frameworks will add to and enhance, rather than supplant or invalidate, multiple approaches to German studies, including those situated within national boundaries.

The problem of national comparison is especially important for German history, since one of its major narratives, the version of the Sonderweg that presented Germany as a pathological deviation from an ideologically charged concept of “western modernity,” was drawn directly from comparative history. Recent postcolonial theories about multiple or alternative modernities may contribute to a rethinking of Germany’s modernity.⁴

In a very basic way, transnational approaches preserve the global scale of comparative history against the microscopic tendencies of some of the cultural studies of the 1990s—while embracing the attention to local peculiarity, thick description, and reading against the grain that are characteristic of cultural studies. Adding transnational approaches to the scholar’s toolbox, intermixed with other methodologies, can only make this inquiry richer.

The scholarly move toward...