In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Meaning of Culture: German Studies in the 21st Century
  • Stephen Brockmann
The Meaning of Culture: German Studies in the 21st Century. Edited by Martin Kagel and Laura Tate Kagel. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2009. 272 pages + 20 b/w illustrations. €29,50.

While this book contains some interesting essays, it does not really live up to the promise of its subtitle, "German Studies in the 21st Century." The book's introduction, by Martin Kagel, and the first two essays, by Michael W. Jennings and Katherine Arens, do attempt to intervene in contemporary debates about German Studies in the United States, but most of the rest of the contributions showcase individual contributors' own research on particular, rather diverse topics. This creates a curious tension in the book between a critique of current trends in German Studies—away from the traditional canon for instance, and towards cultural studies—in the book's first part and displays of those very trends in the second part. As an example of this tension, Kagel, in his introduction, argues that contemporary German Studies in the United States "has produced a distinct bias against the study of literature" (25), but warns that "literary competence in particular is of undiminished social and political importance." And yet, in spite of Kagel's argument about the importance of literature, the book includes only two essays that address literature—Jonathan M. Hess's interesting article on orthodox Jewish fiction in the 19th century and Matt Erlin's critique of Herbert Marcuse, which touches on two canonical Bildungsromane. The book displays the remarkable pluralism of contemporary German Studies in the United States, but Kagel himself is rather critical of such pluralism: "the reality of the oft-bemoaned cafeteria approach to cultural studies, according to which culture could refer to everything and anything, has clearly been detrimental to the disciplinary profile of German departments" (13). Michael W. Jennings contributes a jeremiad about contemporary trends in German Studies, arguing that the institutional crisis of the field is primarily the fault of its own practitioners, whom he sees as being responsible for "a slump in the focus and rigor with which we approach our objects of study" (33). "Am I the only one who imagines the death of humanities when I hear the words 'Berlin' and 'cultural memory'?" Jennings asks polemically. "Or 'Sebald' and 'photography'? The nervous drive toward contemporary relevance has suggested to our students that contemporary concerns alone are sufficient to dictate scholarly problems" (35). Reading the volume, I wondered how Jennings, with his antipathy to the contemporary and the topical, [End Page 152] might respond to Patricia Anne Simpson's article on German rap music and the debate between "Kool Savas, the elder statesman of gangster rap in Berlin" (200) and his erstwhile protégé Eko Fresh, or to Sara Lennox's article about Blackness in Germany, with its attentiveness to "Black German lesbians in Hamburg, gay life in Berlin, and difficulties for Black Germans in Eastern Germany after reunification" (188).

All of the contradictions and tensions within the volume might be productive if the editors actually reflected on them, but unfortunately they do not. Instead they present the essays in the volume as if they were somehow in continuity or conformity with each other, which they decidedly are not. Kagel's introduction and the article by Jennings are rather bleak in their assessment of the intellectual value of contemporary German Studies, and Katherine Arens is hardly more positive when she argues that "[w]e are abandoning our wellsprings," and that "we have launched canon wars and culture wars without knowing what the canon really is" (59). Kagel, Jennings, and Arens are all exercised about the problem of a "cultural critique that is scarcely distinguishable from journalism" (Arens, 61), but they never really bother to define the dreaded "journalism" that they despise. The word "journalism" is often used as a shorthand criticism of any kind of scholarly writing that is relatively readable, and I wonder if the three scholars would be equally critical of the cultural journalism of people like Siegfried Kracauer or Walter Benjamin. I suspect not. At any rate, it is not clear how a...

pdf