Transatlantische Germanistik. Kontakt, Transfer, Dialogik by Paul Michael Lützeler (review)

In eighteen texts plus two introductions, Paul Michael Lützeler traces his career and his discipline from the 1960s to today. The hybrid volume combines traditional analytical essays with lectures and speeches, a grant report, an interview, and a panel discussion; five of the items are published here for the first time. The volume is grouped in nine units of two texts each, beginning with the author’s initial experiences as an exchange student from Germany in America and progressing through the development of universities, institutes, exchange programs, seminars, and journals that have dotted his path, alongside literary interpretations and methodological inquiries, and culminating in accounts of his international guest professorships and world tours.

The title may be somewhat misleading, for this is a two-pronged story with a non-linear narrative but connecting themes. On the one hand, Transatlantische Germanistik is indeed an account of the development of an international discipline through four decades, as it grows from the axis between Germany and America to the global. International encounters, dialogue, and exchange figure in many forms and dimensions here—not only in the author’s experience as exchange student and his subsequent international teaching career, but also in the rich cross-cultural intellectual influences within the scholarly landscape, and as documented in a long history of transatlantic and global contacts with scholars and authors, publishers, and statesmen.

At the same time, many of the texts foreground the author’s experiences, reflections, and accomplishments, and so the collection is actually first and foremost a sort of professional autobiography. Lützeler documents the milestones of his own career, which include establishing the Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature and the European Studies Program at Washington University and initiating the Suhrkamp/Insel Collection there, receiving honors such as the Humboldt Prize, editing the German Quarterly, and launching the journal Gegenwartsliteratur. He describes his rather unconventional, personalized approach in his introduction as a “mosaic” of impressions and as an experimental method, “zwar persönliche, aber nichtsdestoweniger nachvollziehbare Erfahrungen, subjektive und doch überprüfbare Vergleiche, individuelle und gleichwohl diskussionswürdige Ausblicke zu vermitteln” (x). The closing collections of personal observations made during appointments in Japan, China, and India and while lecturing internationally attest to Lützeler’s curiosity and eagerness to engage with new cultural and intellectual worlds through comparative description.

A strong faith in the value of exchange, dialogue, and transfer is the thread that runs through all these varied writings, whatever their form and purpose. Institutions play a central role in Lützeler’s career: professional organizations, foundations, research centers, journals, conferences, and academic departments. In the closing account of his international lecture tour (1988), he stresses the need for Erfahrungsaustausch between foreign teachers and scholars in changing times. His later essays on New Historicism, transculturalism, and European Studies again evoke the ideals of pluralism, openness, and ongoing innovation. But this account is not without its critical tones, as when a 2003 assessment chides the discipline of Germanistik in America for its lack of engagement in the young European Studies programs and challenges national associations to take the lead in building bridges. For all its praise of innovation and exploration, the volume evidences a surprising lack of interest in film and media studies, which are rejuvenating many German Studies programs in America today, as well as only fleeting mention of feminism and gender studies—and there are relatively few women amongst the many names Lützeler drops along his way as important colleagues, mentors, and models. In a 2013 honorary article on occasion of his seventieth birthday, Der Tagesspiegel called Paul Michael Lützeler a “Meister der alten Schule”; this volume honors his shaping role as a co-founder of the academic culture of Germanistik in the United States and pays tribute to the diversity of the intellectual enterprise.