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  • British Cultural Studies thrives in Germany
  • Michael Rustin (bio)
Juergen Kramer and Berndt Lenz (eds), How to do Cultural Studies: Ideas, Approaches, Scenarios, Königshausen and Neumann 2020

How to do Cultural Studies is a remarkable book, which has been written in the context of the establishment of Cultural Studies as a major field of study in German universities today. This development has taken place in the broader context of English studies (Anglistik) in the German university system: British Cultural Studies is now the subject of teaching and research in around twenty-five universities.1 The largest number of students studying courses in English are in teacher education, but there are many others too. It is because of this educational commitment that so many citizens of Germany are fluent in English. Cultural Studies, modelled very closely on the field as it was created at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham between 1964 and 2002, has been adopted as an influential paradigm through which German students of English learn about society and culture in Britain.

This book consists of an introduction by Juergen Kramer and Berndt Lenz which sets out the history and purposes of this programme, giving credit to Stuart Hall's work, followed by chapters from eleven widely-published authors, from eight different universities in Germany, most of whom are Professors of British Cultural Studies. Each of these explores in a substantial essay an aspect of British society, deploying the concepts and methods of Cultural Studies to do so. Kramer and Lenz argue that Cultural Studies has avoided becoming defined by a canon of established writing, instead choosing to develop new case studies for use in the university classroom. Such case studies provide the substance of this book, and include such [End Page 106] topics as 'British Political Rhetoric from World War II to Brexit (Görhrmann and Tönnies), 'Myths of the British Monarchy' (Pankratz), and 'Scandals in British Culture' (Karschay). Each of the topics is designed to be the subject of a single term's course, and students are expected to deepen their knowledge of the area being studied by reference to first-hand English language sources. The World Wide Web has, of course, greatly enhanced the feasibility of such cross-cultural study.

The chapter by Gerold Sedlmayr on 'Ethnicity, race and representation in Britain' provides an introduction to the complex definitions of ethnicity and race set out in Stuart Hall's seminal 'New Ethnicities essay', including a documented history of the politics of race relations in post-war and post-colonial Britain. Wolfgang Hallet's 'Surveillance cultures: theory, ethnographic research and discourse competence in the Foreign Language' introduces students to a new sub-field of sociology, in order to understanding the widening extent of surveillance. Many different forms of representation are presented in Gabriele Linke's 'Cultural memory of the class struggle: the 1984–5 Miners' Strike'. On the whole the authors refrain from providing a specifically Germany-oriented perspective on their topics, although comparisons with the students' experience of their own society are frequent issues for classroom discussion. For example, ethnicity and migration, and surveillance, are now of great significance in both Britain and Germany, and there must be many connections to consider. British documentary films remembering coalmining in north-east England (Morrison and Johansson's The Miners' Hymns) and showing the effects of harsh British welfare policies (Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake) may have similar echoes in German experience. But what, one wonders, do students in the Federal Republic make of the British monarchy and its representations in such media artefacts as The Crown? One would be glad to witness such classes.

What is impressive about the work described in this book is how much its students and indeed its teachers are expected to learn to study their subject successfully. First, they must become competent users of the English language. Second, they must learn to use the perspectives and methods of analysis of Cultural Studies, which provides the frame for their studies of English life. Then, third, they are asked to 'apply' these learned abilities to the study of different aspects of British history and culture. I wonder if any studies...

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