German Studies Review

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 [End Page 511] 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) have been put in German-speaking cultures and thought, as well as in scholarly projects outside German Studies as such that nonetheless borrow significantly from figures, developments, and traditions in the continually evolving field of German Studies. (Two prominent examples from the contemporary field of anthropology alone would be Miyazaki’s account of hope as a method of knowledge formation and Appadurai’s forthcoming account of “future-making” as a crucial but often overlooked feature of most societies and periods, including our current moment of globalization. Both anthropologists draw significantly, though in quite different yet equally complex ways, on Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of hope and aspiration to articulate new desiderata of knowledge-production across the disciplines.) One major finding of this summer’s seminar discussions would arguably be that interrogating shared and [End Page 512] divergent investments in futurity itself might prove an especially productive means of building strong bridges between German Studies and other fields of academic inquiry at many different types of educational institution. It is well known that neoliberal economies and corporate models continue to place increasing pressure on what Frank H. T. Rhodes over a decade ago called the “knowledge business,” in his assessment of challenges facing higher education in the twenty-first century.¹ Familiar defenses of the many contributions that both German Studies and foreign-language education can and do make to the mission of higher education today often take recourse to the German philosophical principle of Bildung as an indispensable and foundational keystone in the very project of liberal arts education in North America. While this characterization is certainly apt, even Bildung requires new and inventive allies, at a historical moment when liberal arts education and the humanities in particular are in many places under siege. Coupling an analytical focus on the past, present, and future of “futurity” in German Studies, and indeed across the disciplines, with continued commitment to the social value of liberal arts education in the twenty-first century, opens at least one new horizon for advancing in innovative and not merely defensive ways the special strengths of German Studies and foreign-language education in a rapidly changing landscape of higher education.

If planning for and contemplating the future have long been staples of human culture, the forms and functions of futurity—in literature and other arts, philosophy and political science, historiography and critical theory, economics and cosmology, environmental studies, and so on—are culturally, historically, and conceptually specific. Discussions in the DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar of 2012 revolved in the main around four key questions: Can we identify traditions of futurity that have shaped German-speaking cultures in specific ways? What aspects and forms of futurity have played especially important roles in German lives and cultures and why? How does an emphasis on futurity as a critical term enhance our understanding of specific contributions that interdisciplinary German Studies can make to the academy now and in the foreseeable future? How can we understand, in newly meaningful ways, the transnational network of futurity in which German culture and contemporary German Studies circulate? Participants were invited to assess “the future” as well as “futurity” as protean problems manifesting at different times and with different stakes as epistemological categories, temporal dimensions, rhetorical constellations, social visions, affective orientations, and imaginative ground. Cultural materials, philosophical frameworks, and historical periods of pivotal interest to the interdisciplinary field of German Studies were discussed in dialogue with the humanities and social sciences—and even with fields such as mathematical statistics and theoretical physics too. As Niklas Luhmann observed in “Describing the Future,” the future is not a discrete temporal unit, but must be understood instead in societal terms as “a problem that can only be formulated and decided within society.”² This suggests that [End Page 513] any concept of futurity would have to be predicated on some concept of the society or societies in which futurity can be thought, and the seminar thus explored multiple forms of futurity relative to social relations, cultural formations, and historical constellations in which the future—as a problem—comes to matter in different ways. One might therefore speak more readily—as Rüdiger Campe does in one of the focal readings for the seminar—of the “use” or uses of the future instead.³ If “the future” is often construed as a temporal register in some necessary, albeit variable relationship to past and present, then we might say that “futurity” is not yet a fully fledged concept in any singular sense, but a useful abstraction with which we can begin to describe various uses of the future relative to the social, historical, technological, political, cultural, and theoretical constellations in which “the future” emerges as an object of thought. Futurity then becomes especially important when “the future” that appears as an object of thought also emerges, in Luhmann’s terms, as “a problem” in thought.

The interdisciplinary field of German Studies is especially rich in materials that lend themselves to vibrant consideration of what “the future” and “futurity” have meant for the multifaceted articulation of European modernity—and for what they mean for changing relations between German-speaking cultures and transnational developments in global networks of sociability, culture, politics, and economics today. Organized into six week-long units revolving around “Futurity and Modernity,” “Rhetoric, Affect, and Knowledge,” “History and Time,” “Language and Orientation,” “Critique and Method,” and “Utopia and Education Now,” the DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar in 2012 afforded many opportunities both for delving into familiar material from new critical perspectives and for contemplating robust bridges that could and should be built between German Studies programs in particular and other units of academic inquiry—as relevant and appropriate to the needs of specific institutions—in the service of higher education in challenging and changing times. Because it would be impossible to summarize the detailed and rigorous exchanges that DAAD seminar participants conducted in the equivalent of a full semester—and because different interlocutors are encouraged to embark on their own explorations and draw their own conclusions—this report on the DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar 2012 concludes with no content summary of materials discussed, but with the seminar syllabus instead, which clearly demonstrated in practice that futurity is part and parcel of the past of German Studies—and of its vital future as well. Seminar participants hope to present some of their related research findings at the annual convention of the German Studies Association in 2013.

The 2012 seminar on “The Futures of Interdisciplinary German Studies” convened three times per week for three hours per session. Optional additional sessions were held to give seminar participants the opportunity to present their own research as relevant to the focal topic of futurity. Bibliographical references for all required [End Page 514] readings are provided below, in the order discussed. A supplemental bibliography of additional references is available upon request.