Third international Summer Academy
“Transatlantic American Studies: Democratic Cultures, Past and Present”
14–28 May 2011
Bavarian-American Academy, Munich
and University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
Academy information here; program schedule here; program poster here
Day 1: the program began with a reception at Amerika Haus; it was wonderful to see everyone—Meike Zwingenberger, Klaus Benesch, Heike Paul, Jasmina Brkovic, and two dozen German, Polish, and American doctoral students, some new to the program and many returned from the first two years. I had just arrived from Prague, but many who had gotten in earlier had already been on an extensive bike tour of the English Gardens.
Day 2: Heike Paul presented a keynote lecture on the legacy of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, concluding with a Bavarian TV satire on democratic “reeducation”; sessions followed by Borislava Marinova (Progressive Era debates on women’s suffrage); Kristine Danielson (Warhol’s Kiss as queer allegory of democracy); Johannes Barthel (diasporic citationality in hip-hop and dancehall musics). A number of us who had conquered our jet lag found ourselves later at the capacious and welcoming Café am Beethovenplatz.
Day 3: Volker Depkat spoke on the iconography of the early U.S. presidents, from royalist stand-ins to democratic equivalence (anticipating the “dead presidents” of the money system); the afternoon sessions focused on the iconic in popular culture: Sarah Bernhard on Obama’s “performance gap” between imagined and real presidencies; Sara Kern on Sex in the City II (postfeminism versus the clash of civilizations in embarrassing karaoke numbers); and Judith Wilbers on the objectifying ideology of American photojournalism in Oliver Stone’s Salvador. Carla Harryman arrived from the literary microfestival in Prague and everyone headed for their chosen beer gardens.
Day 4: Klaus Benesch “killed two hours” (he joked) profitably with his capacious scan of debates on technology in America as democratic, from 18th-century mechanistic political models to Edward Bellamy’s technological utopia; Ben Bagocius read Emily Dickinson’s material texts as formally democratizing (at the intersection of gender and form); Johannes Hausser went deep into the mysterium tremendum of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” at the intersection of urbanism and transatlanticism; and Pawel Dudzinski read the deficient or impaired protagonist as anti-exceptionalist counternarrative in a range of American modernist and postmodern fictions. The session led to beers at the Park Café followed by a literary evening at Wayne State’s Junior Year in Munich building, hosted by Hans-Peter Söder. In his role as MC, Harald Zapf provided a postmodern, cut-up introduction from a range of portentous literary sources; Donna Stonecipher read from her collections Souvenir de Constantinople and The Cosmopolitan, along with more recent work; and Carla Harryman presented selections from The Wide Road and performed a neo-Benshi film collaboration with Konrad Steiner, based on a sequence with Jeanne Moreau.
Day 5: there was no keynote lecture this day; Harald Zapf and I were the co-chairs of the morning sessions, which were devoted to Rebecca Odom’s detailed archival research on German-Americans during World War I, who were not only ostracized but racialized; Ed Brown’s theoretically framed account of the technological innovation of the loudspeaker in a series of German films on the rise and fall of fascism (Triumph of the Will; The Gleiwitz Case; and Downfall), using Adorno, Laclau, and Canetti; and Katharina Gerund’s keystone chapter on Black GIs and democratization in postwar Germany. Everyone had the rest of the day off; I used my time to prepare for my talk, before joining board members of the BAA for a light meal at the Volksgarten (outside the Volkstheater).
Day 6: today was presentation day for the assembled members of the Bavarian-American Academy, two public lectures at Amerika Haus. I followed Horst Mewes, who offered us an overview of the radicalization of the virtual middle class (the middle class that only thinks it is one) that has resulted in the Tea Party. My contribution was a three-ringed Gesamtkunstwerk that sought to bring together 1) a basic account of Theodor Adorno et al.’s World War II-era The Authoritarian Personality as a transnational theory of democracy (assessing its fascist potential); 2) Adorno’s subsequent work on fascism and democracy in Germany, utilizing his negative account of American popular culture; and 3) the way in which both moments (the theory of “types” in The Authoritarian Personality; and of conformity and mimesis in Halbbildung or “pseudo-culture”) could be used as frameworks for reading The Baader-Meinhof Complex. Due to time constraints, I was only able to show a couple of clips and gauge audience responses in what amounted to a reproduction of Adorno’s Gruppen-experiment, in which German focus groups were presented with provocative evidence of American assessments of Germans after the war. Baader-Meinhof (the film; the historical event) could also be seen as such a provocative experiment, assessing German attitudes in the 60s and, with the film’s reenactment of those events, in the recent past. The conjunction of the two series—critical theory and popular culture—is both provocative and productive, and I want to continue the project as a real-time investigation. The day continued with lunch on the grounds of the BAA (gorgeous weather); later on a visit to the Pinakothek der Moderne; and subsequent socializing and clubbing in various districts of Munich.
Day 7: this was transition day from Munich to Nuremberg; various groups traveled on group tickets on the slow train to Nuremberg (about an hour and forty-five minutes). Carla and I spent the morning in sunny Schwabing and walked via the university (where we located the various memorials to the Geschwister Scholl, who were arrested and executed for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets on campus) through the English Gardens to lunch at the Hofgarten. Munich is probably one of the most liveable cities on earth, and liveability comes with a price tag—it is expensive. Nuremberg wears its history, its damage, and its social democracy on its sleeve, but it is no less interesting and, in the end, liveable—as evidenced by the Gostenhof district (GoHo) outside the Innenstadt, which both Jasmina and Alexandra were eager to show everyone. After settling into the very Wessie Art & Business Hotel, we sought out Harald and Ute to take in some medieval churches, half-timbered houses, covered bridges, and Spargel.
Day 8: Sunday was orientation day on fascism and democracy in Nuremberg. The first stop on our collective tour was the Dokumentationszentrum at the Parteitagsgelände, the infamous Nuremberg rally grounds featured in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. The party grounds have been partly preserved as a memorial site, but they are also used for skateboarding, sun bathing, and other hedonistic pleasures; this refunctioning is reflected in the introductory film at the Dokuzentrum, which encourages German teenagers to break through the illusion of the present and access the dark reality of the past. The Dokuzentrum itself is built (at an abrupt, defamiliazing angle) into the trophy Congress Hall the Nazis started but never completed (something on the scale of the U of M football stadium). The exhibition takes the viewer slowly and deliberately through each agonizing stage of the NS seizure of power, emphasizing the importance of Nuremberg as a site of Nazism, the party rallies and anti-Semitism, the multiple catastrophes that followed, and the use of Nuremberg as the stage for the postwar trials. The exhibition is detailed, capacious, and deeply disturbing; as we entered, I heard a young woman exiting in convulsive sobs, which echoed through the display area. The image of large groups of people, Germans and tourists, all tuned into their audio guides as they take in the sequence of horrors is itself edifying. The most trenchant moment of the sequence came with the display titled “Gleichschaltung,” the moment of ideological/institutional conformity that was crucial for the mass acceptance of what had been, up to that event, a minority or fringe political movement. That moment, in turn, would be reproduced in a sequence of parallel moments of the descent toward destruction; the narrative framework of the exhibition marks the stages in which this occurred with inevitable, but in each case contestable, force. A culminating image was the display of a child’s drawing, as an example of ideological indoctrination, that read “Die Jüden sind unsere Unglück” (the Jews are our misfortune). After the exhibit, feeling a bit alienated from humanity, I walked from the Dokuzentrum to the rally grounds, just to take in their impossible scale once more, at which point I ran into some of our group sharing a lunch on a park bench. Never were simple rituals of sociality so appreciated. At midday, we reassembled and, after a quick bite at the Hauptbahnhof, made our way to the newly constructed memorial exhibition at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, the oversized and undamaged building that was the site of the Nuremberg Trials (and appears in the opening scenes of Justice at Nuremberg). According to Rainer Huhle, our host for the afternoon (from the Nuremberg Center for Human Rights), the exhibition was the result of demand by numerous visitors for a way to learn more about the trials and the “Nuremberg principles” that followed, in the context of current Human Rights discourse. The narrative display, comparable to that of the Dokuzentrum in detail and comprehensiveness, built up a narrative toward an entirely different set of conclusions. Here, the emergence of a universal set of ethical standards is shown to be historically constructed, the product of specific conjuncture of political factors. The relation of the destructive horror of the NS period to the historical moment of universal ethical imperative could not be missed. It is another series of steps from the construction of the Nuremberg principles to the current situation of Human Rights discourse, yet another contingent universal. In the Q&A with Prof. Huhle, I asked for his view of the fact that the United States, as major actor in the making of the Nuremberg principles, does not today participate in their continuation in the International Criminal Court. The U.S., it appears, will not submit its sovereignty to universal standards it itself promulgated—a troubling conclusion. From this sobering moment, we moved to the courtroom itself, where I took many photos of our group in what truly deserves to be a “site of memory.” Back out on the street, we left the domain of the universal for the particulars of Gostehnof, its cafés and local cuisine. But for me, the visit to the courthouse was a crucial moment of thinking through the relation of the historical Germany to the postmodern universal, just by going there.
Day 9: Jürgen Gebhardt, a professor of political science in the high intellectual tradition and hence an education in himself, lectured on social systems, the public sphere, and democratization; his feisty manner of presentation was balanced by a keen ear for students’ projects and a genuine humanity at the social occasions where he made himself available. He was responsible for one of the more amusing moments of the program, when he informed Kristine Danielson, at the Marientorzwinger Gasthaus later on in the day, “we will have no more academic talk; it is time for social conversation.” He was also an engaged and acute moderator for the day’s sessions, each of which dealt with political theory in important ways: Astrid Sigglow’s Luhmannian account of the TINA doctrine (“there is no alternative”), often used as a systematic rationale in political discourse; Marleen Schulte’s reading of the negativity of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience as interpreting American democracy in a global framework; and Shashi Thandra’s overview of the ethical stakes for pedagogy attending his analysis of postcolonial Human Rights discourse. The program reconvened at the DAI (Deutsche-Amerikanische Institute/German-American Institute) that evening to hear the featured public speaker, Chantal Mouffe, present her work on “An Agonistic Model of Democracy.” The well-attended event heard a basic introduction to Mouffe’s political analysis and the beginnings of an interpretation of her perspective for the German political situation in the form of a symbolic endorsement of Die Linke party—as keeping democratic horizons open by providing an alternative perspective (there were some groans in the audience at this, but they were countered by appreciation of the often symbolic role Die Linke plays). While the Q&A did not rise to the challenge of Mouffe’s importance for contemporary theories of democracy, and while she skirted her use of the fascist jurist Carl Schmitt’s “friend/enemy” distinction as central to her account of political community, the event was an opportunity to reflect on her position in an economical, rather than expansive, framework. The conversation continued late into the night at the neighboring Gasthaus, where the entire group was treated to a banquet featuring nürnberger Würstchen and multiple pints of beer while Mouffe waxed long to the delight of Astrid, Alexandra, Shashi, and fortunate others. A serious toast was raised to “agonistic democracy” that night.
Day 10: the Cold War-era setting of the DAI continued as the site for our colloquium, which opened with Roland Sturm’s categorically scrupulous analysis of “Democratic Cultures and Political Institutions,” which focused on the constitutional framework of American democracy as superior to the mutability of parliamentary institutions. One feature of the program overall was a frequent “compare and contrast” between an aspect of American democracy and its corresponding form in another system (the U.S. presidency as symbolic and executive, for instance, versus the dual form of German president/chancelor dyad). On the night previous, Mouffe did not seem to be interested in such a transnational strategy; her focus was on democracy as a specific form of the “political,” and she did not test this model in terms of specific historical variants. Gebhardt, on the other hand, insisted on the historical contingency of democratic forms of government, claiming that no more than forty of one hundred eighty state formations in the world today could be termed “democratic.” A sense of the historical contingency of democracy would be one way to group the day’s student sessions: Levin Arnsperger’s readings of the figure of the “Muslim terrorist” in a series of post-9/11 fictions; Cedric Essi’s survey of multiracial autobiographies and the question of “post-racial identity” after the end of the one-drop rule, seen as a peculiarly American institution; and Jessamon Jones, on the transnational politics of adoption as fantasy of global domination by the American middle class. Meike Zwingerberger ran the session with an admirably firm hand, focusing discussion and helping to construct a form of participatory democracy in the institution of the “list” of questioners, allowing everyone their response. At noon, I was able to escort Carla to the airport, and paid with pleasure a $55 surcharge for a bag full of Adorno, art books, and no longer necessary tour guides and maps, which I was happy to put on the plane to Detroit. Later on that evening, everyone gathered for intensive beer and schnapps-tasting at Hütt’n, a kitschily decorated Franconian pub on Burgstraße, half way up.
Day 11: this was to be my last day of the colloquium, as I was scheduled to travel on to Paris and Brittany and address the conference of the French American Studies Association the next day. The day began with two presentations: Heike Schwartz on narratives of environmental agency in eco-literature, ranging from “greenwashing” to “monkeywrenching” (seeing everything from a “green” perspective versus forms of destructive protest); and Matthias Klessti on the status of nature and the environment in African-American literature as a form of Foucauldian “power/knowledge.” Due to there being only two papers in this session, the discussion was particularly exhaustive, with many pointers on dissertation structure being offered by an empowered group of peer critics. After a short break, Heike returned to present some of the 1400 photos she had taken at last year’s summer academy in Detroit, a number of which had exhibited (and had been awarded prizes for). In Heike’s photos Detroit becomes the ground for rethinking the nature of social cohesion that is often taken for granted; her processing of a number of the images through digital techniques, rather than simply recording the sublimity of Detroit’s gaps and immensities, does something new and allowed the assembled group to reflect on last year’s experience. At this point, I said my goodbyes, hurried to the airport, and found myself negotiating my luggage on the Paris streets—that is for another story. At Nuremberg, the program continued with a train trip to Erlangen, home of the host University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where Anne Koenen lectured on the cultural history of the American mail-order catalogue, with reference to the German-Jewish Levi Strauss, an immigrant from Franconia who established the world-renowned brand. (My knowledge of subsequent events is based mainly on a reading of the program, and I await further descriptions from those who took part.)
Day 12: Tomasz Basiuk, University of Warsaw, lectured on “Democratic Cultures, Minority Discourses, and Queer Identity Politics,” laying out (I am told) a clear case for queer theory as a democratic politics; sessions followed by Jill Darling, on a transition from psychoanalysis to queer ontology in the feminist experimental writings of H.D. and Beverly Dahlen; Julia Soltysek, on splitting and abjection in post-9/11 cultural discourses; and Charles Wesley, on the political transition of Salman Rushdie, before and after the issue of the infamous fatwa, from cultural pluralism to something akin to neoliberalism. Thus concluded an impressive range of student presentations of early dissertation research, and I was truly sorry to have missed the last three.
Day 13: the final keynote lectures were provided by Sabine Broeck, on post-abolition discourses of slavery in American culture, and Walter Mignolo, on a postcolonial reading of American democracy via Hegel’s Philosophy of History and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The stakes for both lectures were high, and I understand that they were provocative and productive. The program ended with a trip to the Levi Strauss Museum in the town of Buttenheim, and a farewell party at which, I assume, beer and nürnberger Würstchen were consumed to abandon.
Day 14: participants departed for wherever their funds would take them (Munich, Berlin, Venice, and Ireland were some destinations I heard mentioned), and we await further reports in the form of Facebook posts, Flicker photo streams, and other social media. Special thanks should be mentioned to those who made this year’s program such an example of focused and pleasurable engagement: Meike Zwingenberger, Jasmina Brkovic, Heike Paul, Harald Zapf, Alexandra Ganser, and Klaus Benesch. Next year, the program will continue in Washington, D.C.
[Comments and feedback welcome at barrett.watten@gmail.com!]
