The GSA Experience

Back from Oakland and the German Studies Association conference, a serious scholarly affair where German professors get to hang out with their own kind, discuss the future of the profession, sniff out what's blowing in the wind (not always a delight) and trot out their newest ideas.

This year the conference was organized according to themes, which to some grad student in the future will give a fair summary of the buzz words big in 2010: money, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and cities were among the mix. But then again, these terms show themselves at most any humanities conference these days.

Underneath these catch phrases were a great number of papers that paid homage to the moment and then proceeded to discuss whatever the presenter was working on. So you can be busy in the eighteenth century, as I am, and still be transnational--a trend that was not obvious ten years ago, when transnational was confined to a handful of contemporary writers.

The other major trend: papers on Goethe, particularly his lyric poetry, which on the face of it would seem to be the antithesis of transnational, but only to the uninitiated. The string of Goethe panels was in many ways the bastion of literary analysis in the midst of cultural studies. If brand names rule the humanities as they do everything else, then Goethe was a name that a great number could rally around. Goethe is the big tent name. We could talk about Schiller of course, but Spinoza and God fit in as well, especially when there is a hard rain falling.

One lesson from the GSA: Goethe scholars still think like members of a guild, and most were delighted to see the Chicago master of Goethe scholarship give a paper that once again made clear to all in the room how it is supposed to be done. It was reassuring to watch a scholar so very excellent at his calling--made you think for a moment that the hierarchy of universities was actually correct, that tenure decisions at fine universities really were based on excellence. David Wellbery made everyone feel that there was an order to intellectual institutions, and we were all pleased.

And there was the old time favorite: I saw a wonderful paper by Ute Gerhardt, old school feminist historian, speaking in eloquent academic German, an essay ready for immediate publication in Die Zeit. If the audience was not enormous, my delight in hearing her speak certainly was.

A few steady old war horses, like Peter Albrecht, made the trek, but in general the West coast location meant that far fewer Germans attended. Usually there is a crowd of middle aged German political scientists at the GSA ready to discuss the meaning of Europe or the last election, this time there was hardly one in sight.