2 Herder vs. Goethe in Egypt: East and West German Language Courses in Cairo and the Evolution of “German as a Foreign Language” (DaF)

Abstract

On February 27, 1965, Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister Nureddin Tarraf along with Lotte Ulbricht, the wife of East German head of state Walter Ulbricht,1 opened the East German Cultural Institute (Kulturund Informationszentrum, KIZ) in Cairo.2 It was situated near Cairo University in a spacious villa with a lush garden. This garden villa at the Western bank of the Nile competed directly with the West German Goethe Institute, which had been established just a few meters from the Tahir Square seven years earlier. In the memories of Egyptians, the East German cultural institute is still called the Herder Institute, although it never officially bore this name. However, it was closely related to the Herder Institute at Leipzig’s Karl Marx University which offered language training to international students and other groups of foreigners arriving in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).3 The opening of the East German cultural institute KIZ