Teaching the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

The chronological spread of what is taught in German Departments in the UK and Ireland has contracted over the years. Once central areas — Aufklärung, Sturm und Drang, Weimarer Klassik, Romanticism, nineteenth-century poetry and fiction— have become marginal. At the same time, the disciplinary outlook has widened. An exclusive focus on literature has given way, in most Departments, to an approach encompassing aspects of cultural and social history, as well as the newer medium of film. There is nothing unnatural or unhealthy about these developments; on the contrary. The needs of our undergraduates and the compelling drama of twentieth-century German history have been powerful drivers of change. Film— the only art invented after antiquity— was scandalously ignored for many decades, and now has its rightful place in the curriculum. Cultural and social history have reinvigorated literary studies, as well as claiming an interest in their own right. The point of raising the status of eighteenthand nineteenth-century literature in our teaching, therefore, is not to hark back to a golden age. It is to ask, instead, what, in this new context, the rich resources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can add to what we teach, not in isolation, but in dialogue with contemporary culture, and as a window onto a deeper German(-speaking) past. It is worth raising the question from the point of view of the profession, too. The developments outlined above have widened the gap between British and Irish German Studies on the one hand — or Auslandsgermanistik more generally — and Inlandsgermanistik on the other. Bringing the eighteenth and nineteenth century back into focus would also be a way of keeping open lines of dialogue with our colleagues in the German-speaking countries. It is perhaps worth remembering how significantly distinguished British and Irish Germanists have contributed to the study of these areas in the past. Carrying that tradition forward into the present and future is a legitimate aspiration for the English Goethe Society. This issue derives from discussions on a special panel, sponsored by the EGS, at the 2021 conference of the Association of German Studies. The panel comprised British and Irish Germanists, together with German Germanisten with experience of teaching in the British system. We sought, therefore, to