From Far and Wide

The academic contributions to this volume reflect some of the topics and methods that characterize German studies in Canada in 2019. The first two articles demonstrate how traditional philological methods can be employed to explore topics of contemporary social relevance. In “Here, Everywhere, Nowhere: Schiller’s Cosmopolitan Vision,” David Pugh grapples with Friedrich Schiller’s concepts of national identity and cosmopolitanism. In “‘Indem ich davon spreche, tritt mir das Bild wieder deutlich vor die Seele.’ Visualisierungen in Theodor Fontanes Schach von Wuthenow” Christiane Arndt brings together various discourses on illness and visual media.

The second pair of articles engage productively with the social and historical context of twenty-first-century film. James Skidmore’s “Reflecting the Empty Values of Modern Finance” asks how windows and reflections in J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call (2011) and Marc Bauder’s Master of the Universe (2013) convey meaning about the financial crisis of 2008. Katrina Sark’s “Der Weg, den wir nicht zusammen gehen (2009) and the Nostalgia for Babylon in the New Berlin” addresses the issue of urban development and cultural memory in the city of Berlin through the conceptual lens of nostalgia.

The third and final part of essays highlights the interdisciplinary work of Canadian German studies. Paul M. Malone’s “Flüchtlingscomics: Comics About / For / By Refugees – Across Cultures, or At Cross Purposes?” situates the depiction of refugees in contemporary comics within discourses of postcolonialism, asking questions about perspective and representation. Isabell Woelfel’s “Guiseppe Becce’s film score for Leni Riefenstahl’s film ‘The Blue Light’: cultural interactions between art music concepts and the early sound film” explores the impact of musical concepts on the genre of film music. In “The World War Two Refugee in the Twenty-First-Century Museum between Nationalism, Transnationalism, and Human Rights” Emma Mikuska-Tinman and Stephan Jaeger use Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory to describe how different cultures productively cross-reference refugee and expellee memories with memories of the Holocaust and other wartime atrocities without losing sight of historical specificity.

In addition to six academic contributions, this volume also contains four reports on the future of German studies in Canada. Here, too, we boast a variety of perspectives. We have reports by an Associate Professor of Teaching, a Sessional Instructor, a Deputy Provost and, finally, a team of authors, which includes tenured and nontenured faculty as well as administrative staff. While acknowledging the difficulties faced by our discipline, all of the authors provide optimistic and forward-thinking assessments of the future of German studies in our country. Florian Gassner argues for an open and critical engagement with the idea of German studies without German-language requirements. Katrina Sark urges German scholars to take advantage of the precarity of our field to innovate, highlighting the importance of collaboration and community building. Florentine Strzelczyk offers her perspective as an administrator to advocate for reimagining the learning outcomes of undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Hers is not a call to reinvent German studies for the reigning neoliberal paradigm, but rather to enhance the valuable skills we already impart to our students through experiential learning opportunities. Our team of authors (Shannon Lewis-Simpson, Maria Mayr, and Isabell Woelfel) share their knowledge and experience in developing experiential learning opportunities, similar to the ones advocated by Strzelczyk. Their report gives an overview of a project called “Mobilizing Knowledge on the East Coast Trail,” which was co-developed with a local non-profit and their university’s Student Life office. All four of these reports provide fascinating and innovative ideas on how to enhance the future of German studies in Canada.