Pier Carlo Bontempelli. Knowledge, Power, and Discipline: German Studies and National Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. xxxii + 258 pp. $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8166-4112-3; $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8166-4111-6.

Reviewed by Patricia A. Herminghouse (Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Rochester)
Published on H-German (February, 2005)

German Studies as Germanistik?

The recent decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court overturning Education Minister Edelgard Bulmahn's attempt to establish the rank of "junior professor" as a new route towards a coveted professorship (and concomitantly eliminating the traditional Habilitation) might well be seen as a validation of Pier Carlo Bontempelli's analysis of "the university as an institution and of the characters of professorial power as a social and cultural practice" (p. xix). While the decision, based on states' rights arguments from Bavaria, Saxony, and Thuringia does not abolish the possibility of individual states choosing to establish "junior professorships," it does for now reinstate the Habilitation as the standard path to a professorship, at least in the humanities. Whether, under these circumstances, the institution of "junior professor" survives, given the opposition in some quarters of the academic establishment, or whether it goes the unfortunate way of the Assistenzprofessor of the 1970s remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Bontempelli's analysis of the traditional system, first published in 2000 and now rendered in fluid English translation, with only a few minor glitches, retains its relevance.

North American proponents of a multidisciplinary version of German Studies are apt to expect something other than what the pointedly Foucauldian allusion of Bontempelli's title actually delivers. In this respect, the title of the Italian original is more to the point: Storia della germanistica: Dispositivi e istituzioni di un sistema disciplinare (2000). It is, in fact, a history of the discipline known as Germanistik since the establishment of the first chair in nineteenth-century Germany, with only a brief concluding glance at more recent developments outside Germany, and then limited to the United States. Apart from what present-day proponents of an interdisciplinary German Studies might regard as a missed chance for the flourishing of Jakob Grimm's deutsche Wissenschaft, which was based on the three disciplines of law, history, and philology, the "philologizing" of university Germanistik along the lines established by Karl Lachmann in the first half of the nineteenth century "meant its demise as a cultural and political project of national interest" (p. 19). The translator's rendering of Germanistik as "German Studies" in the English translation is thus apt to raise false expectations.

While invoking Foucault for his analysis of the imbrication of power and knowledge, Bontempelli's account of the "disciplining" of Germanistik actually depends much more on the theoretical foundations laid by Pierre Bourdieu, particularly his notion of habitus for the inculcation, reproduction, and enforcement of a disciplinary value system, embodied as it has been in the institution of Habilitation. Although the general outlines of the disciplinary history that Bontempelli traces correspond to those that can be found in other histories of Germanistik that have appeared in recent decades,[1] it is his recourse to the insights of these French theorists that distinguishes his approach to an otherwise mostly familiar history.

Bontempelli justifies his decision to approach his subject along these theoretical lines by citing his own observation of the post-unification evaluation of East German university teachers who were required to reapply for their posts as emblematic for the "operation of symbolic violence and domination and the arbitrary character of power, even when legitimately exerted" that he sees at work in German academe. Describing the process as "an allegory of academic power, as it were, representing orthodoxy's control over the production of discourses and the processes of legitimation necessary to speak authoritatively within the institution," he sets out to trace the genealogy of power and domination that has enabled Germanistik to assert and reproduce its disciplinary system over the course of almost two centuries (p. xvi).

This approach is perhaps most fruitful in the chapter dedicated to "German Studies in the Years of National Socialism." Here Bontempelli analyzes the difficulties that the process of Gleichschaltung encountered when confronted with a system of disciplinary self-perpetuation. Although there was no explicit opposition to the political regime and, indeed, plenty of individual sympathy with its ideology, deeply held corporate convictions of the autonomy of the discipline hindered direct attempts at restructuring and aligning it with party directives as an interdisciplinary Deutschwissenschaft comprising "Germanenkunde, Rassenkunde, Vorgeschichte, Kunstgeschichte, Geschichte, Volkskunde."[2] In this, it was ironically the generally conservative proponents of Geistesgeschichte, in power since the Weimar era, who stuck to their view of literary genius as isolated from history and politics. Mindful of the danger of a public confrontation between this older hierarchy and a younger cohort more prepared to align its work with National Socialist priorities, the discipline avoided holding general professional conferences until after 1945, although individual Germanists did lead projects in support of Nazi ideals, such as Franz Koch and Gerhard Fricke's five-volume Von deutscher Art in Sprache und Dichtung or Julius Petersen's Die Sehnsucht nach dem Dritten Reich in deutscher Sage und Dichtung.[3] Wartime paper shortages after 1942 (p. 116) may actually have precluded the publication of considerable evidence of the extent to which some Germanists had compromised themselves during this period. By the same token, despite the political and economic reform initiatives of the postwar occupation powers, Bontempelli claims, "maintaining the resistance of the cultural arbitrary, the continuity of the academic habitus, and the impermeability of the discipline as supreme values allowed German Studies to overcome the crisis without any particularly traumatic ruptures or changes" (p. 117).

Against this background, it is not surprising that, at least in the Western sectors of occupation, no mass purges of Nazi German professors were made, beyond a few individuals who had particularly offended their traditional colleagues or egregiously compromised themselves publicly. Conversely, few professors who had spent these years in exile were able to regain their teaching posts. The establishment of werkimmanente [intrinsic] criticism as the dominant mode of the day was of a piece with this tendency to isolate the discipline from contemporary politics, at least until the Munich Congress [Germanistentag] of 1966. Considered a turning point in the orientation of the discipline, this conference served to validate the older generation's wariness about the potential of such gatherings to interfere with things as they were.

Significantly, as Bontempelli demonstrates, the methodological and organizational changes that followed in the wake of this conference could not effectively challenge the structure and "self-reproducing mechanisms of the discipline" (p. 149). This was the situation addressed by disenfranchised students and teaching staff who rose up against the rules of the game in the political struggles of the late 1960s. The paradigm shift that followed--new internationally oriented methodologies and contents, such as Marxism, social history, feminism, deconstruction--also resulted in increased layers of bureaucracy that nonetheless were unable to achieve a genuine democratization of the discipline as it existed.

Bontempelli argues that the rupture in German history marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification in 1990 presented Germanistik with an unprecedented opportunity for self-renewal and new initiatives. Instead, the process of "evaluation" turned out to be one of imposing the existing West German system on the new German states. Bontempelli is clearly disappointed with the current state of affairs, both the renewed emphasis on philological scholarship--the sorts of expensive critical edition projects that can garner large financial subsidies--as well as the move towards collective, interdisciplinary scholarship carried on in venues external to the university, such as societies and conferences. The trend toward hyperspecialization, he argues, quoting Peter J. Brenner, has a homogenizing effect, as "each current creates its own circle with its own circuit of publishing opportunities, which gives them the possibility to find, along with a 'citations syndicate, a circle of friends sharing the same orientation' who cultivate their own specialized, or indeed secret, language."[4]

Nonetheless, Bontempelli places his bets on the revitalization of Germanistik as "German Studies," especially as practiced in the multicultural environment of the United States, seeing in this development the possibility of a return to an interdisciplinary Kulturwissenschaft, such as was originally envisioned by Jakob Grimm. Flattering as this perception might be to those of us who pursue this goal on the American continent, Bontempelli does not take into account the forces of "corporatization" that work against our reputed "freedom from the heavy burden of traditional heritage" (p. 190). For the German university, he sees a ray of hope in the challenge to the entrenched system of Habilitation in the institution of the rank of Juniorprofessor in 2002. Since this book went to press before the 2004 decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court, which significantly weakens the prospects for this attempt at change, we are left to wonder how Bontempelli might now wish to revise his argument.

Notes

[1]. See, for example, Wilfried Barner and Christoph König, Zeitenwechsel: Germanistische Literaturwissenschaft vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1996); Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Voßkamp, eds., Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994); Jost Hermand, Geschichte der Germanistik (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1994); Christoph König, Hans-Harald Müller, and Werner Röcke, eds., Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik in Porträts (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000); Rainer Rosenberg, Literaturwissenschaftliche Germanistik: Zur Geschichte ihrer Probleme und Begriffe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1989); Karl Weimar, Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1989).

[2]. Gerd Simon, ed., Germanistik in den Planspielen des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS (Tübingen: Verlag der Gesellschaft für interdisziplinäre Forschung, 1998), p. 62.

[3]. Gerhard Fricke, Von deutscher Art in Sprache und Dichtung. 5 vols. (Stuttgart and Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1941); Julius Petersen, Die Sehnsucht nach dem Dritten Reich in deutscher Sage und Dichtung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1934).

[4]. Peter J. Brenner, "Das Verschwinden des Eigensinns: Der Strukturwandel der Geisteswissenschaften in der modernen Gesellschaft" in Geist, Geld und Wissenschaft. Arbeits- und Darstellungsformen von Literaturwissenschaft (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), pp. 21-65 (quote on p. 48).

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Citation: Patricia A. Herminghouse. Review of Bontempelli, Pier Carlo, Knowledge, Power, and Discipline: German Studies and National Identity. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10212

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