U.S. German Studies and Germany

The article, taking its cue from Philipp Sarasin's history of the 1970s, argues that the fundamental infrastructure of U.S. German Studies was created in the 1970s, and that the developments in the field during that decade reflected more general social trends in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. The five major developments in U.S. German Studies that the article examines are: the German Studies Association as an institution committed to radical interdisciplinarity; feminist German Studies and its commitment to the study of literature by women authors, as well as to scholarship by women academics; the study of the German Democratic Republic; German film studies; and the founding of the journal New German Critique. The article looks at some of the commonalities among all these developments, in particular the way that U.S. German Studies in the 1970s and subsequently has distanced itself from more traditional Germanistik. Finally, the article questions how well prepared a field whose infrastructure developed in the 1970s is to face the difficult challenges of the present and future half a century later.