E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten
Lentz The Goethe-Institut
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-3-608-12455-2
Verlag: Klett-Cotta
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
A History from 1951 to the Present
E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-608-12455-2
Verlag: Klett-Cotta
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
From cultural export to global network: Germany's cultural institute
How have the challenges, role, and vision of one of Europe's most important cultural institutes changed over the past decades? Carola Lentz and Marie-Christin Gabriel offer a concise history of the Goethe-Institut from its beginnings in Cold-War West Germany to its mission in today's multipolar world. Historical documents combined with interviews with former and current staff members provide lively impressions of the institute's work in 98 countries.
From cultural export to global network: this phrase aptly summarises the over seventy-year story of the Goethe-Institut, which is closely interwoven with Germany's post-war history and with global transformations. In the beginning, the institute's work was focused on promoting the German language abroad and exporting 'German culture'. But the understanding of culture soon became more diverse. The Goethe-Institut developed into the largest intermediary organisation in German foreign cultural and educational policy, and in the process eventually redefined its role. Today, the Goethe-Institut, with a total of 151 institutes in 98 countries, operates primarily as a global network of local and regional cultural initiatives. An up-to-date afterword reflects how the institute is responding to the recent multiple crises such as the Corona epidemic, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the increasing number of illiberal regimes.
Fachgebiete
- Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen
- Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Universitäten, Wissenschaftliche Akademien, Gelehrtengesellschaften
- Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
- Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Politische Propaganda & Kampagnen, Politik & Medien
Weitere Infos & Material
Introduction
The book cover shows female students in a building at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, whose campus was designed in the 1960 s by Arieh Sharon, one of the Israeli architects of Tel Aviv’s ‘White City’. Sharon studied at the Dessau Bauhaus under Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer, returned to Israel in the early 1930 s, and went on to design public buildings in various places around the world. With their open architecture, the buildings in Ile-Ife are perfectly adapted to the tropical climate and encourage communication. Sharon also incorporated local aesthetic elements and invited Yoruba artists to paint the concrete walls. The students and teachers are proud of the architecture, reports architectural historian Zvi Efrat, who made a film about the campus.[1] ‘Arieh Sharon is … not seen as a coloniser here’, says Bayo Amole, Professor of Architecture at the University of Ile-Ife. ’What we do have here is an Israeli who studied in Germany, who worked in Africa. That says something about the universality of the world – but it also says something about the university as a universal place.’[2] The photo and interviews were taken in 2018 as part of the exhibition project ‘Bauhaus Imaginista’, organised by the Goethe-Institut in co-operation with the Bauhaus Kooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar and the House of World Cultures in Berlin to mark the centenary of the Bauhaus design movement. The project comprised research, exhibitions, and events in eleven countries on four different continents and explored ‘the international and transcultural networks of the Bauhaus in the world’.[3] For curator Marion von Osten, the Bauhaus was from the very beginning not a ‘German export item’, but a European and ‘global project’; it stands ‘symbolically for societies that oppose nationalism and colonialism’.[4] The exhibitions for the Bauhaus anniversary not only examined transnational interdependencies, but also expanded them through interconnected individual projects worldwide. This is typical of the cultural work of the Goethe-Institut since the turn of the millennium – work which aims to promote dialogue between artists, intellectuals, and civil society activists around the world. The emphasis is on promoting cultural co-production, presenting different perspectives on global issues, reflecting on colonialism and the politics of memory, focussing on the rights of women and Indigenous minorities, engaging with illiberal regimes as well as democratic movements, and much more. These concerns reflect Germany’s increasing interdependence with Europe and the world, and in particular with the Global South. This book aims to retrace some of the landmarks on the Goethe-Institut’s path to this self-perception. While the institute’s work initially focussed on promoting the German language abroad and exporting ‘German’ culture, today it operates in 98 countries with a total of 158 institutes, not only as a worldwide provider of language courses, but also as a global network of local and regional cultural and civil society initiatives. The history of the institute since its foundation in 1951 – as well as its previous history under the Deutsche Akademie in the Weimar Republic and under the Nazi regime – reflects Germany’s more recent history and foreign politics, developments in Europe, and global transformations throughout the world. At the same time, the Goethe-Institut has not only responded to shifts in Germany’s self-image but has also actively shaped that self-image. In its desire to break with the National Socialist state appropriation of cultural politics, the post-war West German government placed foreign cultural politics in the hands of so-called intermediary organisations, that is, independent organisations, mostly in the form of non-profit associations. In response to the Cold War and the division of Germany, the Federal Foreign Office decided to financially support the Goethe-Institut a few years after the institute was founded, and its network expanded rapidly. The young democracy wanted and needed to distance itself from National Socialism, win friends all over the world through cultural exports, and at the same time demonstrate its superiority over socialism. This was true of many other West German cultural institutions founded during this period, such as the Berliner Festspiele and Documenta, as well as the re-established Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, ifa) and the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service, DAAD). During the social movement in West Germany that began in 1968, the Goethe-Institut wanted to convey a different image of Germany, but not all political stakeholders approved of this; the conflicts that developed as a result of this clash of opinion led, in turn, to innovations in foreign cultural politics. The end of the Cold War, German reunification, and the emergence of a multipolar world are formative recent developments that are reflected in the Goethe-Institut’s turn towards multilateral co-operation and its new role as a global networker. Examining the history of the Goethe-Institut therefore also means taking a particular look, from a cultural politics perspective, at the history of the Federal Republic in the context of global transformations. I (Carola Lentz) developed an interest in the topic as part of my preparations for my new position as president of the Goethe-Institut – a time that, in terms of anthropological theories of ritual, can be described as a ‘liminal phase’: a period of transition from one social order or stage of life to another.[5] In autumn 2019, I left active service at Mainz University (although I remain associated with it as a senior research professor), but it would be more than a year before I started my position at the Goethe-Institut. Anthropologists such as Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner have characterised the liminal phase as a time of ambiguity, of ‘betwixt and between’, entailing, at least according to Turner, a special freedom. For me, the transition period offered space for research curiosity. As a social anthropologist who has carried out intensive research on African independence celebrations, my interest was also sparked by the forthcoming seventieth anniversary of the Goethe-Institut, which soon came to my attention. I assumed office as the institute’s president in November 2020, while still working on the book. Did this create an irresolvable conflict of roles? The book is not intended as a commemorative publication that uncritically celebrates the institute’s achievements, but rather that turns to tensions in the institute’s work, ruptures, unfulfilled promises, and unresolved questions about the future. Can an acting president create the necessary distance for such an analysis? What made this challenge easier, in addition to the aforementioned ‘liminal phase’, is a generational distance. I am the first president born in the post-war period and the first to be younger than the institute itself. The times in which the ‘first’ Goethe-Institut was established within the Deutsche Akademie in 1932, and when the current Goethe-Institut was (re)founded in 1951, are more foreign to me than to my predecessors. Furthermore, my co-author’s generational distance from the institute is even greater than mine. Marie-Christin Gabriel, born in 1986, and I have thus brought two biographically different perspectives to the book project. Like myself, Marie-Christin Gabriel is a social anthropologist, and her experience with organisational analysis and biographical methods as well as the critical analysis of eyewitness accounts and historical sources have benefited our research for the book. As a new, younger employee of the Goethe-Institut, she was also in a better position to interview our interlocutors, and people probably approached her with more openness than they would have done with me, as the designated and then incumbent president. Social anthropologists work with a de-familiarizing gaze in order to question realities that seem self-evident. My personal distance from the organisation helped me to explore its history. Until my predecessor Klaus-Dieter Lehmann asked me in summer 2019 whether I could imagine taking over from him, I had hardly had any interaction with the institute. The first contact came about in 2006, when my Ghanaian family organised the presentation of my book on the history of Northern Ghana at the Goethe-Institut in Accra. After that, I regularly attended the institute’s events and was particularly impressed by how it showcased West African artists. Two works by Mohamed Tamekloe, which I purchased at an exhibition opening, still hang in my study in Mainz today. They are collages that show the half-destroyed remains of ancestral figures made of wood and scraps of fabric as well as imaginary archaic characters on a bright indigo blue and clay-coloured background. The Togolese artist has labelled his works Le grand voyant (The great clairvoyant). ‘The pseudo-ritualistic texts and objects,’ he explains in the catalogue, ‘evoke an earlier reality, or more precisely: a constructed past that we are all trying to grasp. … [It] is necessary to take stock of our journey up to here and now and to ask where it all leads us.’ This artistic engagement with memory and history, with a view to the future, has inspired me in many of my research projects. Tamekloe’s explanations are also instructive for our exploration of the Goethe-Institut. On the basis of existing scholarly work and the institute’s own reports, we can reconstruct this complex organisation’s...
