German Studies in England and Wales
at the Beginning of the New Century:
Unpredictability and Challenge
Nigel Reeves
Since
the beginning of the last century, the 20th century, German Studies at UK
universities has broadened almost unrecognisably to encompass not only
literature and historical linguistics but almost all the social sciences, many
of which were either just evolving or, like business and management studies,
did not exist. After a hundred years of unpredicted and unprecedented violence
in Europe, a reunified Germany in an economically powerful and politically
stable European Union and European continent, together with an almost 35% 18
year old participation rate at UK universities, German Studies ought to be
looking forward to a promising future. But a potent cocktail of adverse factors
ranging from the inexorable forward march of English as the international
language, through competition with Spanish for the narrowed space for a second
foreign language in the National Curriculum for England and Wales and the
growing preference of UK, latterly fee-paying, unsupported students for
programmes with more obvious lucrative career prospects has led to a rapid and
serious decline in applications to German. The paper analyses these largely
unpredicted developments that have occurred in the last five, at most ten years
and asks if they can be reversed.
German Studies at the
beginning of a new century lives in interesting times. The circumstances that were to face the
student – in the real sense of the word – of Germany and German language and
culture in Britain at the turn of the 20th century were very
different. As a university subject
German was still in its infancy. The
study of the German language in the schools and university was seen as an
alternative discipline to Latin thanks to its rigorous morphology and
Latin-like word order, and at university it was pursued in the same manner as
the ancient languages with prose composition, if not verse composition,
constituting a pre-eminent activity. (Whether in parallel with Greats at
Oxford, for example, students were also required to compose in verse I have not
been able to ascertain…). Historical
linguistics, largely in the form of etymology and the study of earlier forms of
the language dominated philological aspects of the subject. Familiarity with
biography, content and metrical form were the chief constituents of literary
appreciation, with a strongly positivistic approach to literary history and
research. Political science as we know
it did not exist. The study of German politics and economics would have been
part of history. Political thought was
the property of the history of philosophy, political theory of constitutional
law. None of this is very surprising
since the scope of our subject, which now embraces the social sciences,
linguistics and schools of literary theory at which our more firmly rooted
forebears would have scratched their heads, did not begin to expand until the
1960s and 1970s.
This
earlier format and approach were still largely intact until the creation of the
new universities, technological universities and polytechnics between 1963 and
the early 1970s. These acted as the catalyst for change, a change that went
hand-in-hand with the massive expansion of the social sciences and the
emergence of that most buoyant of all social science subjects business and
management studies.
But what had been happening in
Germany itself a hundred years ago and what was soon to happen in the opening
decades of the 20th century was moving swiftly, more swiftly than
politicians, the military or British business and industrial interests, let
alone universities were able to comprehend.
In the short space of forty years from 1870 Germany had emerged as a
nation state, not only as the last of the great West European nations but as
its largest. German industry had been
transformed from a craft base to a major manufacturer in all the key areas,
coal, steel, ships, vehicles, electrical goods, chemicals and, of course,
armaments. Britain’s supposed ‘natural’
dominance as the world’s workshop, and its greatest naval power and as
possessor of the largest Empire, was already waning, though few could see
it. The resultant tensions were to
shatter the world order in the convulsion and senseless slaughter of the First
World War, and still those tensions were not resolved by it. Indeed another
World War, the Cold War with its hotspots in Berlin, Korea, Africa, Central
America and Vietnam have had to be endured before some semblance of a new
stability could emerge. Germany has remained at the epicentre of all these
developments.
No less convulsive were the
changes that swept across German literature, Expressionist verse and drama, for
example, both anticipating and reflecting in their violence of form and themes
the political and military scene. If
their message, like that of the early and middle years Brecht, was only too
clear, the enigmatic nature of a Modernist literature that refused easily to
yield up its secrets at the intellectual, linguistic and biographical levels
found its German-speaking counterparts in the Rilke of the Elegies and in Kafka
in Morgenstern, the Dadaists, in George and Benn to name but a few (see Reeves,
1999). Arguably, the iconoclasm of Nietzsche fostered both the violence of the
Dionysian literary revolt and the refuge in an Apollonian art for art’s sake.
What all this amounted to was
unpredictability. But then again, it
was many years before British Germanistik exposed itself to these problematic
works, preferring to focus on the Goethe-Zeit and bourgeois realism.
However, from the 1960s our subject
has transformed itself and I do not need to detail what has happened.
Notions of what may be included in British Germanistik have radically
changed, now embracing the whole range of social sciences applied to the study
of things German, perhaps best summarised under the title ‘Area Studies’ or
‘Deutschlandstudien’.
[1]
The study of the German business environment is seen as
legitimate as the post-war history of German political parties, Patrick Süßkind’s
Das Parfum or Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser. The German-Jewish issue is no taboo nor the destiny of the Romanies.
The variety of German university syllabi is enormous as departments
seek to capture aspects of that multi-faceted prism, German society or culture,
in an all-embracing manner reminiscent of the Grimms’ conception of Germanistik
as the study of a cultural totality (see Reeves 1990). Nor, of course are
the other German-speaking countries, Austria or Switzerland,
neglected.
[2]
Surely then, our course is set
fair? The study of a language has
become a compulsory part of the pre-16 National Curriculum for England and
Wales. Britain has been a member of
EEC/EU for twenty-seven years, the Single Market has virtually been completed,
a single currency adopted by eleven of fifteen EU states. Germany has been reunified. The move to Berlin as the capital has been
decided and achieved. Timetables for
the eastward expansion of the EU from the new Germany’s eastern and south
eastern borders have been established in outline. Germany remains the power-house of the European economy and
Britain’s biggest visible trade partner.
Moreover, it has been officially recognised in the UK that the
universities play a key role in the emerging knowledge-intensive economy, the
university participation rate of eighteen year olds has been lifted to 35% and
is rising to 50%. We should be looking
at a cloudless sky in the year 2000, much as many thought the sky was cloudless
in 1900, the Boer War being seen as a serious but temporary irritation, not the
beginning of the end of an Empire on which the sun would never set.
Unfortunately for us in German
Studies, just as no one, not even the most ‘scientific’ of the political
scientists, predicted the collapse of the GDR and the Soviet Eastern bloc in
1989, none of us at that time foresaw a whole string of events that ten years
on seem life-threatening to the subject.
Let me try to sketch these events.
Please forgive me if they seem only too familiar but familiarity does not
reduce their menace.
Let me start with the economy,
as President Clinton might say. After
the rush of enthusiasm in the 1960s and 1970s, university expansion in terms of
numbers of Higher Education institutions and relative rate of increasing spend
came to a halt. The winter of
discontent (1978-79), the demise of the Labour Government under Callaghan and
the emergence of the monetarist and neo-liberal government under Margaret
Thatcher ushered in a new period of public sector stringency, though it took
the Treasury and the DfEE until the early 1990s to figure out a definitive way
to drive down the unit of resource across the whole sector, enabling the number
of students to double in ten years and the polytechnics to be made
universities, all without significantly increasing expenditure on Higher
Education, indeed keeping it well below comparable GDP percentages in Mainland
Europe. Moreover in 1979-80 spending on
Higher Education represented 1.23% of UK GDP.
In 1999-2000 it represents 1.13% and is not planned to increase to more
than 1.14% up to 2002, notwithstanding the huge increase in student numbers.[3]
Meanwhile the transformation
of the university sector into a service industry where employers and students
are our customers is still continuing and has a long way to go. But there is no doubt that the introduction
of the flat rate fee[4] and the abolition of the grant except for
the few in order to finance the continual expansion of Higher Education into
social groups that were previously hardly represented, is not only part of a
social agenda (indeed a welcome and necessary agenda in my view). It represents a further decisive step
towards an industrialised system (see Reeves 1998) in which we sell a service that will only partly be paid out of
tax revenue and in which the majority of students, just like our international
students, personally purchase that service.
The quality inspection system is an integral part of this
transformation, ensuring fitness for purpose and value for money for the
customer, whether that customer be government through its agents the Funding
Councils and the Quality Assurance Agency, or the student and student’s
parents, who can read the public reports on the individual institutions and
note the grades awarded. Likewise the
principal customer for research as funded through the dual system (the only serious
source of research money for the Humanities, incidentally) is the
Funding Council and that funding too, is allocated on a quasi-value for money
basis as measured in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).
At the same time as the
universities moved from a situation that was in some ways analogous to the
Church, if not in funding then in professional culture, the UK economy and the
aspirations of the UK workforce were shaken up, exposed to a competitive spirit
from which many industries and professions had foolishly thought they were
protected. This itself had a profound
effect on young people. The A-level
points[5]
race took off, vocational/professional hopes were aroused and as subjects such
as Business Studies and Information Technology began to boom, subjects
perceived to be difficult and leading to modest career rewards such as
engineering and certain of the humanities, dropped in popularity. German was one of the latter. The reputation for difficulty may be linked
to the demise of Latin, for those of us who had been steeped in Latin
morphology from a tender age, however, sterile we considered that study, could
find German morphology relatively straightforward. The decline in single subject German, which can be ascribed in
part to the loss of interest in philology and medieval literature and a dislike
for literature as a subject that seemed to naïve eighteen-year-olds obscure and
irrelevant – and, of course, too difficult – was offset for some twenty years
from the mid-1970s by the rise of combinations with another language, the
social sciences and above all, Business Studies. That offset now seems to be fading in effect. The obvious truth that Germany is our
largest trading partner, an industrial motor in the heart of Europe but only
fifty minutes away by plane from London Heathrow, a country well disposed to
Britain and very well disposed to the universities through those excellent
institutions, the DAAD, the Goethe-Institut, the Alexander von Humboldt
and other Foundations, a sister country sharing a language of common origins
with deep literary and philosophical connections, does not seem to have had any
lasting impact on the popularity of our subject. When I gave my inaugural lecture at Surrey University in 1976
(Reeves 1976) calling for a new, broader perspective on our subject, that
economic reality seemed to me to promise a bedrock for future appeal and thus
for the future of our subject, ensuring the survival of less popular but no
less important branches of our study. I
did not conceive that that appeal would also fade. Indeed for some fifteen years the ever greater applications for
German programmes combined with Business Studies or economics seemed to
demonstrate my prediction. In 1992 for
example, the year of the Single European Market, Aston University’s
International Business and Modern Languages programme had over 1200
applications for 75 places and we were able to take double that intake number
with an average of over 24 A-level points.
Today the application is only 25% of that number. The number of places is some 85 and it
remains a key strand in the School of Languages’ portfolio, but clearly
something has impacted on German at university that goes beyond a proliferation
of provision in a popular area! If for
example we compare 1996 national applications for German Single Honours with
1998 we find a decline of 22%: 258>201.
True, French had also declined from 757 to 716 – but that is only a 5%
decline.[6]
For Joint Honours with German
the statistics are still only available for 1996, which may underestimate what
has happened since. Here the decline
for German was only 5%, French Joint Honours 2%, with accepted applicants
numbering 3789 and 1622 respectively.[7] However the total number is deceptive since
a single candidate may well be accepted for more than one programme, in the
case of German leading to an inflation factor of 50-60%.[8]
(A much larger inflation factor has to be added when we look at all
applications, given that an individual could choose six universities in 1996). In that same year German Single Honours
applications totalled 1379. German
Joint Honours on the other hand were 11545.
We cannot discount the reduction of choices in 1996 from eight to six
universities but the decline was evident before that.[9]
Chart 1 compares applicants for
German with those for Italian, Spanish and Russian between 1994 and 1998. The decline in German is by far largest, to
only 50% of its former total.
Chart
1: Total Applicants: Modern Language Subjects (English Universities)
Chart I source:
HEFCE letter to Vice-Chancellors, December 1999
Naturally Departments have
attempted to mitigate that fall so that in Chart 2 the fall in entrants is
shown to be much smaller but what that means in terms of entry points is not
clear.Chart 2 source: HEFCE letter to
Vice-Chancellors 17 December 1999.
Chart
2: Total Entrants: Modern Language
Subjects (English Universities)
What we also observe is,
however, a long term trend of falling popularity of modern language studies at
university, affecting French, Italian, Spanish and Russian. HEFCE[10] highlighted this trend in a recent letter to
universities but it has been argued by the Universities that languages continue
to be popular in combinations or as a supplementary subject. Certainly the statistics for combinations
under the Q, R and T UCAS codes[11] show only a decline of 9% from 1996 to 1998
(applications and acceptances) but this is still a fall and in terms of
acceptances larger than for German or Spanish Single Honours (at –4% and –6%
respectively) though far smaller than for French at -18%![12]
This brings me back
to the common factor with 1900 – unpredictability.
When Margaret Thatcher
dispatched Lord Cockfield to the European Commission in the early 1980s she had
not expected him to emerge as a champion of a Single European Market, which,
even when it was relaunched as the completion of the EEC’s original objective,
was known to be intended as the basis for a European political union, already
featured as the ultimate aim of the 1956 Treaty of Rome. 1992 caught the imagination of the public
and had a tremendous impact on interest in learning foreign languages in
schools, universities and companies. But
the enthusiasm was followed by disappointment as the reunification of Germany,
which had overtaken the excitement of the Single European Market, ignited fears
among the older generations in UK and particularly the more xenophobic among
them of the emergence of a greater, uncontrollable Germany that might seek
hegemony in Europe in a fateful repeat of the Bismarkian era. Kanzler Kohl’s obsession with the euro as
the final link in the Market and a key to a higher, though undefined if almost
certainly federal, potential union added to this fear, and his remarks on any
failure of the euro being a matter of war or peace in Europe were seized upon
by an increasingly anti-German UK press and interpreted literally. The rise of the Europhobic Conservatives who
became the bane of John Major’s government undoubtedly helped to whip up
anti-German feeling that harked back to the last two wars. The British TV companies seemed, for a
decade or more, to want constantly to feature programmes about the Nazi era –
documentaries, situation comedies such as ‘Allo Allo’ and straight comic
sketches which repeated the Nazi caricature of Germans and Germany ad
nauseam. Imbecilic football rivalry
aided by the boulevard press poured further fuel on this combustible situation.
The teaching profession had,
however, attached great expectations to changes in the National Curriculum for
England and Wales. The inclusion of one
compulsory foreign language to 16 was expected to lead to marked
diversification, and an increase in the numbers successfully taking GCSE[13]
languages. In 1991-2 there were 306,010 entries in French of which 139.075
achieved grades A-C, 97,636 entries in German with 53,295 achieving grades A-C,
and 27,681 entries in Spanish with 15,620 at grades A-C. By 1996-97 entries in
French had only increased marginally to 313,013 with grades A-C achieved by
153,261. While German had increased strongly to 130,687 entries and 71,097 at
grades A-C, Spanish had grown still more strongly to 40,845 entries and 22,713
achieving grades A-C. In the latest figures available, for 1997-98 there were
312,358 entries in French of which 152,155 achieved grades A-C showing a slight
decline. In German there were 129,674
entries of which 70,960 achieved grades A-C which suggests that a plateau has
been reached. In Spanish there were 44,575 entries with 24,506 achieving grades
A-C [14] In percentage terms Spanish has been the
winner but even if German has levelled off, it has benefited from the new
Curriculum despite the problems mentioned above.
More worrying is that the
number in French gaining A level grades A-E has decreased substantially. In 1992-3, 21,811 gained such distinction in
French, in 1998-9, 16,372. In 1992-3
8,248 gained these grades in German, in 1998-99 7,885, a number that has held
up remarkably well in comparison but that still shows decline and no reflection
of the 30% increase in successful German GCSEs[15]
When we look at the A level candidate
numbers there is a similar trend with French losing out most (1992-3: 25,215;
1998-99: 17,775).[16]
The German candidate number has fallen from 9,548 in 1992-3 to 8,527 in
1998-99, the disjuncture between GCSE and A level being a matter of great
concern. However, falling numbers in
University entrants is not matched in every foreign language A level
candidature. In Italian, candidates
have increased from 429 to 556, in Spanish from 3,767 to 4,640 and in Chinese
from 465 to 1122, while even Russian has recovered from 354 to 455, though the
total number of University candidates for all languages has fallen from 41,061
to 34,439.[17] (Nevertheless the decline in A level grades
A-C is tiny: 23,050 to 22,854. (See
Chart 3)
Chart 3: A level results in modern languages
Chart 3. Source: Data Supplied by DfEE for HEFCE Letter, December 1999
What we seem to be observing
is a greater take-up of the range of languages at the expense of the two
traditional front-runners, French and German.
But the additional key factor is the range of A level subjects,
especially in the social sciences.
There are many alternatives to a language A level including those such
as economics or business studies, which seem more relevant in a cultural
environment that now places so much more emphasis on business success, making
money – and which, of course, seem to give the promise of meeting your
university debts at the end of the programme.
Moreover the drastic reduction
in maintenance (living costs) support for students was only one side of the
coin in the transformation of universities into a service-sector industry. The number of 18 year olds and mature students
entering Higher Education has more than doubled since the late eighties. With a participation rate of over 35% and a
target of 50% we have become an integral part of the knowledge economy. But, as we saw, the central spend has
effectively remained static. One key
tactic of the Funding Council to help achieve this financial feat was the
standardisation of funding, lumping together profoundly different subjects such
as German Studies and English Literature at a common average already driven
down by the inclusion of non-funded student numbers beyond the MASN (Maximum
Aggregate Student Number).[18] Thus the cost of teaching an 18 year-old who
has studied German at school for perhaps four years on a linguistically
undemanding syllabus and bringing him/her towards the near native competence in
the language which is the stated mission of some university programmes has been
totally discounted, as if the British A level student of German already had a
command of the German language equal to that of a peer who had been learning
English since birth and uses it as an academic language. The consequent reduction in income of German
Departments has been drastic, requiring in many universities other subject
areas to cross-subsidise and so lose their own competitive edge against those
departments not asked for cross-subsidy.
The new concession to raise German to Band C is a purely paper exercise
that gives most universities no more funding, a quite extraordinary and
indefensible piece of sleight of hand.
A number of Vice-Chancellors regard this as an unsustainable situation
and are thinking carefully – and I suspect unsympathetically – about the future
of languages departments and specifically German departments.
Thus we face a combination of
secular, adverse trends: a service industry culture in which the customer pays
and therefore has to earn substantially later.
An external, media-hyped environment in which anti-European and
specifically anti-German feeling has become endemic. A desperate desire among pupils to get good grades and therefore
a fear of an apparently difficult subject, in the case of German exacerbated by
the decline in Latin. A National
Curriculum that has squeezed the traditional second foreign language. A lack of teachers of German so that head
teachers play safe and opt for French.
Nor is Germany the sunny, seaside tourist attraction that are Spain or
Italy. And both Spanish and Italian are
related to French, the traditional first foreign language. Nonetheless, it remains a disturbing fact
that French at university has suffered more than German, albeit from a far
larger critical mass.
But further factors are at
work – predictable and unpredictable.
German companies are transforming the way they operate. Under the pressure of endemic high
unemployment, lack of competitiveness because of high labour and social
on-costs and tight labour laws, German companies are shifting production out of
Germany. They are also moving out from
under the wing of their house bank on to the stock market to raise
capital. The consequently acute awareness
of shareholder value, the ever increasing difficulty of keeping market share
and the pressing need to invest in research are pushing German companies into
alliances and mergers on a global scale – the Daimler-Chrysler alliance and the
purchase of Mannesmann by Vodaphone Air Touch are examples of friendly merger
and hostile take-over respectively that point in the same direction. The banks
themselves are reorganising to compete with the American and Japanese giants.
Deutsche Bank and Bankers’ Trust have merged.
Now we hear that Deutsche and Dresdner Banks are to merge. And behind that merger lies Allianz
Versicherung, one of the world’s largest insurance companies. Now, what is the language policy of these
new global giants? Certainly in the
case of Deutsche Bank it is to abandon German as the company language and to
turn to English – as have also Lufthansa and AEG! Even Deutsche Welle now broadcasts internationally in English to
try and compete with CNN.
But regrettable as the retreat
of German as an international commercial language may be, I suppose it was
predictable. Unpredictable was the exposure of former Kanzler Kohl and of
Wolfgang Schäuble as purveyors of sleaze, not on the puny brown envelope scale
of certain British Conservative politicians but on a grand scale, that may
conceivably turn out to be international in reach, and shine an altogether
different light on the Franco-German partnership that was the core of the
political union within the European Union and the butt of Mrs. Thatcher’s
ire. We have to be thankful that Herr
Schröder’s party is in power - but must also be mindful that the much vaunted
Third Way was in fact the invention of the CDU in the late 1940s. The practitioners of German democracy,
indeed those that shaped reunification – have turned out to be the
practitioners of precisely what the British anti-European lobby has been
claiming, corruption, a malpractice that has also turned out to be at the heart
of the European Commission under Jacques Santer.
Meanwhile, in Austria, the
inclusion of the FPÖ in government, Jörg Haider’s quasi-Nazi profile and his
most recent manoeuvrings have brought a dramatic new twist to the situation,
providing the Europhobes with still more ammunition. And please don’t mention the ‘Beef War’ or BMW…
‘Aber wo
bleibt das Positive, Herr Kästner?’[19]
I have to conclude that if no
one is going to help us we have to help ourselves. That means organising high profile conferences to draw attention
to the importance of our subject, its rich diversity, its role in contributing
to the education of the new generations in a Europe of ever-closer bonds and
economic ties. While the pound sterling
may be outside the euro now, joining the euro is economically inevitable as the
strains and threats of remaining outside grow intolerable for activities as
wide apart as inward investment and agriculture. We have to build up the case once again for the business value of
German both for the UK and for the individual whether in small and medium size
export businesses, or for those with ambitions for promotion within German-led
multi-nationals. We have to re-state the supreme educational value of young
people not being confined to a knowledge of one language and one culture in a
multi-cultural European and globalised economy. We have to highlight and illuminate the contribution that is
being made by German writers and thinkers to our self-understanding in the
Information Age, an age where the nature of reality and human inter-relationships
is changing. We have to lobby
Vice-Chancellors and politicians about the absurdity of the English Funding
Council’s funding of languages and the deceptive funding adjustment to
German. We must enlist the support of
the DAAD and the Goethe-Institut in making the case for the German
language. It is above all the German
language that is central to our argument.
Without knowledge of the language no businessman, no politician, no
diplomat, no social scientist has authentic access to the original texts and
information and no sound or immediate insight into what is happening in
Europe’s largest nation and largest economy.
Who is going to lead this campaign?
Could it be UCML[20] Will it be the CUTG[21]
? Or might the place where we are
meeting, in the Institute of Germanic Studies[22]
be the institution best placed to take this lead? I leave you with this question.
References
Althof,
H.J. (1990) (ed.) Deutschland Studien
International I, iudicium Verlag, München.
Kästner,
E. (1969) Gesammelte Schriften für
Erwachsene, Droemer Krauer Munich/Zurich, vol 1.
Lutzeier, P.R.
(1998) (ed), German Studies: Old and New Challenges. Undergraduate
Programmes in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland (German
Linguistic and Cultural, vol 1, Peter Lang, Bern.
Reeves, N.B.R.
(1976) ‘University Language Studies and the Future of Britain’, Inaugural
Lecture, University of Surrey.
Reeves,
N.B.R. (1990) ‘German Studies:
Legitimität, Theorie und Pädagogik’.
In Deutschland Studien
International, ed. Althof,
iudicium verlag, Munich, pp. 47-60.
Reeves,
N.B.R. (1998), ‘Assessing the Quality of Teaching and Learning in Higher
Education: The Emergence of Higher
Education as a Service Industry’, Centre for Literature and Translation, Lignan
College, Hong Kong Occasional Paper 8.
Reeves, N.B.R.
(1999), ‘At the Limits of Language. The Challenge of Modernist Literature to
Translation Theories and Practice’. In Translation
Quarterly 13-14, pp. 1-31.