A view from without: Welcome to the Garden of Eden
By Regina Krieger
Dieser Artikel in Deutsch
Regina Krieger (Fotos: privat; Humboldt-Stiftung).
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Germans are known to be self-critical. German scholars and historians are no exception - even, and particularly during the Year of the Humanities that is dedicated to them. It is time for a eulogy from the perspective of foreign academics who consider Germany a scholarly paradise.
In 2007, Germany is celebrating the Year of the Humanities, the first in the past seven Science Years that is not dedicated to the natural sciences. From an outsider's perspective, that seems odd. A little survey amongst Humboldtians showed that elsewhere, there is no such thing as a Science Year, let alone a Year of the Humanities. But the perennial celebration bestows on German scholars attention, money, and time, the most valuable resource of all.
Robert Van Valin, American linguist and professor at Düsseldorf University: "Many things are different, most of them for the better." Click here for a larger image.
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The year 2007 has brought a flood of new funding opportunities, with the federal government taking the helm. According to Federal Minister of Education and Research Annette Schavan, herself a humanities scholar, about 64 million EUR federal funding will flow into research projects in the humanities up to 2009. One of the most recent opportunities is the ministry's initiative to establish International Research Schools in the Humanities in cooperation with the German Research Foundation (DFG). The concept combines collaborative and individual research. The "Pro Geisteswissenschaften" initiative for the humanities promotes highly qualified junior scientists and scholars by offering up to ten "Dilthey Fellowships" per year as well as the "opus magnum" programme for experienced researchers. This allows researchers to take leave of absence for up to two years by providing, for example, secondment for their teaching duties, so that they can concentrate on achieving a major, original, academic coup. The funding agencies are the Fritz Thyssen and Volkswagen Foundations, in cooperation with the ZEIT Foundation and the Donors' Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities in Germany.
"This is like paradise for researchers," comments American linguist Robert Van Valin, Humboldt Research Award Winner in 2005. After completing research stays at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, he has held the chair of General Linguistics at the Institute for Language and Information at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf since the summer term of 2007. "International mobility is very much encouraged in the United States, yet it is not always easy to relocate to another country, not just for a scholarship, but for a permanent position," the expert on role and reference grammar states. He found his German partners to be very flexible when it came to the administrative transition from the University at Buffalo, NY, to Düsseldorf. According to Van Valin, many things are different, most of them for the better: "The German Max Planck Institutes are first-class worldwide; there is nothing comparable to them in the United States. The same is true for the DFG's Collaborative Research Centres."
Katalin Mady experimenting on herself: using X-ray to trace tongue movements. Click here for a larger image.
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His Hungarian colleague Katalin Mady is also glad to be doing research in Germany. The Humboldt Research Fellow works at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. With the help of X-ray images, she researches the movement of the tongue during phonation. "Conditions for my field of research are very good here," she explains. "In Hungary, I worked at the German department of a linguistics institute. They do not off er phonetics as a major there. My problem was that I did not teach what I was researching."
Unjustified negativity
This positive perception from abroad and excellent international reputation of German humanities form a bizarre contrast with its own selfimage. While the German Science Council says that "negative talk is unjustified," professors point out the poor teacher-student ratio in the humanities - a tenth of university faculty teaches a quarter of all students. Humanities are popular; students particularly flock to subjects such as German, English, and History. The results of the first round of the excellence initiative have been much debated at the universities. Only one of 17 clusters of excellence that were selected for funding is in the field of humanities: the research project "Cultural Foundations of Social Integration" at Konstanz University.
In addition, many professors lament a rising pressure to defend their legitimacy. It bothers humanists that they are publicly asked to prove the practical utility of their disciplines. Historian Rudolf Schlögl, professor of Modern History in Konstanz and spokesman of the selected cluster of excellence, has the fitting answer: It would be a catastrophe for modern society "to focus exclusively on economic gains. Society needs an identity and must know its own fabric. Humanities make an indispensable contribution to this. The globalised economy confronts our society with a degree of diversity and complexity that can only be stabilised with the help of methodologically controlled, scientific introspection."
Natalia Filatkina, German scholar from Russia: "Things that others don't even see might catch the eye of a non-native researcher." Click here for a larger image.
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A change of perspective confirms this diagnosis. A research project launched by Russian researcher Natalia Filatkina at the department of German Studies at Trier University in July is perfectly in tune with Schlögl's perception: Her pioneering work promises new interdisciplinary insights and will introduce the non-scientific public to a part of cultural history. She is examining formulaic German idioms such as "eine Straftat begehen" (to commit a crime) or "jemandem aufs Dach steigen" (literally "to climb someone's roof ", to scold). She tries to discover the social, historical, and cultural connections underlying these socalled phraseologisms, and draw conclusions about modern language. Combining historical linguistics and text encoding technologies, she is building a database, an electronic corpus of texts. Her research work has earned her the Humboldt Foundation's Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, one of the most highly endowed awards in Germany with an award sum of up to 1.2 million EUR which enables her to work with her own research team over a period of four years. Is it an advantage to research a foreign rather than a native language? "I believe so," the German scholar says. "A certain distance to the language opens up a different angle and sharpens one's perception. Things that others don't even see might catch the eye of a non-native researcher."
Only individuals can surmount barriers
"The foreign perspective always sheds light on the innate, the familiar, the known, and alienates it in a manner that is, in my opinion, necessary," New Zealand German scholar Alan Kirkness agrees. He considers international mobility indispensable, but also thinks that there are limits. "Effectively, only individual researchers and academics surmount the language barriers that are intrinsic to the humanities. These language barriers are also cultural barriers. English (alone) does not help much if you want to go in-depth. The essence is always lost in translation."
His scientific detective work led him to a sensational discovery: German scholar Alan Kirkness from New Zealand found lost editions of Grimm's German dictionary. Click here for a larger image.
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A year ago, Kirkness made a sensational discovery. In the Jagiellon Library in Krakow he found nine copies of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's German dictionary with handwritten notes that had been considered lost since World War II. Kirkness had been searching for these volumes for thirty years like a scientific detective. He has genuinely lived a cross-border life, studying in Auckland and Zürich, taking his PhD in Oxford, doing research in Heidelberg as a Humboldt Research Fellow, working at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, and as an expert on Grimm at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
"What I appreciate most about staying in Germany are the human contacts in the name of a scientific cause. They have made my research stays in Germany so enticing and attractive," he summarises, very much in tune with what other guest researchers say. "I only have positive things to report about doing research in Germany."
Of course, it is not only humanities scholars that say this. But the outside perspective helps the humanities scholars, in particular, to overcome the negative talk and the pressure to justify themselves. Wolf Lepenies, sociologist and winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, aptly portrays the indisputable "magic moment": When he thought of the humanities, Alfred Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" sprang to mind, he said at the opening ceremony of the Science Year in Berlin. In the 1938 film an old-fashioned, somewhat scatterbrained lady, who constantly whistles a strange tune, suddenly vanishes on a train ride. "While we lament her fate, we keep hearing her tune in places we would never have expected her. She turns out to have exemplary presence of mind. Tongue-in-cheek, she lets us know what really happened when we thought she was gone forever and we would never see her again."
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