History of German at Monash University
German Studies at Monash University
This volume "Passagen - 50 Jahre Germanistik an der Monash Universitaet / Passages - 50 Years of German Studies at Monash University" will celebrate fifty years of teaching and research in German Studies at Monash University in Melbourne (forthcoming 2010). The university was established officially in 1958 in the first wave of rapid expansion of the Australian university system, and teaching began in 1961. German Studies has existed at Monash, in the active sense, for as long as the university itself. Teaching and research began in the German Section of the then Department of Modern Languages in that same year. A Chair of German was established in 1962, with Leslie Bodi appointed as Foundation Professor in 1963. Like the new university as a whole, German grew extremely rapidly, and young staff were recruited from all over the world.
Apart from Leslie Bodi, who already had a short career in Europe and Australia behind him, virtually all the staff members in these early years were young academics beginning to establish their careers. The mix reflected Leslie Bodi’s belief in a balance between native speakers of German and Anglo-Saxon Germanists with near-native German. The staff list for 1968 comprised a Swiss German, two Englishmen, one Scot, five Australians (though two had native German from their background), two Germans, one Austrian and one Hungarian. Despite this diversity, the Department of German (as it became) was a friendly and harmonious place. By this I certainly do not imply any absence of argument, robust debate and even conflict. On the contrary, discussions about all manner of things, from new course offerings to the relative merits of newly emerging German authors, were typically carried out in a robust fashion, with raised voices, indignant protests and even virtual insults being completely normal. More than one dean, witnessing the German Department in discussion around a table in the staff club, has worriedly approached its senior members later to enquire whether German had any real chance of survival at Monash. Despite the violent arguments, grudges were very rarely held, and laughter of an equally violent kind was common. This too could be upsetting for our monocultural colleagues, whose sense of decorum would be upset by the sight of their German Department colleagues guffawing uproariously in their common room.
A good deal of the cohesiveness of the department was brought about by Leslie Bodi and his wife Marianne (Mari) opening their house, in a street just beyond the perimeter of the university, to colleagues on all manner of occasions. Their living room became an extension of the professor’s office, with the difference that, alongside discussions with one or more colleagues about matters of serious import for the department, there was much social chat and lively debate about politics, literature and the state of the world. Mari Bodi provided us with wonderful cooking, a civilised presence, and endless patience. She needed it. As I noted, gatherings of my colleagues could become rowdy, a constant flow of wine and coffee was called for, and we often argued late into the night. In addition, Mari’s gentle persuasiveness defused many a fraught moment. This carried over into the arena of her husband’s dealings with his fellow professors in other departments and in particular with various deans. It is fair to say that Leslie Bodi had a combative and tempestuous nature, and he was fiercely protective of his department and his people. This meant that he was frequently involved in disputes and confrontations that disconcerted his mainly Anglo-Saxon peers because of his vehemence. Leslie would soon become conscience-stricken about his behaviour and the next day would present his latest victim (usually the dean of the day) with a propitiatory box of chocolates (provided by Mari). Mari kept a stash of chocolates, as she knew that the next skirmish was just around the corner.
There are advantages in starting a large enterprise like a university from the ground up, in a rapidly expanding situation. There was a large budget for the new university library, which had to be stocked quickly. Here too Leslie Bodi seized the moment, ordering huge numbers of books in an attempt to build up as complete a collection of ‘necessary books’ as possible (his own phrase, with a very broad connotation), not just in German studies but in the neighbouring areas of social and political history, history of ideas and philosophy, political science, art history and linguistics. He was helped in this enterprise by the relatively large numbers of students of German, the allocation of library funds being largely determined by student enrolments. Monash had broken with the traditional requirement for entry into Arts of a foreign language successfully studied at senior secondary school. Instead, it required students not fulfilling this requirement (very large numbers) to take an ‘elementary’ language, i.e. a foreign language for students with no prior knowledge, in their first year. This arrangement, later discontinued, boosted the budget of language departments, and German was a big winner. Young people beginning or contemplating an academic career were hired to teach the large numbers of ‘beginner’ students, and furthermore encouraged or required to begin a Ph.D. This apprenticeship scheme was another innovation. Before the 1960’s, people did not do doctorates at Australian universities. Postgraduates in languages sometimes did a doctorate in Europe. Under Leslie Bodi it became a requirement that all young academics either possessed a PhD on appointment or began one immediately. This development, which quickly became the norm across Australian universities, was symptomatic of the rapid professionalisation of academic life, a which was reflected, in the case of Monash German, in the development of serious language courses in which curriculum design and teaching methods were based on sound linguistic principles and often underpinned by applied research on the part of the colleagues who taught these courses. The determination to place language teaching on a properly professional basis was also behind the various outreach programs initiated by German Studies, including the provision of extension courses for teachers of German at primary and secondary schools. The previous rather desultory attempts to encourage the use of German among Monash students were replaced by a systematic program which included the insertion into each semester of a ‘German Week’, during which normal classes were suspended in favour of a program of talks and activities, all in German. Importantly, German-speaking members of the community were brought in to talk about their lives and professions, a reminder to students that the language they were studying was a vital and natural part of the life of a large and varied community of speakers.
Monash was from the beginning brashly conscious of its status as a newcomer, determined to shape its own character in contra-distinction to the older universities. Particularly as far as the University of Melbourne was concerned, there was (and is to this day) a sense of rivalry that could be quite fierce. The consciousness that Monash was new and vibrant, unhindered by tradition and precedent, was fostered by its first Vice-Chancellor, Louis Matheson, an engineer who came to Monash from Manchester, and who brought with him the forthrightness and sleeves-rolled-up attitude that one associates with that profession and that region. He proved to be a good fit with the new institution: he was open to the new and the bold, and he presided over an energy-laden, optimistic and exciting first decade of the university’s life.
But Monash University was established along conventional lines. The cornerstones of its structure were the traditional disciplines, organised in departments. The later emergence of more flexible structures which would allow cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary work was nevertheless prefigured in the German Department’s early moves to break down barriers and link up with cognate fields. For many years German was virtually a lone voice at Monash in this respect. The notion that teaching and research could profitably be carried out across disciplines and fields was not well received. Part of the problem was a fundamental difference in how the very terms ‘discipline’ and ‘field’ were to be used. The entrenched view was that ‘discipline’ meant ‘department’ (so English was a discipline, German a discipline, but ‘literature’ or ‘linguistics’ were activities carried on in various ‘disciplines’). Our view, that the discipline was literature or linguistics and that English and German were areas of study, was the precondition for the later wave of interdisciplinary studies at Australian universities, but was rejected at the time – the 1960’s and 1970’s - by the prevailing conservative powers. The disagreement, often taking on a robust and even violent tenor that reflected the general climate at Monash in these years, carried over into conflicts unleashed by various proposals for renewal and change put forward by German and its allies. These included the establishment of a Centre for literary and cultural studies which would bring together members of various departments to study and teach literature and culture across ‘disciplines’; and a similar enterprise to bring together linguistics from various parts of the faculty to share and develop their interest in migrant studies, an area of major importance in a country like Australia.
In important ways this sense of belonging to an enlightened minority, as it seemed to us, helped define German’s identity and provided a powerful self-belief. The German section, later department, never subscribed to the traditional narrow conception and practice of Germanistik, which survived the upheavals of 1968 more successfully than is perhaps commonly thought. Here too we were in a small minority: of the eleven departments of German that then existed in Australian universities, only New South Wales, where John Milfull headed an energetic group, was engaged in the sort of German studies that Monash was committed to, broad-ranging, interdisciplinary and contemporary.
These early attitudes and standpoints, the style and profile of German at Monash, were heavily influenced by Leslie Bodi. In addition, his insistence on a complete undergraduate and graduate program and coverage of all major eras of the culture of the German-speaking countries, his emphasis on the historical and social context of literary, cultural and linguistic studies, and close attention to the bodies of theory relevant to these studies, were decisive. It was fundamental to virtually all teaching and research carried out in the German Department that political, social and intellectual history formed constant points of reference. This meant that, for example, senior students in both German and Comparative Literature and Culture could be offered a subject entitled ‘Cultural Critics’, in which the writings of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and others were studied. Nietzsche could only be studied, at undergraduate level, in the German Department, and only there were Marx and Freud studied in the original German (moreover, for many years James Joyce’s Ulysses could only be studied in the Centre for General and Comparative Literature – in a subject on the modern novel taught by Germanists).
Monash was a leader in the inclusion of German linguistics as a major part of its program. From 1963 Michael Clyne led this part of the enterprise, before moving to the Department of Linguistics in 1988 as Professor. Under his leadership, and that of Leslie Bodi, the old discipline of philology was largely replaced by the new discipline of linguistics, targeted on German. Though historical and general linguistics were paid due attention, the sub-discipline of sociolinguistics was particularly well-developed, through the ground-breaking work of Michael Clyne and his disciples. Clyne pioneered the study of migrant languages, and was a key figure in the promotion of multiculturalism in Australia. When work in the area of migrant studies finally became formalised in the Centre for Migrant Studies, Clyne became its foundation director.
German at Monash made Austria, Switzerland and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) important aspects of teaching and research, resisting the near-universal tendency to equate contemporary German culture with the culture of the Federal Republic (West Germany). Here the presence in the department of colleagues either from or with a close association with Eastern Europe and Austria was a bonus. If these interests were partly the result of personal experience, the emphasis on contemporary German culture, especially writing, was the result of a general conviction that Germanistik should concern itself not just with the work of the past but with present-day developments. Major works by writers such as Guenter Grass and Peter Weiss, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Volker Braun and Christa Wolf quickly found their way onto undergraduate reading lists and into published research.
Location as a Department of German Studies at the opposite side of the world to where the object of its interest and expertise lies results in a complex situation. Foreign Germanists, that is Germanists not from a German-speaking country, inhabit two worlds: on the one hand they live in the society and culture of the country they physically inhabit, in our case Australia or in a broader sense the Anglo-Saxon world; on the other they are immersed in the culture and language of the German-speaking world, they are at home in it. The situation is made more complicated by the presence in Australian German departments of colleagues from German-speaking countries. They too inhabit two worlds, in a kind of mirror image to the situation described above. Reflection on these matters - and no less than four Monash Germanists have written about them - engenders a positive self-awareness about what it is one is doing when one ‘does’ Germanistik in Australia. It is not just the physical remoteness of Australia, but an acute consciousness of these complexities, that has led German at Monash, along with other Australian colleagues, to pursue and maintain a very close two-way contact with the German-speaking countries. Relations with the various German higher education bodies – Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung – have been consistently lively and productive. It is significant that Dr Heinrich Pfeiffer, the distinguished and long-serving Director of the Humboldt-Stiftung, the most important and prestigious German research institution, was awarded an honorary doctorate at Monash in 1994; and appropriate as well, since no fewer than nine members of German Studies at Monash have been recipients of Humboldt Foundation fellowships and other awards over the years. Three of its past or present members (Bodi, Clyne and Veit) hold the German Bundesverdienstkreuz and Michael Clyne was awarded the prestigious Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm-Preis in 1999. Four colleagues are Fellows of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
The DAAD has been very important to foreign Germanistik as the provider of scholarships for undergraduates and graduates to fund study at German universities, and as the organiser of the system of ‘Kurzzeitdozenten’, in which distinguished professors from German universities take up short-term visiting posts in Australia. Monash has benefited particularly from both these schemes, and has managed to secure a high rate of representation among scholarship holders. The same desire to maintain productive contact with German institutions is reflected in our close collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, the German cultural institute.
Despite many changes, there has been a remarkable continuity within German at Monash. The basic philosophy about German Studies outlined above continues to prevail. Key members of the early department have retained a presence. Michael Clyne has returned as Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, and three other arrivals in the mid-1960’s are still closely associated with the department: Emeritus Professor David Roberts, Emeritus Professor Philip Thomson and Honorary Associate Professor Walter Veit. There have only been two incumbents of the Chair, Leslie Bodi and Philip Thomson.
Well before interdisciplinary and intercultural studies became popular, German at Monash, which had become an autonomous department in 1972, was involved in teaching and research which crossed boundaries and connected to related fields such as comparative literature, art history, the history of ideas and politics, as well as language and linguistic studies. Members of the department were heavily involved in the project mentioned above to establish a Faculty Centre where research and teaching in literature and culture across various fields could be carried out. This project eventually came to fruition as the Centre for General and Comparative Literature (a literal translation of the long-established German discipline Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft). Now known as the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, it is one of the most successful and high-profile enterprises at Monash. Four Germanists have served as Director of the Centre. In addition, German Studies was the prime mover in the establishment and running of the Centre for European Studies, and two of its members, Silke Hesse and Kate Rigby, played a similar role in Women’s Studies.
German Studies at Monash has always paid close attention to maintaining a vigorous PhD program alongside its research work, training successive generations of young scholars. Many of its former PhD students themselves now occupy academic posts, including all of the first nine Ph.D. candidates. As far as research is concerned, the picture is too diverse to summarise. There is still an interest in early Australian history and its connections to Germany; a widespread engagement with the various bodies of literary and cultural theory emanating from Europe in general and Germany in particular; a commitment to producing the bricks and mortar of work in the humanities such as bibliographies; an ongoing concern with questions of identity – national, linguistic, social, and with the concomitant issue of Germanistik and Germanisten in Australia; and continuing work in the broad area of German Romanticism and its consequences, and in the problematic idea and phenomenon of modernity in the German-speaking realm. The problem of identity and self-understanding is also central to much of the work done in German linguistics, where bilingualism continues to be a key area of research, along with second-language acquisition, German as a pluricentric language, and the broad area of sociolinguistics. But work has been carried out, and is continuing, in many other areas, from the more traditional pursuits of Germanistik to currently topical debates and discussions.
Though in the important ways outlined above the Monash German Department was characterised by innovation and a strong sense of “doing it new”, it has been subject to the nationwide downturn in language learning in schools, and to the increasing budgetary pressures in universities, that have been an increasingly negative feature of the Australian education system since the early 1980’s. The inexorable logic of the decrease in numbers of school pupils studying German is a downturn in students enrolling in German courses at university. In addition, fewer and fewer of the students who do enrol have studied literature and/or history in senior secondary school, meaning that they do not necessarily have the aptitude (or the inclination) to study subjects based on or targeting culture (however broadly understood). Monash, like every other German Studies program in Australia, has had to adapt its courses in order to respond to these changes. This ongoing work of adaptation includes the development of a full program for beginners, students who start learning German only when they come to university and often have no previous experience of language-learning. The strong interdisciplinary input continues, in both research and teaching, and the determination to retain as much breadth in our activities as possible.
The contributors to this forthcoming volume "Passagen - 50 Jahre Germanistik an der Monash Universitaet / Passages - 50 Years of German Studies at Monash University" are all current or former members of the German Studies program at Monash, or PhD graduates of it. These colleagues were asked to provide an article or essay they considered particularly important or representative: something that decisively influenced a career, that opened up a new channel in German studies, or put a personal stamp on a topic. In this way the volume presents a kind of record of a multifarious enterprise that brought together many people and shaped many lives, an enterprise that is now fifty years old.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that the cohesiveness I described before has lasted. It is in the nature of academic life that egos clash, powerful ambitions produce jealousies and strife, career needs and aspirations get in the way of genuine friendship. Past and present members of German Studies at Monash not only still speak to each other (in English and German, and characteristically in a mixture of the two), they enjoy cordial relations, and a remarkable number of them are close friends.
Philip Thomson