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Abstract
This contribution takes up the arguments developed in the essay ‘Cultural Studies in Germany (and Austria): why is there no such thing?’ (European Journal of Cultural Studies (1999), 2(1): 109-15). It refers, however,only to the German reception of cultural studies and focuses on the different ways cultural studies have become influential in various contexts since the 1970s. Three major stages can, roughly, be detected. The first comes from a new Leftist background dealing with working class and youth culture, and the discussion of the notion ‘ideology’. The second grew out of the youth culture debate in an attempt to re-politicize it, elaborated by the so-called ‘German Pop left’. The third is now within academia, particularly in media studies and‘Kulturwissenschaften’. The contribution aims to sketch out the limitations of the, however different, lines of the German reception of cultural studies as well as the weaknesses of the attempts to work in cultural studies with reference to what can be called the German (intellectual) tradition.