PREFACE

The only things that count here are the institutions,

and whilst you can achieve considerable power as a

member or representative of one of those institutions,

you can achieve nothing without them or outside them.¹

Throughout history and across cultures, institutions influence how we write and read, who we are, and who we think we once were. The six contributions to this special issue of Oxford German Studies consider institutions in relation to training for literary production (Micke and Philpotts); the role of an emergent university discipline in encouraging, and to some extent determining, a plurality of contemporary writing (Wright); book prize policies (Braun); reading tours by authors (Pizer); as well as feminist polemics (Spiers) and museum narratives (Lloyd). Together, they examine institutions and literary culture in both parts of a divided post-war Germany — East (Micke and Philpotts) and West (Wright) — as well as the contemporary German landscape within a globalized world (Braun, Pizer and Spiers), and the Third Reich in retrospect (Lloyd). While institutions need not be concrete, we understand them here as more than mere customs: on the whole, as bureaucratic or corporate entities.

In the UK, where this special issue was conceived, distrust of institutions seems commonplace today. Many accuse the civil service of institutionalized inefficiency and welcome the closure of quangos; parliamentary and party expenses scandals have shaken public confidence in political representatives and organizations; and banks have been heavily criticized for their bailouts and staff bonuses. More generally, we tend to think that institutions should be transparent to our scrutiny. But alongside or perhaps because of our scepticism towards institutions, we invest institutional trust in (re-)established watchdogs and even increased governmental oversight. We call for rigorous regulatory frameworks for the press, for example, or welcome independent bodies which are tasked with keeping state departments and private or commercial interests in check. Institutions are a constant if constantly changing and contested structural principle of social life.²

The post-war period has been a time of significant social transformations which have swept over Germany and the world. Mark McGurl argues that the twentieth century in the US was marked historically by ‘a literary field increasingly dominated by bureaucratic institutions of higher education’,³ such that ‘the rise of the creative writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history’.⁴ However, this is not to say that literature of this US ‘program era’ is more institutionalized per se, for as McGurl points out: ‘In their own way, the social patterns that laid the tracks for, say, the fateful arrival of Ernest Hemingway at the door of Gertrude Stein’s apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus were as rigid as any underlying the many great teacher-student relations of the postwar period, if not more so.’⁵ The aim of the present volume, then, is not to assert that institutions have a more pronounced topicality for the genesis, dissemination and reception of (German) literature and literary personalities after 1945 until the 2010s than in other periods. Nor does it attempt to theorize the idea of a post-war institution in and of itself — though the institutional theories of Bourdieu and Foucault, for instance, are important for our contributors Micke and Philpotts, Braun and Pizer, as well as Spiers respectively. Rather, institutions offer a necessary corrective lens for insight into twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literary studies, complementing the analysis of other eras or other nation’s literatures.⁶ More broadly, these essays exemplify and examine attitudes to negotiating institutions, and their connection to literature in general.

Micke and Philpotts begin with a discussion of a creative writing programme which is comparable with the post-war trend in the Anglophone world. But the inception of the Leipzig institute was particularly complex given the confused cultural policy of the GDR in the 1950s. Wright continues the theme by considering competitions for non-native writers of German in light of post-war population shifts and the new subject of Deutsch als Fremdsprache in German higher education; these competitions were anthologized, becoming constitutive of ‘exophonic’ literature. Spiers and Lloyd examine the appropriation of and engagement with institutions, in popular and memory cultures and through literature, concerning a specifically German personality — Alice Schwarzer — or problem: how to remember life at home under Nazism. Braun and Pizer, meanwhile, contend that an extreme number of local and national literary prizes or reading tours is a peculiarly German phenomenon. Consequently, these institutions are best studied in a German context.

The contributions show that the concept of an institution can be paired with (or set in opposition to) a mythologized individualism: notions of a ‘founding figure’, literary genius or neoliberal politics. They reveal the supportive roles of an institution for a minority group or ‘ism’, such as a certain brand of feminism; and they demonstrate an institution’s delimiting powers. The case studies thus complicate abstract understandings of institutional aid or control. Autonomy becomes a key word in the subsequent chapters, but it is inevitably actually a relative term.

As modern academics, we too are institutionalized — and not only by the ivory tower (or towers, for there are competing academic ideologies to which we may align ourselves). We are variously institutionalized — for example, by literary societies of which we may be members, as grant holders, and as writers for scholarly periodicals such as the present one. Our lives beyond academia also influence the academy. As Allen Chun contends: ‘In an institutional setting of the public, academia is never really free. Its degree of authority is a function of its relative autonomy or embeddedness vis-à-vis other institutions of power or society at large.’⁷ Institutions demand our intricate analysis because we never inhabit one type to the exclusion of another, nor can we ever occupy a space outside of them all.

We should note that the critical interrogations undertaken by the current contributors, as well as our own editorial choices during the assembly of this special issue, are institutionally conditioned (and contestable) by different scholarly doctrines as well as professional pressures on research outputs. So too was the overall concept for what follows. Our original stimulus was an Oxford Postgraduate Symposium in 2011, on the theme ‘Literature and Institutions’, co-organized by Birgit Mikus, Seán M. Williams and Michael Wood, with keynote lectures by Susanne Kord and W. Daniel Wilson. We are grateful to all the speakers and attendees at that event, and to Katrin Kohl for her suggestion that it should be a springboard for a further project. This themed volume was launched as many academics from across the UK and US kindly offered us their work, from which we were only able to accept a selection. We thank them, the nine peer reviewers, and the in-house team at Oxford German Studies, who assisted us in preparing the issue for print.

SMW, Jesus College, Oxford

WDW, Royal Holloway, University of London

Notes

1 Javier Marías, All Souls, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 67.

2 In the words of Peter Hall, ‘the formal rules, compliance procedures, and standard operating practices that structure the relationship between individuals in various units of the polity and economy.’ Peter Hall, Governing the Economy (Oxford: OUP, 1986), p. 19.

3 Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. x.

4 Ibid., p. ix.

5 Ibid., p. xii.

6 Notably for German literature, Theodore Ziolkowski’s German Literature and Its Institutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

7 Allen Chun, ‘The Institutional Unconscious; or, The Prison House of Academia’ Boundary 2, 27·1 (2000), 51-74 (p. 53).