Workshop Panel I: Cultural Histories of Intimacy aaaaaView Papers aaaaaaa

From Freud and Simmel to Elias and Frevert, German intellectuals have pondered the role of intimacy in human affairs. In German, the words “Vertrautheit” and “Intimität” convey different dimensions of this word, which highlights the ambiguity of this historically constructed concept. Recently, scholars in German Studies have re-discovered this concept as a rich terrain for investigating the boundaries between “public” and “private” spheres across centuries of social interaction and cultural meaning.

We encourage papers that take multiple approaches to intimacy in German Studies. Since the history of intimacy is most obviously a history of private life, of bourgeois love, marriage, and sexuality, submissions might address the history of the senses and emotions and the role of intimacy in gender and family relations. Intimacy does more, however, than connect family, friends, and lovers. It is fundamental to a variety of relationships of interpersonal cooperation and conflict, to investigations of others and otherness that produce power/knowledge structures (e.g., in interactions between colonialists and colonized, scholars and subjects, cultural producers and audiences). And although intimacy begins in the close spaces of interpersonal contact, the practices associated with the expression of closeness and affection invite us to move beyond the personal and problematize the borders between public and private, modern and early modern, local, national, and global. Intimacy thus offers a way to rethink conventional chronologies and geographies. Is intimacy a strictly modern phenomenon, or is it related to eighteenth-century cults of sentimentalism and sensibility? Can one speak of increasing intimacy (or the lack thereof) across space and time?

Workshop Panel III: Transnational Germany aaaallllllaaaView Papers

The transnational turn in German studies is well underway. At the 2006 German Studies Association meeting in Pittsburgh, issues of the global, the transnational, the transcultural, and the postcolonial were at the forefront of discussion, even in panels not explicitly dedicated to such topics. In his keynote address “Where Germans Dwell: Transnationalism in Theory and Practice,” the historian Michael Geyer identified an emerging consensus among scholars that beyond national and international histories, there is such a thing as transnational history. That history considers those “actors, movements and forces that cross boundaries and cut or fuse into the political, economic, social, or cultural fabric of nations, peoples, or lands.” According to Geyer, “the wager of transnational history . . . is that even the most parochial and inward-turned worlds are imbricated in other worlds of action and imagination that range beyond parish or nation.”

The project of transnational history holds a special potential for students of German history and culture. It has long been recognized that the boundaries of “Germanness” never coincided with the boundaries of a single state, and that German projects of nation-building have involved the exclusion of peoples, cultures, and territories with a claim to being German. Add to this the post-war experience of Germany as a divided, semi-colonized territory, crisscrossed by the commodities, ideologies, and weapons systems of the competing superpowers while at the same participating actively in the global market of labor, jobs, goods, and ideas, and it is unsurprising that so many Germanists in recent years have made the transnational turn.

We invite position papers that explore the transnational aspects of German history and culture from the eighteenth century to the present. In particular, we are interested in how a transnational approach causes us to rethink long-standing debates about the relationship between domestic and international affairs in German history; the role of German corporations, business elites, and venture capitalists in the development of German colonialism and in the post-colonial era of globalization; questions of religion, race, and nationalism; the experience and impact of the war, colonialism, and genocide; post-war projects of “Americanization” and “democratization;” and the relationship between emigrant, exile, or export notions of “Germanness” and those of the German “homeland.”