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COLUMBIA FORUM

Reclaiming the Language of Democracy

The Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Andreas Huyssen, received the 44th annual Mark Van Doren Award for Great Teaching for “humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership” on May 5 at Faculty House. This award, given annually to one professor, is bestowed by an Academic Awards Committee of students, who met throughout the year to discuss candidates.

Professor Andreas Huyssen in his Hamilton Hall office. The 2005 Mark Van Doren Award (with crown) is at his left. PHOTO: LISA PALLADINO

A former chair of the Germanic languages department (1986–92), and chair again as of this year, Huyssen recently directed the newly founded Center for Comparative Literature and Society. He is one of the founding editors of New German Critique, the leading journal of German Studies in the United States and he serves on the editorial boards of October, Constellations and Germanic Review. Huyssen’s research and teaching focus on 18th–20th century German literature and culture, international modernism, Frankfurt School critical theory, postmodernism, cultural memory of historical trauma in transnational contexts, and, most recently, urban culture and globalization. He has published widely in German and English, and his work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Japanese and Chinese.

Huyssen currently is preparing a volume on the culture of non-Western cities resulting from the Sawyer Seminar he taught at Columbia, “Globalizing Cities and Urban Imaginaries.” He also is working on a book project on modernist miniatures, a little-studied experimental form of modernist writing, widespread in French and German modernism from Baudelaire to Rilke and Benn, Kafka, Kracauer and Benjamin.

Here are Huyssen’s remarks in accepting the Mark Van Doren Award.

To receive a teaching award is a high point in any teacher’s life. To be awarded Columbia’s Mark Van Doren Award is even more special because it comes directly from the student body and because the formidable list of past winners can only be an inspiration to live up to the high standard and great tradition this award represents. I accept it with great pleasure and pride, but also with an acute sense that this award stands for Columbia’s commitment to ambitious and challenging teaching in general to which all faculty, teaching assistants and part-time teachers remain dedicated.

I would like to say a few words about one of the lecture classes from which my nomination for this award emerged. It was a 4000-level undergraduate/graduate class on the Frankfurt School, “Aesthetics Under Siege.” We read famously difficult texts by Lukács and Bloch, Kracauer, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno — texts that deal with the fate of art and literature, music and philosophy, film, photography and the media at a time of growing illiberalism, censorship, and outright cultural intimidation and persecution in the earlier 20th century. Close readings of these texts allowed us to discuss key issues of 20th century aesthetics such as the interwar debates about realism and modernism in literature and the visual arts, about abstract versus committed art, about the socially liberatory or manipulative functioning of the culture industry, about state and society, and about the possibilities of enlightenment in dark times.

In order to make sense of the deep pessimism — a pessimism sometimes bordering on despair in Benjamin’s last essays or Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment — I insisted on the need to read these works as closely tied up with their times: the times of the rise of national socialism and Stalinism. Only then would we discuss how aspects of this theoretical work might pertain to our postmodern present 50 and more years later. I have taught this class since I came to Columbia in 1986, and it has always attracted a diverse group of students from different disciplines and from several schools. I never imagined that a time would come in which this work would begin to resonate deeply with the political and cultural present in the United States. But this was my experience of teaching this material last fall semester, and the queries and concerns of the students reinforced a sense of worry and foreboding.

Something happened in class discussions that had not happened in earlier years. As someone who since the 1960s and the Vietnam War has always (in Europe and in the U.S.) rejected facile parallels between the collapse of Weimar (let alone the Third Reich) and the United States, I came to worry about certain pressing analogies — analogies with differences to be sure, but analogies nevertheless — between the current political culture war in this country and the German scene of the late Weimar Republic. Liberalism was a dirty word then as it is now. Democratic secularism and enlightenment at that time faced an onslaught from national socialism as a political religion as it is under attack by a religious politics today. The media were increasingly shifting to the right as Hugenberg, the right wing media tycoon, extended his media empire, and the attacks on the freedom of speech and the freedom of research and teaching in the academy mounted already in the years before Hitler was appointed chancellor. Civility turned first to incivility, then to violence. All of it was accompanied by lexical transformations.

Observers of political language in this country have in recent years often pointed to George Orwell’s “newspeak,” but it might be equally instructive to reread Victor Klemperer’s Lingua Tertii Imperii to understand how democratic institutions are first and foremost undermined by the voiding of established meanings and the insidious redeployment of cherished words. This, after all, is the domain of the humanist, and it may well be necessary to reclaim the language of democracy, life and freedom, even the language of balance and fairness from its abusers today.

Humanists are the guardians of language, and language does matter in describing good teaching. So let me say this: Ambitious and challenging teaching has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of balance, fairness or comprehensiveness that is so aggressively demanded of us these days by the self-appointed watchdogs of the academy. It has to do with intellectual passion, with a reasoned point of view and with the search for the truth rather than its self-confident transmission. In my field of literary and cultural studies, teaching is about making the dead letter of past writings come alive in the heads of our students, and with encouraging the students’ sense of possibility, Möglichkeitssinn, as Austrian novelist Robert Musil once called it. Balance and comprehensiveness in teaching are at best recipes for boredom. I happily confess: I’ve never been balanced in my teaching, and I simply don’t know enough to be comprehensive.

When I first taught the Frankfurt School after coming to Columbia in 1986, it gave me goose bumps — the goose bumps of having become part of something much larger, part of a historical tradition. Remember that the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research had been given a home in exile by the generosity of Columbia’s President Nicholas Murray Butler in 1934, and the Institute remained on West 117th Street well through the war and beyond until it relocated back in Frankfurt in the 1950s. Decades later, in 1989, Leo Löwenthal, the cultural sociologist and one of the last surviving members of the “first generation” of the Frankfurt School, came back to Columbia to deliver the keynote lecture in a conference that my department had organized on the work of Siegfried Kracauer, his close friend from their Frankfurt days.

Kracauer had spent many of his exile years writing about film in the film archives of the Museum of Modern Art and died relatively unknown in this country in the mid-1960s. But neither Löwenthal or Kracauer, Adorno or Horkheimer, ever had a teaching presence at Columbia. The Institute — genuinely cross-disciplinary between social sciences and humanities — was a research operation only. Thus, I feel privileged today to have been able to represent this important tradition of German intellectual life in my classes at the very institution that offered these refugees shelter in exile, and to have received the Mark Van Doren Award for making this tradition come alive for my students.

Some of you may think that as a native German, I may be prone to seeing apocalyptic scenarios. But ethnicity is not everything. What I take away from my upbringing in Cold War Europe and from my readings of these most pessimistic traditions of German thought and criticism is this: The traditions of liberalism and the democratic enlightenment, which secular though it may be is not per se anti-religious, must be asserted anew, and not just defensively. How to do this is the big question today. My students kept pressing me on this matter last semester, and I thank them for it. Aware as they were of the problematic drift in this country and in the world, they did not want to buy into the pessimism of the dialectic of the enlightenment. For me, that was a sign of hope and proof that teaching can have its best unintended effects when the teacher does not have all the answers.

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