Abstract
What does it mean to teach German as a foreign language in a US classroom? What is foreign and what is not, who is foreign and who is not, who is an insider and who is an outsider? This essay serves to decolonize German Studies by bringing a Critical Whiteness Studies perspective to the field of second language acquisition and into the German classroom. The two parts of this essay address theoretical considerations drawn from critical pedagogy and critical theory, in particular Critical Whiteness Studies and offer concrete activities for an intermediate or advanced German classroom that highlights the importance of reflectivity and positionality. In a multi-class lesson focused on the concepts of Ausländer, Heimat, Leitkultur, and Repräsentation as seen through the films Yes I Am! (Sven Halfar, 2007) and Ausländer raus! Schlingensiefs Container (Paul Poet, 2002) students will explore competing discourses about foreignness in diverse German-language contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
Later in the essay we will address distinctions between German Studies and Germanistik as fields of inquiry.
- 2.
A description of the meeting and texts of the talks given was published as Verhandlungen der Germanisten zu Frankfurt am Main am 24., 25. und 26. September 1846 (Sauerländer, 1847). Many of the participants went on participate in the Frankfurter Nationalversammlung during the 1848 revolution.
- 3.
Wolf D. Hund uses this example to open his recent history of race and racialization in Germany, Wie die Deutschen weiß wurden: Kleine (Heimat)Geschichte des Rassismus (Metzler 2017).
- 4.
Most published research on critical pedagogy and Critical Whiteness Studies comes from the fields of English as a second language and teacher education, rather than second language acquisition.
- 5.
This is addressed directly on day three of the lesson.
- 6.
Sarah Eigen and Mark Larrimore’s edited volume The German Invention of Race (SUNY, 2006) argues for the importance of German-language thinkers of the Enlightenment like Herder in contributing to modern conceptions of race. Sven Halfar’s Yes I Am! discusses the Brothers Keepers and Sisters Keepers album Lightkultur, a play on the idea of Leitkultur (1:29:59–1:31:37). Days two and five of the lesson deal with conceptions of language and nationalism.
- 7.
The phrase “Sprache ist der Schlüssel zur Integration” comes up frequently in discussions of immigration to Germany. It also appears in Paul Poet’s film, where the container roommates take German lessons every morning (25:55–26:10).
- 8.
The business world sometimes talks about “productive friction,” a term coined by John Hagel and John Seely Brown in a 2005 Harvard Business Review article.
- 9.
Storch’s tweet was very controversial, prompting a suspension of her Twitter account and a criminal complaint, documented in an article in Spiegel Online on January 1, 2018.
- 10.
Melanie Bee also notes in her essay that she was advised she didn’t need to take an Integrationskurs when she migrated to Germany: “The reason I’m not seen as a migrant in need of integration is because I’m white, middle-class, and well-educated” (2013, p. 2).
- 11.
The concept of Heimat is discussed at length in the first day of the lesson.
- 12.
See, for example, the discussion in Celia Applegate’s A Nation of Provincials (pp. 2–10).
- 13.
For a more critical take on Heimat see Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum, edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah (2019), Gabriele Eichmanns and Yvonne Franke’s Heimat Goes Mobile: Hybrid Forms of Home in Literature and Film (2013) and Olaf Kühne and Antje Schönwald’s “Identität, Heimat sowie In- und Exklusion: Aspekte der sozialen Konstruktion von Eigenem und Fremdem als Herausforderung des Migrationszeitalters,” in Internationalisierung der Gesellschaft und die Auswirkungen auf die Raumentwicklung Beispiele aus Hessen, Rheinland-Pfalz und dem Saarland, edited by Birte Nienaber and Ursula Roos (2015).
- 14.
According to the Office of the University Registrar: www.registrar.wustl.edu/student-information-systems/student-enrollment-and-graduation-statistics/student-body-diversity/.
- 15.
According to the University Provost: www.provost.wustl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/WU-Faculty-Diversity-Detail-Snapshot-Fall-2017.pdf.
- 16.
25% of students who take German in the German department in Fall 2018 are international students, which is slightly more than the international student enrollment of 18.87% of WashU’s total enrollment in Fall 2018.
- 17.
More detailed information about the project can be found on Schlingensief’s website: http://www.schlingensief.com/backup/wienaktion/.
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Gallagher, M., Zenker, C. (2020). Decolonizing the Mental Lexicon: Critical Whiteness Studies Perspectives in the Language Classroom. In: Criser, R., Malakaj, E. (eds) Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34342-2_7
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