The End of Slavonic Studies in Germany?

Rostock, Marburg, Bonn, Mannheim, Saarbrücken, Bielefeldt, Münster, Erlangen-Norimberk and, since 1 February, also my alma mater, Frankfurt – all these universities have closed down their departments of Slavonic studies since the unification of Germany.  The country total has gone down from thirty-five institutes to twenty-six. It all happened rather unexpectedly. Following the rise of Gorbachov, the end of the division of Europe and the subsequent integration of some Slavonic states into NATO and the EU German Slavists had hoped that a new era was dawning for our field. Our hope was that the opening of the borders would help increase the significance of our subject and its social prestige, swelling the ranks of students. However, things have turned out rather differently. One of the consequences of German unification were holes in the budgets of Germany’’s states.

 

University funding was reduced and as university administrations started looking for savings, the Slavonic departments were an easy target. Surely we can manage without knowing about our Eastern neighbours!? Slavonic studies have two structural disadvantages: firstly, they attract relatively small numbers of students compared with Romance or English studies, and secondly, they require a large number of teachers.  Our new higher education fetish – the student-teacher ratio –  is staring us in the face with contempt. How does one respond if asked why it is that Slavonic studies need so many lectors if a single English lector – overstating it a little – can cope with far greater student numbers and a much larger area comprising Britain, Canada and the US, as well as Australia?  This question may show a lack of awareness of the realities behind the mental iron curtain but it is one you can hardly openly address to the university leadership.

However, what I find much more worrying when talking to the administrators (and I hope this is not just my Slavonic hypersensitivity) is that they tend to ask if it really isn’’t rather up to you, i.e. you Slavs, to learn German and whether the object of our scholarship is really worthwhile.

It seems that the field Slavonic studies in our country was shielded by the Cold War. We had to take you Slavs seriously since you threatened us with SS-20 missiles. And by the way, this is not a purely German phenomenon: colleagues at Glasgow University in Britain have also been fighting to preserve their Slavonic department.

Let us recap:  low significance, zero appreciation. And what about students? The backbone of Slavonic studies is Russia. Its media image is directly reflected in our student numbers. These swelled dramatically thanks to the hype surrounding Gorbachev. Now on the other hand, the growing crime rate in Russia and the faltering development of democratic structures under Putin have made the subject shockingly less attractive. Few German school leavers are willing to tie their personal future to Russia.

The salvation came from the East, with the wave of repatriation of the so-called Russian Germans and the Jewish emigration from the Community of Independent States, to Germany. This was followed by the influx of au-pairs from all over the former Eastern bloc. As a result, classes in Slavonic departments have filled up again but over 85 per cent of our enrollment is now made up of native speakers of one Slavonic language or another. It was around 1995 that I gave my first introductory lecture in Russian linguistics as the solitary German, surrounded by Russian-speaking students… A further challenge for German Slavonic studies was the varying level of knowledge among our students: a German student, one who has only just taken up his first Slavonic language after graduating from secondary school where he learned next to nothing about Eastern Europe, might be seated next to one who completed his secondary education in Moscow or Prague. How to teach them together and respond to their differing demands? What is boring for the one will be too demanding for the other. And how to assess their attainment? One has gaps in the language(s) being studied, the other in the language of tuition, i.e. German. The teacher has to master the complex art of balancing wildly differing levels.

But it could have been worse. A Slavonic department might have found among its students our former Minister of Defence and plagiarist supreme, Karl-Theodor, Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg.

 

Translation: Julia Sherwood

The article appeared in the Orientace, a supplement to the Czech daily Lidové noviny.