German Democratic Republic Studies in the United States
These mostly interdisciplinary studies on the German Democratic Republic (GDR) originated in German studies and research on Eastern Europe in respect first to literature and later to politics in the 1960s.
From the establishment of the GDR in 1949 to the 1960s, the research topic GDR was relatively unknown to American scholars and not represented in the curriculum of American universities because the country was treated neither in West European studies, where the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was covered, nor in East European studies. The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 served as catalyst for the slowly evolving academic interest in research on the GDR. Before the mid-1960s, participation of East German scholars in conferences in Western Europe and North America was nearly impossible because of the travel restrictions imposed by the East German government. Propelled by John Dornberg’s The Other Germany (1968), Jean Edwards Smith’s Germany beyond the Wall (1969), and David Childs’s East Germany (1969), research on the GDR took off in the time of detente, starting with an increased interest in literature. At the end of 1973, the interdisciplinary journal New German Critique was founded, with a special issue on the GDR being published in the following year after U.S. recognition of the GDR as a sovereign state. The 1974 annual conference of the American Association ofTeachers of German was the first academic conference that focused exclusively on GDR topics; followed by a symposium on GDR literature in St. Louis, Missouri, “The Humanities and Socialism: The GDR in the 1960s and 1970s”; and a GDR symposium at the World Fellowship Center in Conway, New Hampshire, which grew into an interdisciplinary, annual symposium. The proceedings of the Conway symposiums were published as GDR Studies in Culture and Society each year. Washington University’s German Department founded the GDR Bulletin, which updated the growing number of those researching on GDR topics on recent developments in this field. The University of Kansas even installed an area studies program focusing on the GDR.Public financial support increased after U.S. recognition of the GDR in 1974. The International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), which was founded in 1968 by the American Council of Learned Societies to negotiate exchanges with Socialist and other countries, supported study trips to the GDR from 1975 onward. The East German Academy of Sciences signed a treaty with the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1978. Universities agreed to establish exchange programs (Rostock- Brown, RI; Leipzig-Kent, OH; East Berlin-Minneapolis; Jena-Colby College). A 1977 survey lists 140 German departments that offered GDR literature and/or GDR culture. By then, the GDR was fully integrated into the syllabus of most German departments.
Changes in the relations between East and West, along with Erich Honecker’s “coalition of reason” and moderate attempts for a more independent policy, attracted the interest of the U.S. government and strengthened the GDR among American researchers. In 1983, the year of the celebration of 300 years of German emigration to the United States, the first international social sciences conference presenting a comparative perspective on the GDR was convened by Charles R. Foster (Conference Group on German Politics) and Michael Sodaro (George Washington University/ Washington, D.C.). The immediate result of this conference was the founding of the German Democratic Studies Association of the United States. With the support of the FRG, the American Institute for Contemporary Studies was opened at Johns Hopkins University, which targeted the study of
the FRG but included studies of developments in the GDR. Despite cuts in the federal funding of the study of Eastern Europe and the GDR in the mid-1980s, the study of GDR literature was blooming at Ohio State University, Rutgers University, and the universities of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, mostly places with large German-speaking communities.
Christiane Rosch
See also Berlin Wall; Fulbright Program;
German Students at American Universities
References and Further Reading
Mallinckrodt, Anita M. Research on the GDR ‘auf English’: Research of East German Affairs and Their Studies in English-Language Countries. Washington: Mallinckrodt Communications Research, 1984.
McCarthy, John M. “German Studies in the USA.” The USA and Germany in the Era of the Cold War: A Handbook. Ed. Detlef Junker. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.