The Latest at Goethe

Mumbai, Chicago, Singapore, Munich – Hans-Georg Knopp knows cultures as he does culture. Today, the world citizen and secretary-general of the Goethe-Institut has every reason to celebrate. By Michael Jeismann

The new year of 2010 must have seemed like a finishing tape to him, which he is finally crossing after the long race of reform named “Goethe 09.” Almost simultaneously, today the secretary-general of the Goethe-Institut, Hans-Georg Knopp, also reached the biographical “lap” of his 65th birthday. This harmony between the institution and the individual is not a mere coincidence of dates.

In fact, it characterizes a career that never obstructed the view of the person behind it, but, on the contrary, has allowed that person to fully develop their talents. Following diversified studies of Indian, Arabic and Persian, sociology and political science at the universities in Tübingen, Vienna, Marburg and Giessen, which he completed with a doctorate in 1974, Hans-Georg Knopp began working at the Goethe-Institut Mumbai.

This step took him right into the middle of a world the main features of which were hybrid; although they weren’t called that yet back then. The British influence had spread itself atop some aspects of public and social life like powdered sugar; below it, though, there was a whole world to discover whose practically ungraspable polymorphism must have awakened a kaleidoscopic interest.

This kind of interest and awareness are some of the chief traits of Hans-Georg Knopp. His attention for what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “distinctions” – but on the scale of a major world culture, distinctions that make up the norm and everyday occurrences – were surely formative fundamental experiences in India, leading him to develop his sense of the new and of new constellations of the known, his sense for dialogue and his ability to bring people together.

Whether in Colombo, Jakarta, Singapore or Chicago, his further stops on the Goethe pathway, in none of them did he seek the monochrome. For him, this also means that there is no culture without conflict. It is precisely this productive yet dangerous seesaw that Hans-Georg Knopp considers one of the core functions of cultural mediators. The balance requires inner equilibrium, naturally, so it is not surprising to learn that Hans-Georg Knopp practices yoga daily.

It’s not a matter of life or death; however his concern for creating spaces for communication and for better self-understanding has shaped the character of the institutions for which he has worked. This is primarily illustrated in his almost ten years with the House of World Cultures. There, he had the job – as difficult as it was fascinating – of shaping foreign cultural policy on domestic soil.

At the House of World Cultures, Knopp brilliantly mastered the job of taking the foreign or otherness and revealing and employing it in dialogue as a means for perceiving the world and one’s self, where in spite of all yearning for the wide world, the local and what we are familiar with are still the most highly rated. The conditions for this were favourable since the House of World Cultures was just the right size so that inspiration, ideas and proposals could be implemented quickly. In addition he was one of the first to replace the somewhat naïve-seeming multiculti approaches in cultural exchange with the reflexion of the consequences of globalization.

Hans-Georg Knopp was able to keep this spirit alive when he was appointed secretary-general of the Goethe-Institut in 2005. Without his strength for mastering new situations he, together with Jürgen Maier, would have hardly been able to navigate the difficult course that the Goethe-Institut had to take. There was no lack of detractors, but with his very own flexible perseverance, Hans-Georg Knopp was able to ensure that the Goethe-Institut and its institutional and programmatic independence and substance has better footing today than ever before.

New programme fields were developed and promising alliances were commenced. The fact that reaching retirement age does not mean a farewell to the office of secretary-general is a happy biographical distinction in which Knopp’s vitality and stimulating power effectively find their official expression.