Academy and Studying in Germany

Former Samuel Fischer Guest Professors at Berlin’s Free University include Feridun Zaimoglu, Raoul Schrott and Kenzaburo Oe. The guest professorship programme is intended to further critical reflection on world literatures, and the authors often take a highly original approach to their teaching – it is quite conceivable for seminars to take the form of telephone conferences or talk shows.

The Samuel Fischer Guest Professorship programme is based at the Peter-Szondi-Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (i.e. Department of Comparative Literature), and was established as a public-private partnership, a concept that is becoming increasingly popular at German universities. It is jointly sponsored by the Free University (FU) of Berlin, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Holtzbrinck publishing group and S. Fischer Verlag (part of the Holtzbrinck group). The programme is named after Samuel Fischer, the Jewish founder of the publishing house.

“The DAAD pays the professor’s grant and travel expenses”, explains Professor Oliver Lubrich, who takes care of the programme together with Professor Gert Mattenklott. “The FU provides everything needed on site and for the purposes of teaching, while we at the Department of Comparative Literature make an office and an apartment available to our guests.” The Veranstaltungsforum of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group organizes, communicates and takes responsibility for devising and developing public events.

Teaching freedom enjoyed by the guests

These events tend to take place at prominent venues in Berlin. In 1999, for instance, the House of World Cultures presented a lecture by Nobel Literature Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, who came again to mark the tenth anniversary in 2008. The Californian Robert Hass made an appearance at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, and Cairo-born Nora Amin took the stage at Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre. For the seminars led by the authors, in which students can also acquire credits, rooms are provided in the FU’s main building, known colloquially as the “rust bucket”. The guest professors are free to decide for themselves how they organize these weekly teaching events, which also offer an opportunity for students to consult the professors.

The visiting professors are happy to take advantage of this freedom, which lets them teach as they see fit, and employ their methods of choice. For example, for each of the seminars in his “The Universe of the Beginning” series, Hungarian author Laszlo Krasnahorkai staged a live telephone interview with a writer of international repute. Etgar Keret from Israel introduced his students to the practical aspects of creative writing, and subsequently published their best short stories as a book. Feridun Zaimoglu, in turn, used the entertainment value offered by literature in his lectures: he invited guests from the world of literature and media such as Maxim Biller, Maybrit Illner, Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre and Moritz von Uslar to take part in a talk show debate under the banner “Literature to Go”.

Theory and practice

An academic approach is also possible, however. In the 1999 summer semester, Congolese writer and scholar V. Y. Mudimbe – the second Samuel Fischer Guest Professor – gave a seminar on the theories of difference. On Berlin’s streets, he then experienced at first hand the sad effects of difference: “I walk up Clayallee one late afternoon”, he writes in one of his texts. “At the Garystrasse crossing, right opposite Oskar-Helene-Heim station, I encounter a look full of pure hatred. What should I say? I can neither start nor understand a conversation.”

These are the words Mudimbe used to describe his experience of xenophobia in a book entitled Berlin Hüttenweg. Stadt erzählen (i.e. Berlin Hüttenweg. A Story of a City), in which other guest professors – Vladimir Sorokin from Russia, Sergio Ramirez from Nicaragua, Yann Martel from Spain, Michèle Métail from France and Marlene Streeruwitz from Austria – also wrote about how they felt about the city of Berlin, the university environment and their guest semester (not all of their experiences were bad, incidentally). In most cases, the guest professors portray Berlin, the city of literature, in a cosmopolitan and global light.

The pointlessness of a “defining culture”

The Samuel Fischer Guest Professorship highlights the extent to which the FU Berlin emphasizes the transnational and international dimension of the humanities. “Defining cultures are the pointless inventions of intellectuals and politicians who overestimate their own importance and that of culture, as if searching in a theatre’s lost property box for props with which to perform outmoded repertory theatre in order to save their own hides”, stresses Gert Mattenklott, for example. And his colleague Oliver Lubrich notes that the guest professorship poses no threat to conventional chairs in philology, despite many of these having been abolished at the FU Berlin since the mid 1990s – on the contrary: “They complement what is already on offer by providing content that normally would not or could not be made available.”

The Samuel Fischer Guest Professorship is one of three similar programmes in place at the Department of Comparative Literature which seek to open up the discipline in terms of discourse and methods. The other two are the Heiner Müller Guest Professorship for Literature and the August Wilhelm von Schlegel Guest Professorship for Poetry in Translation. These likewise offer students the chance to acquire credits; only final dissertations cannot be supervised by the guest professors.