MY TRAJECTORY IN THE AMERICAN ACADEMY, totally haphazard in its beginning, was always tentative at the time when it unfolded, tentative and contingent rather than somehow logical and telos-driven, as it may appear in retrospective delusion. And it remains tentative and full of gaps now in its narrative formulation. But some facts are not in dispute.

Having studied German and Romance languages and literatures at various universities across Western Europe, including Paris, Madrid, Cologne, Munich, and finally Zurich, I finished with comprehensive doctoral exams in Zurich in early 1969. My reason for choosing Zurich was simple: Romance literatures were taught there in the target language, not in German. My dissertation advisor was Emil Staiger, my main mentor in French literature the phenomenologist Georges Poulet. Paul de Man had a partial appointment in Zurich and lectured on Rousseau at the time. Among us graduate students, methodological and political issues had begun to surface, even in Zurich, by 1967/68. We read Hildegard Brenner's alternative, not the PMLA. The glaciers of traditional Germanistik and Romanistik had begun to melt. My still very traditionally framed dissertation on German romantic translation theory and the utopia of a German world literature was rejected for publication by Peter Szondi in his then new book series published with Metzler, but enthusiastically accepted by Staiger and published in his Zurich dissertation series, the Züricher Beiträge. In retrospect I have to say: Szondi was right. The dissertation would have needed serious revisions and a sharper theoretical focus.

So there I was—Zurich, spring 1969, 26 years old. The Beatles told me: “Get back to where you once belonged.” But having finished my studies outside of Germany with only five early semesters of study at German universities, re-entry into the German academic world seemed difficult. An inquiry in 1970 with a famous Heine scholar in my hometown Düsseldorf would put the idea to rest forever. “If you're globetrotting the world, as you do, you cannot expect to be taken in just like that by a German university,” he said. “Unsere eigenen Studenten sind uns dann doch näher.” Plausible, but strange coming from a Heine expert.

IN SOME OF MY PAST WORK on the visual arts I have addressed ways in which Holocaust memory, together with its images and tropes, has migrated into other geographic, political, and historical contexts—into Argentinean memorial projects and Marcelo Brodsky's photo work, into installations by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo and Polish artist Miroslav Balka, and into literary and visual work on the Indian Partition in Anita Desai's fiction and Nalini Malani's video-shadow plays. Such migrations of discourse fragments into non-related later contexts are not to be seen as equations of the Holocaust with other traumatic events and experiences. They rather testify to the powerful model of Holocaust discourse for attempts to come to terms with histories of genocide and state terror elsewhere in the world. In each case the memory politics are different, requiring linguistic and historical knowledge that does not come easy to Germanists. But the centrality of the Holocaust in current memory, genocide, and human rights debates across the world has made a geographic expansion of German studies unavoidable, while at the same time posing practical challenges and difficulties for deep transnational understanding and analysis. There is cognitive and political gain to be had if German studies moves beyond the Holocaust memory bubble and its national confines. Much comparative and transnational work is currently being done in our field. Just as international artists work increasingly out of the ruins of European modernism these days, the issues raised by Holocaust memory now have a global field of resonance, often conflictual, polemical, and politically loaded. This is where German studies can intervene and establish links to other geographic and disciplinary fields. The increasingly transnational dimension of Holocaust studies must never ignore the specifically German dimension of the Holocaust, which continues to haunt German postwar generations and German politics to this day. But in the context of ongoing genocides, ethnic cleansings, and massacres in our own time, the recourse to theories of uniqueness and unrepresentability, so strong still in the 1990s, has become counterproductive to a deep understanding of memory politics in our world.

In a Spiegel review of Kluge's 1977 Neue Geschichten (New Stories), his most voluminous and ambitious collection of stories to date, Hans Magnus Enzensberger said something that ten years later still has the ring of truth: ‘Among well- known German authors Kluge is the least well-known'. Least well-known in this case means well-known, but not widely read. It seems that Kluge's unique versatility as film-maker and film politician, social theorist and storyteller has hampered rather than enhanced the reception of his literary works. Many people will have seen one or the other of Kluge's many films, and there is a lively and growing debate about formal and political aspects of his film-making. For the past fifteen years, his theoretical works, coauthored with Oskar Negt, have played an important role in the German discourse of social and cultural theory. But comparatively little serious work has been done on his storytelling. Many of the early reviews of his stories betrayed, more than anything else, the perplexity and helplessness of the critical establishment, and there seems to be a shared assumption that Kluge's ‘primary’ medium is cinema. Surely, the resistance to Kluge's literary texts has something to do with the ways in which these texts consistently and programmatically disappoint readers’ expectations. But it also reflects the simple fact that even people interested in contemporary cultural production are more likely to submit themselves to the demands of a ninety- minute Kluge film than to spend several days working through hundreds of pages of seemingly unconnected, discontinuous stories which systematically prevent reader identification and frustrate the pleasures of literariness. Despite the studied simplicity of style, the demands Kluge's stories make on the reader are no less intense than those his films make on their spectator. It is not only that Kluge's filmic or literary texts resemble construction sites, as has often been said. The very structure of his writing is designed to transform the reader's head into a construction site.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge occupies a singular position in the history of modernist prose. Rilke's only 'novel', written in the Paris years during a pivotal crisis of the poet's creative imagination and finished with some difficulty far from Paris, is fundamentally concerned with issues of poetic language, vision and imagination. It tells the story of Malte, a twenty-eight-year-old aristocratic Dane whose artistic aspirations bring him to Paris, where he begins to record his life crisis, experiences and memories in a series of diary-like notations. However, Rilke soon abandons the fictional convention of telling the story of an individual bound by a defined space and by chronological time. Especially in the second part, fictional plot gives way to a series of literary and historical reflections that push the work toward allegory and essayism rather than providing narrative and plot. Read in light of this second part, even the first, more directly narrative section of the text, which is focused on Malte's traumatic reactions to city life, appears less like a novel and more like a concatenation of narrative fragments and miniatures not primarily controlled by a storyline, but by a consciousness and subjectivity in crisis.

Thus it makes sense that Rilke should draw on the convention of the diary form. But here, too, the suggestion of a sequential diary is abandoned as soon as it is introduced. There is only one conventional diary heading, the one on the first page: ‘September 11, rue Toullier’. After that, the reader’s expectation of a stable progression in time and space is again undermined. The informed reader soon begins to wonder to what extent the figure of Malte serves as a screen for the writer himself – Rilke in Paris, his own life crisis as a poet, his sense of alienation and estranged perception, of ego loss or ego dispersal – all displaced and rewritten as the life crisis of an other, a fictional figure.