German in the world: a new vision
The endowment of the Schwarz–Taylor Chair is supporting a powerful vision to give the study of German greater relevance, weight and visibility across the globe.
If ever there was a moment to champion the richness, breadth and value of studying German language, literature and culture, it’s now. German is the operational language for many important global businesses and the native language of around 130 million people worldwide. Despite this, there has been a dramatic downturn in the study of German and the humanities in general over the last 20 years. Brexit has created additional challenges and university departments in the UK must now work harder not only to maintain their connections with European counterparts, but also to provide more targeted support to address the declining number of students graduating with a degree in German.
Oxford’s Schwarz–Taylor Chair of the German Language and Literature is one of the oldest and most prestigious German chairs anywhere. It sits at the centre of a German department that is celebrated for being among the most active in the English-speaking world. The post was fully secured in 2022 by the Dieter Schwarz Foundation, an organisation whose future-forward spirit is very much in evidence at the University: as well as investing in German, it is supporting an ambitious programme of research and new posts dedicated to investigating the impact of AI and other game-changing technologies at the Oxford Internet Institute.
It is particularly apt, then, that embracing the future is at the top of the incumbent chair’s agenda. Professor Karen Leeder is overseeing a wide-ranging new strategic vision for German at Oxford. ‘We’re not going to abandon our traditional strengths of close attention to history, texts and literature,’ she reassures, ‘but it’s about looking above the parapet. This chair can bring German departments together. It gives Oxford visibility and acts as a way of networking in this country and internationally.’
A 2002 decision to scrap the compulsory study of a language at Key Stage 4 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has resulted in significantly reduced language teaching provision in schools and fewer than half of students studying a single foreign language to GCSE level. This is hitting university language departments hard. In response, Oxford now offers a German degree for students who have never studied the subject before. There is clearly demand: the capacity on this route has doubled in the last year alone and it’s now also possible to study German from scratch jointly with, for example, English, history or philosophy.
Professor Karen Leeder in the Taylor Institution Library, which is dedicated to the study of modern European languages and literature. Photo by Oxford Atelier
Underpinning this successful development is the work of the Senior Lecturer in Beginners’ German. A new donation from the Dieter Schwarz Foundation has secured the post for the next six years, while a further commitment has been made by the foundation to endow two new graduate scholarships in German. On funding master’s students, Professor Leeder says: ‘That one year is often where we lose people, so it’s very important. People from all over the world want to come here and we just don’t have enough funding.’
Access routes and scholarships form only part of the picture: content is key. ‘We’ve got to reshape the curriculum for the 21st century and take German into the broader creative economy,’ Professor Leeder says. Her decades of experience and skills are a perfect fit to make this happen and recent activity includes visiting schools with a German poet, performance artist and rapper; bringing different writers to festivals and events in the UK; making radio programmes; and working with the BBC to encourage more German programming.
Already there have been significant moves to place present-day themes at the heart of German at Oxford. ‘We have to look for the synergies with larger, urgent agendas and connect up. So, environmental humanities, medical humanities… these are the sorts of directions we need to take the subject in to link with where the energy is,’ says Professor Leeder. ‘We’ve created a new palette of master’s courses and have been very successful at attracting interest, with between 25 and 30 master’s students a year – more than any other language. It’s a very lively cohort, at the cutting edge of the discipline, bringing all kinds of ideas and enthusiasm.’
‘What I’d like for the future is to secure German and to support all these graduates and the brilliant people here that we need’
A new master’s in creative translation is being developed, which will include adaptation, translating for film and translating for performance. ‘It’s a new kind of concept,’ says Professor Leeder. ‘It’s something I said in my inaugural lecture that I wanted to do. I thought it would take me ten years and I’m really surprised. It must have just hit the right moment!’
Professor Leeder fosters an inclusive research environment that allows people to do what they want to do but also brings together people who are interested in similar things; for example, graduates, early career researchers and senior colleagues researching different periods might present a seminar on themes that overlap. Professor Leeder herself has four books coming out in the next year, including a volume of selected poems by German national poet Durs Grünbein. She is also completing a book on spectres in contemporary German literature as well as a collection of essays about German poetry, and has two other projects in the pipeline – one on Rilke in English and one on the cultural anthropology of the stars. ‘I’d like to get a research group together about the night skies. It’s a great way of putting German in conversation with art, physics, environmental science and geography,’ she says.
Collaboration is a hallmark of Professor Leeder’s approach. She speaks proudly of the active Oxford German Network run by her colleague Professor Katrin Kohl, which interacts with local businesses, German businesses and schools; and of Oxford’s partnership with BUA – the four main Berlin universities and related archives, libraries and theatres – ‘a very lively platform for joint research exchanges and joint funding applications,’ she says.
Professor Leeder is Humanities Lead of Oxford in Berlin, a partnership supporting high quality joint research initiatives; and she has also secured an Einstein Fellowship with the Freie Universität Berlin, offering opportunities for outstanding thinkers to explore new fields. Oxford’s exchanges with seven German universities are also central to activity, not only attracting a good number of students from Germany but enticing several to stay on for doctorates, such is their enjoyment of the Oxford experience.
For Professor Leeder, the human connection running through all these endeavours is key to creating vibrant communities that celebrate German language and culture and developing a new generation of German-speaking graduate talent. ‘I think equipping people coming out of our universities to interact in a global context is vital: upholding links, making things happen, building bridges – like the one the Dieter Schwarz Foundation is building. It’s so important.’
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