Herausforderungen für die australische Germanistik. German Studies als ›life writing studies‹ und der transnationale und interdisziplinäre ›turn‹

Like many other anglophone English-speaking countries, Germanistik in Australia has faced numerous challenges over the last two decades to survive. Despite a series of administrative restructures, greater commercialisation of universities and increasing reliance on fees, German has proved astoundingly resistant. It has successfully withstood pressure from the dominant »monolingual mindset« (Hajek/Slaughter 2014) in the tertiary education sector and in society more broadly, and witnessed a resurgence in student numbers in many universities. In teaching and research, Germanistik in Australia has been recast as German Studies in the broadest sense, whereby literature is regarded as one cultural medium among many, alongside culture, film and theatre. It is proposed here that one of the specific contributions that an Australian German Studies can make to global German Studies is in reconceptualising literary studies as life writing studies. A focus on life writing permits a more sustained focus on memory and testimonial writing, for instance, of first, second and third generational survivors of the Holocaust (many of whom emigrated to Australia) as well as autobiographies of victims and perpetrators (and their of fspring) of the GDR. It also allows us to read the secret police archives of the GDR themselves as forms of life writing, which are being rewritten and overwritten in biography and autobiography. To read Stasi files as literature can therefore be seen as part of a larger project asking what is the value of literature, and why do we use it (vgl. Felski 2008; 2009). It can be fruitful to reconceive literature as a »Lebenswissenschaf t« (vgl. Ette 2010; 2012) that, in an age in which the humanities are under attack, can hold its own against pressure from the sciences. Institutional imperatives in foreign language departments in universities have also encouraged a transcultural and transnational research turn, in which projects spill out over national boundaries. These can provide illuminating comparative perspectives, for instance, in studies of the transnational evolution of the case study genre in sexology, psychoanalysis and literature. Finally, much of the research in Australian German Studies in recent years has explored various permutations of interdisciplinarity. Recent examples of the interdisciplinary turn have