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Sunka Simon
Associate Professor of German, Film and Media Studies1993: Ph.D. German Literature and Literary Theory, The Johns Hopkins University Frequently Taught Courses:German 1B - 4 Interview:Q : Why should a Swarthmore student want to learn German, besides the fact that it requires intelligence and an openness to different kinds of systems? (1) When learning German, students are exposed to an intriguing combination of artistic, philosophical and logical thought, to a language system that consistently forces them to analyze meaning while acquiring its lexicon, its syntax and its phonetics. It has a built-in self-reflexivity that has catapulted many German writers beyond their immediate disciplines (take Walter Benjamin or Bertolt Brecht for example) to include a self-critical analysis of their disciplines as part of their thought processes. In a way, each student will become a language critic simultaneously with becoming a speaker of German. (2) The interdisciplinary breadth of German writers, scholars, critics, and artists also means that being able to read German is still of utmost importance to the disciplines of art and art history, economics, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, political science, music and many others.
Germany today is very different from the 1960s, when I grew up in Hannover: city-scape: From the postwar era through the 1980s, Hannover, Hamburg and Berlin, for example, still had large bombed out areas that were not yet developed and many of the older houses in the urban areas showed signs of the war in the form of bullet holes.We even played in one of these no-man's land areas next to our apartment house, where I grew up. Today, everything is freshly painted, restored or rebuilt, and it has become hard to find visual signs of the war days, which is one of the reasons I am happy for memory-projects like the "invisible wound" series in Berlin that have created plexiglass covers for some of these telltale signs to preserve the city's ambiguous history. politically: the 70s, when I was in high school, were a time of terrorism and "democracy in crisis," but it was also an incredibly exciting time, because it pushed everyone to ask what their principles were and what they wanted and could be responsible for politically. I remember endless discussions at home, in school and in my spare time. Strong animosities and strong loves were forged in this time, some of which most Germans of my generation now have to struggle with anew as the context and national climate have changed to a comfortable conservative social democracy (the Green party, which distributed sunflower-adorned leaflets on its considerable environmental and political virtues on street corners in the late 1970s is now part of the established government). language: German as it is spoken and written today, since the most recent language reform from 1998 in fact, is quite different from the German before 1998, before 1989 (the GDR and the FRG had developed a distinctly different idiomatic lexicon), 1945 (the Nazi ideologues insisted on returning to the Germanic roots of the German language), or before WWI (most books were published in a type called Fraktur, close to the Old English font on your computer). Can you imagine France agreeing to modernize French to the point of radically changing its rules regarding new vocabulary (many of them Anglicized), the spelling of new and old words, and revamping its grammar? Germany did just this in 1998, not without a decade worth of public debate on the issue, but still. Today, you will read words spelled with three "f's," such as "Schifffahrt" (formerly "Schiffahrt"), because it is a compound noun made up of the two words: Schiff (ship) and Fahrt (ride/drive). I leave it up to you to decide whether the change is more or less logical than the traditional spelling.
Q : What are the most exciting places in Germany for students to visit, and why? Being somewhat of a local patriot, I would have to say, Hamburg first. The second largest German city and capital of the newspaper and music industry is my hometown. A thriving sea-port, it lies directly on the Elbe river and is often called the "Venice of the North" due to its many canals and streams. Spending a lazy summer afternoon rowing from "Eisdiele" (ice-cream parlor) to waterside local pub for a cool "Alsterwasser" (mix of beer and lemon-soda) brings a bit of the Mediterranean to the “cold North”. Not to mention that Hamburg has one of the most active Jazz, Classical Music, Cinema, and Theater Scenes in Germany, so that deciding where to go in the evenings is quite difficult. Take the train for 90 minutes and you'll get dropped off at the 5th Element-style new Hauptbahnhof in Berlin. I have yet to meet someone who has not been utterly overwhelmed by the continuously changing urban face of Berlin when standing on Potsdamer Platz and beholding the dare-devilish architecture and design of that city square (that place that used to be a field of weeds back in the 1980s, look it up in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire). Q : What are your teaching interests? Your research interests?
At a place like Swarthmore, teaching and research can go hand in hand without limiting the faculty member to one author, one focus. I have always gained more momentum analytically and professionally, when I could productively combine feminist criticism, poststructuralist literary theory and cultural studies in my teaching (Wien und Berlin - Popular German Culture - Gender, Genre, and Utopia - The Body-Machine – Cyberculture - German Cinema) and in my research.
Q : Why did you decide to live most of your scholarly life in the US? After spending a year as an exchange student at Dartmouth in 1984, I knew what I wanted to be -- a professor at a small liberal arts college (I guess, some dreams do come true, after all). This professional choice meant that I could not stay in Germany, because Germany, then, did not have any colleges, only large state universities. And even if I had wanted to become a German academic, it was downright impossible for a woman with a comparative literature focus (meaning two departments had to agree on me at most universities) and absolutely no "Vitamin B" (Beziehungen = connections, here) to get a permanent job there. There was ONE female professor in my department in Hamburg in 1986, a department that served over 300 graduate students. Every other woman was a one-year or two year Dozentin (lecturer). Q : What is your particular set of interests in film? I am specifically interested in portrayals and generic expressions of the interrelation between gender and race. For my next book, tentatively titled "Eurovision" I am investigating the way, in which the cinematic syntax, the structure of film as visual language, especially of so-called German block-busters, initiates, channels and/or reroutes the spectators' concepts and traces of memory (memory of Germany's past, of gender/sex/race identity formation, of nationalism). Q: What is your favorite movie, and why? When I was in my teens, my favorite movie was Broken Arrow, a very sentimental Western with James Stewart in the lead role. Like many Germans, I was infatuated with Hollywood's portrayal of Native Americans and their relationship with the Whites in the frontier days. Then, in my twenties, Blade Runner got me hooked on cinematic sci-fi in a big way, mainly because of its stunning cinematography and Rutger Hauer, I have to admit. Right now, I don't have a particular favorite, only films that are fun to talk or write about, to deconstruct. Q: Who is your favorite director? I would say that my favorite director would be a mix of Percy Adlon, Valie Export, Monika Treut, R. Zemeckis, the Coen Brothers, D. Cronenberg, B. Luhrmann, and Ridley Scott. Q: Why is German cinema special? Or -- what are its significant relationships with other nations and traditions? I don't know if I would call it "special," but as a national cinema, it has one of the longest histories within the medium of film. In addition, because the history of German Cinema is interwoven with the political cultures of the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the 1960s reform movements, and the terrorist wave in the 1970s, the political uses to which cinema was and is being put as a medium have led to an intense self-reflexivity and interrogation of cinematic meaning and structures by German filmmakers and critics alike. Q: Who is your favorite writer? I admire Ingeborg Bachmann's prose for her unfailing and brutal honesty about gender-related conflicts and her ability to get under my skin as well as stimulate me analytically. And I love to get immersed in one of Pieke Biermann's pomo-lesbian Berlin thrillers, where the dialogues between characters are so outrageously linguistically drafted with dialects and accents that I often read them aloud.
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Q : How is Germany today different from before? 