Komparatistik gestern und heute. Perspektiven auf eine Disziplin im Übergang

Doubts about what educational sense and what effects beyond that could come from the study of multiple literatures were among the prejudices of national philologies against an emerging discipline, comparative studies, which had taken up comparative literary studies in theory and practice. For a long time, the scholarly durability of comparative practices was strongly questioned at the institutional, academic level. For a long time, the discipline had to defend itself against the accusation that it did not have a scientifically viable set of tools at its disposal. Characteristic of this reserved attitude was probably also the concern of single-philology subject representatives that a "comparatist broadening of horizons" (Bauer 1988, p. 39), i.e., an increasing fragmentation of literary studies teaching content, evident in the creation of a subject such as General and Comparative Literary Studies, might in the long run threaten the identity of their own discipline, cause their subject to lose significance within the humanities, gradually lose its defining characteristics, and ultimately lead to the elimination or reallocation of positions. In the tone of moral superiority and with the pleasure of rhetorical destruction, they formulated unreflective sweeping judgments instead of concrete criticism. Such skirmishes were certainly unenlightening and distracted from the real core of the problem. Nevertheless, the national philologists argued for maintaining the status quo. The development of professional perspectives in the field of teaching was certainly a weighty argument in favor of this. German studies - in contrast to comparative studies - shaped a professional profile. In the public consciousness, the study of German is regarded as a generally qualified humanities subject, as a training phase that - at least in times of acute teacher shortages - leads relatively quickly to a profession. If one is to believe the view of the zeitgeist, then comparative studies at the beginning of the 1970s de facto served only to supplement and round off the existing university philologies and suffered from the complex that it basically played the role of a guest in the philosophy faculties, whom the locals followed with bashful glances and whose right of establishment and existence they fundamentally wanted to question. It was seen as an eccentric self-indulgent discipline, an activity on the fringes of the established philologies, genteel, dignified and philanthropic, but also a bit off the beaten track and - in times of crisis - of questionable utility.