The Future of German Studies

Across Europe and North America, language and literature departments are contracting at a pace that would have been unthinkable two decades ago. Courses are frozen, programmes merged or dissolved, and the study of specific languages, German not least among them, is too often dismissed as a dispensable ornament of the past. Beneath this development lies a familiar, and deeply flawed, assumption: that in an age of translation driven by large language models and frictionless global communicati...