Researching Multilingually in German Studies: A Brief Retrospective

So, is it time for a new turn? In applied linguistics, global South-based scholars like Setiono Sugiharto have looked askance at the supposed eventfulness of a "multilingual turn" in North Atlantic scholarship, asserting that European Unionstyle multilingualism's bid for contemporary preeminence "denies the existence of multilingual practices which were and have been highly vibrant not only in Western countries, but also in most postcolonial countries worldwide."8 Likewise foregoing the temptation to appeal for such a "multilingual turn," the Luxembourg-based scholars Till Dembeck and Georg Mein have instead reminded us of the suggestive power of romantic and early Enlightenment philological methodologies, which had always taken messy translingual investigation to be a practical and moral virtue, and presumed no such need-to-know foreclosures on language expertise as those inscribed in Cold War area-studies bilingualism.9 With his 2015 essay on "reactionary multilingualism," the anthropological linguist Robert Moore further pointed out that Europe's recent programmatic investment in multilingualism does not guarantee linguistic justice either for new or autochthonous Europeans, and may instead exacerbate racialized hierarchies upon which certain kinds of European speakers gain ever-more access to symbolic cosmopolitanism, while others are cast as recidivistically failing to get with the multilingual program.10 Nonetheless, claims Moore, the European Commission's 2007 "Maalouf Report" (officially: "The Report of the High Level Group on Multilingualism") is all but Jacobinist in its faith that reshaping the European polity according to an orderly, communicative vision of the multilingual citizen-subject will obviate the continent's protracted security, superdiversity, and integration problems.11 Pursued in this way, the societal ideal of multilingualism has found itself under ever greater performance pressure from legislators and interior ministers who have themselves rarely if ever struggled under adverse conditions to learn, teach, or fund foreign language curricula. While GSR research throughout the 1980s did indeed stake out an overtly geopolitical theater, predicated on concerns about "third world" poverty, nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation and Middle East oil, these early articles did not often engage with source materials beyond English and German. They did however often take the liberty (without the benefit of Russian-language sources)