The Goethe Institute
The inauguration, early in February 1958, of the German Cultural Institute, known since 1962 as the Goethe Institute, was an important milestone in Anglo-German postwar relations. Like the British Council and the Alliance Française, the Goethe Institute is dependent on funding from government, but run independently of it. The Institute's first Director was Baron Donald von Hirsch. The present Director, Dr Elmar Brandt, is his third successor. The Goethe Institute now comprises two fine buildings at 50 Princes Gate, Exhibition Road (South Kensington), with an excellent library which has grown from 4,000 to more than 30,000 books, reading rooms, exhibition space, class and lecture rooms. There are Goethe Institutes in Glasgow, Manchester and York also.
All important is the Institute's language teaching department with some 1,600 students annually in day and evening classes. The London Goethe Institute, moreover, maintains contact with some 2,000 teachers of German in public and state schools in the South of Britain including Wales and the West Midlands, organising seminars for them and providing them with teaching aids. The demand is increasing though the future of German in Britain's secondary schools looks bleak, mainly because of shortage of funds. This is particularly depressing at a time when this country increasingly sees its role in Europe. German is now spoken by up to 100 million people as their mother tongue though English remains the lingua franca.
In the early days, the Institute's programme concentrated on the "safe" themes - German classical music and the German literary classics. In the sixties it became more daring. Contemporary German artists, musicians, also German films, old and new, the experimental aspects in art, were introduced and found an interested public. More recently the Institute has prompted dialogue among particular groups of experts of both countries, concerned for example with the future of radio and television journalism, Church-State relations, museum policies, education. The all-pervasive German cultural influence in Britain in the 19th century has gone for good and so it seems has the taste for French culture that replaced it as an intellectual fashion in the political upheavals of the 20th century. The modern world is decidedly international in its cultural outlook and eclectic in its preferences.
The political developments in the 20th century and two World Wars no doubt had their negative effect on Anglo-German cultural understanding. The Entente Cordiale which Britain and France concluded early this century has its cultural repercussions still in that there are many more translations of French classics published each year in Britain than German ones. Reviewing recently a new biography of Goethe by Nicholas Boyle, Bernard Levin drew attention to the effect of "immense boringness" which Goethe has on the British. "Draw the blinds and cover the mirror", Levin wrote, "and then tell me whether you have ever managed to finish Torquato Tasso, or whether indeed you know anyone who has." Probably even some Germans would agree with that. But there is evidently a mental blockage here which those who work for Anglo-German literary understanding have to face.
