German Cutlrual Diplomacy or Transcultural Networking?The History of the Goethe-Institut between National Representation and Transnational Networking

自1951年成立以来，歌德学院一直是德国外交政策团体的一部分。作为外交部的一个中介组织，它牢牢地扎根于具有重要意义的国家背景中。同时，它的大部分文化和教育工作都是在德国国界之外的外交政策的实际“外部”进行的。因此，学院的历史总是发生在不同的空间和不同的层面上：在与德国政治机构的互动中，在国际学院的文化和政治实践中。研究项目的重点是歌德学院作为一个跨国互动的机构，一直被置于全球影响和国家价值体系之间的紧张领域。迄今为止，对这种模糊性对学院自我形象和实践的影响还缺乏系统的调查。历史研究从未离开以德国为中心的视野，只从中心看向“边缘”，从而忽视了全球文化政治日常生活的微观层面。该项目通过研究该研究所在其全球互动空间中的理念和组织转变，专门利用尚未见过的原始材料来解决这些需求。该研究提出了这样的问题：在全球和国家影响之间的紧张关系中，自我认知和组织实践在何时、如何以及为何发生了变化？自我知觉和外部知觉之间的关系是什么？对文化理解的变化过程是什么？该项目的目的是在其跨国和跨文化相互联系的视野中，将歌德学院从成立到现在的历史、背景和时期化。该组织的全球定位塑造了分析：在多角度和多维度的过程中，国际机构成为地理和历史扩展分析网络中的概念节点。在典型选择地点的基础上，从自我感知(I)、外部感知（II）、文化理解（III）三个层面考察了变化的历时性过程和对当地实践的共时性后果。特别关注冷战结束后的动态变化时期，这是研究的另一个空白。对最近一段时期的研究也有望揭示1989/90年后德国在世界上角色的变化。因此，该项目不仅将自己视为对歌德学院跨国和跨文化机构历史的贡献，而且还将其视为当代历史的贡献，以研究德国自我形象在全球接受范围内的转变。

Since the foundation in 1951, the Goethe-Institut has been part of the foreign policy ensemble of Germany. As an intermediary organization of the Foreign Office, it was firmly embedded in national contexts of significance. At the same time, most of its cultural and educational work took place in the actual "outside" of foreign policy beyond Germany's national borders. The history of the institute thus always took place in different spaces and on different levels: in interaction with Germany's political institutions and in the cultural and political practice of the international institutes.The research project focuses on the Goethe-Institut as a transnationally interacting institution that has always been placed in a field of tension between global influences and national value systems. A systematic investigation of the effects of this ambiguity on the self-image and practice of the institute has been lacking up to now. Historical research has never left the view centered on Germany, has looked only from the center to the "periphery" and thus neglecting the micro-levels of global cultural-political everyday life. The project addresses thesedesiderata by examining the ideational and organizational transformation of the Institute in its global space of interaction, drawing exclusively on as yet unseen source material. The research asks: When, how and why did self-perception and organizational practice change in the field of tension between global and national influences? What was the relationship between self-perception and external perception? What were the processes of change in the understanding of culture?The aim of the project is to historicize, contextualize, and periodize the Goethe-Institut from its beginnings to the present in the horizon of its transnational and transcultural interconnections. The global orientation of the organization shapes the analysis: in a multi-perspective and multi-dimensional procedure, the international institutes become conceptual nodes within a geographically as well as historiographically extended network of analysis. On the basis of exemplarily selected locations, the diachronic processes of change and the synchronic consequences for local practice are examined on the three levels of self-perception (I), external perception (II), cultural understanding (III).Special attention is paid to the dynamic period of change after the end of the Cold War, which marks another blank spot in research. The study of this most recent period also promises to shed light on Germany's changed role in the world after 1989/90. The project thus sees itself not only as a contribution to a transnational and transcultural institutional history of the Goethe-Institut, but also as a contemporary historical contribution to examine the transformation of German self-images in the horizon of their global reception.