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

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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.