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的一部分。作为外交部的中介组织，它牢牢地植根于具有重要意义的国家背景中。与此同时，它的大部分文化教育工作都发生在德国国境之外的外交政策的实际“外部”。因此，歌德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，以及在国际机构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家互动的机构，它一直处于全球影响和国家价值体系之间的紧张领域。到目前为止，还缺乏关于这种模糊性对学院自我形象和实践的影响的系统调查。历史研究从来没有离开过以德国为中心的视角，只从中心向边缘看，从而忽视了全球文化政治日常生活的微观层面。该项目通过审查研究所在其全球互动空间中的观念和组织变革，专门利用尚未看到的原始材料来解决这些问题。这项研究问：在全球和国家影响之间的紧张领域，自我认知和组织实践何时、如何和为什么发生变化？自我知觉与外部知觉之间的关系是什么？对文化的理解有哪些变化的过程？该项目的目的是在歌德学院的跨国和跨文化相互联系的范围内，从其成立之初到现在，对其进行历史化、语境化和阶段化。本组织的全球定位决定了分析的方向：在一个多视角、多层面的程序中，国际研究所成为在地理和历史上延伸的分析网络中的概念节点。在典型地点的基础上，从自我知觉(I)、外部知觉(II)和文化理解(III)三个层面考察了变化的历时过程及其对当地实践的共时后果。对这一最新时期的研究也有望揭示出在/90之后德国在世界上角色的变化。因此，该项目不仅是对歌德学院跨国和跨文化机构史的贡献，也是对在全球接受的视野中审视德国自我形象转变的当代历史贡献。

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.