A Conversation with Walter Hoelbling - RE-MARKINGS March 2020

American Studies and European Perspectives:

A Conversation with Walter Hoelbling

Nibir K. Ghosh

Professor Walter W. Hoelbling is retired professor and former chair of the American Studies Department at Graz University, Austria. After 40+ years of research, teaching & administration he now has more time to write poetry and pay occasional visits to members of his global patchwork family in the USA, Europe, and Australia. With Gaby Pötscher he published two books of poetry, Love Lust Loss (2003) and Think Twice (2006); his poems are also included in Vienna Views (2006), Aesthetica 22 (2008), A World Assembly of Poets: Contem-porary Poems (2017), several other print collections, as well as in 9 issues of gangan.at/mags/lit-mag. In 2018 he published his first collection of poems in German, Gemischter Satz. Gedichte. In this conversation Walter Hoelbling talks about his interests and concerns as an academic, a poet and an American Studies activist in Austria.

Ghosh: Warm and cordial greetings from Re-Markings. How did you feel being a part of A World Assembly of Poets, an anthology of poems published by Re-Markings as a special number in November 2017? What do you think of such a harmonious coming-together of poets from all continents and fifty-six countries in our crises-ridden times?

Hoelbling: I was pleasantly surprised and happy to contribute. Even though poets and writers usually have an above-average international awareness and point of view, being together between the covers of an anthology creates a special sense of belonging together. Looking at the current tendencies of reawakening nationalism in many countries, in my opinion any action that promotes mutual tolerance and under-standing is in high demand and much appreciated.

Ghosh: In your most recent poem, “Happy News Year,” you have expressed the wish for 2020 to be a year where the “news” becomes “more elevating” by foregrounding “the positive” rather than what is “sensational/ alarmist/ frightening.” Is your optimism centred around a possible change-in-heart among politicians or those engaged in perpetuating a clash of civilizations as Samuel Huntington had visualised?

Hoelbling: My optimism is 1) a natural disposition of mine, but 2) the only way to face – and counteract – the various fearmongering populisms that play the old game of “divide and conquer” by insinuating that “the others” are trying to steal our wealth, rape our women, degrade our values, mock our gods, etc. etc. (As if gods ever needed human defense – unless they are not more than our creations...). The actual trigger for the poem was a new feature in our Austrian moderately leftist newspaper DER STANDARD that recently introduced a column about the GOOD things that happen. I hope this can serve as an example for other media. And this morning even the (relatively) left USA digital news service The Daily Kos had a “good news” column at the end. Maybe this is becoming a trend. 

Ghosh: What responsibility would you attribute to the Media in bringing about a transformation in the world?

Hoelbling: I think the responsibility of the media is very great, as they provide much of the information on which people base their decisions. The recent development of so-called “social media” (I think they often are pretty a-social) on the internet is a challenge to traditional mass media like TV, radio, print and will necessitate serious changes in the information market, especially if media in democracy should be able to fulfill their watchdog role in relation to the politicians/the government, which so far is still more or less functional but is increasingly threa-tened in a growing number of democracies.

Ghosh: You have had a distinguished career as a professor of American Studies and Culture at the University in Graz, Austria. What attracted you to American Literature at the first instance?

Hoelbling: Somewhat paradoxically, it was the absence of American Studies in the curriculum when I started my studies of “English and History” in 1965 that made me curious. When I was, quite unexpec-tedly, offered a 2-year Junior Ass. Prof. position at the – then only affiliated to the university – Institut für Amerikanistik after my final exam in English in 1971, I was delighted. Two years later the Institut became a regular university department and Jürgen Peper, from the J. F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University of Berlin, was appointed the first department chair. In 1982 – after 11 years of ‘lobbying’ on diverse committees – the curriculum was renamed “Anglistik/Amerikanistik;” since then American Studies has been part of this program that offers B,A,, M.A., and Ph.D. degrees.

Ghosh: Who would you list as your favourite American writers?

Hoelbling: What an overwhelming question! I’ll try to be more or less chronological and somewhat selective ... Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine; Washington Irving, E. A.  Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, David Henry Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Mark Twain; Ambrose Bierce, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, O. Henry; Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Willa Cather, Robert Lee Frost, T.S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Francis S. & Zelda Fitzgerald,  Wallace Stevens, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Upton Sinclair; Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Richard Wright, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller, Paul Auster, Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie, John Barth, Barbara Kingsolver, .....&....&...

Ghosh: How would you respond to Ernest Hemingway’s 1935 statement: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”?

Hoelbling: I think the statement shows that he appreciated Twain’s innovative narrative technique of Huck’s “innocent eye” and its use for a sweeping – and often critical – review of significant sections of U.S. society and their various cultural characteristics. But Hemingway also was a rather male-oriented person – what we nowadays might call an alpha male – and he was not very religious, to put it mildly, so it is not surprising that in 1935 he did not mention the role of the Puritan heritage in U.S. literature and culture, nor the then already very visible writing of women authors and African-Americans.

Ghosh: In terms of economic and political paradigms, could you please shed some light on your views about “European Re-Visions of 'America' after 1945”?

Hoelbling: It is, I believe, no coincidence that both the U.S. American Studies Association and the European Association of American Studies were founded in the early 1950s: not only was there a political need (and the concomitant financial resources) for a more organized and systematic (self-)exploration, there was also a strong scholarly need for re-conceptualizing dominant ideas about the U.S. on both sides of the Atlantic.

That the development of American studies in Europe was strongly influenced by historical-political constellations in the wake of the Second World War can also be seen by the fact that the first European scholars of American studies mostly came from countries which had been liberated by U.S. troops from the threat or the oppression of Nazi Germany. Many of the first-generation European American studies scholars – e.g., Sigmund Skard from Norway, Roger Asselinaux in France, Harry Allen & Marcus Cunliffe in England, Mario Praz in Italy, Max Silberschmidt in Switzerland, Arie N.J. Den Hollander in the Netherlands, Heinz Galinsky in Germany – were both iconoclastic and entrepreneurial. They saw American studies as a new and exciting field as well as a launching pad for their careers, and to some extent they were also advocates for America. In their books and essays, their public lectures and their teaching, they tried to correct prevailing clichés about the U.S. As they saw it, their task was to offer an honest but sympathetic portrait of a country most of their fellow citizens conceived of in terms of second-hand stereotypes – a place on the other side of the Atlantic whose outstanding features were the Wild West, Al Capone, Hollywood, Coca Cola, fast food, eccentric millionaires, and high-tech achievements.

Ghosh: Did the Cold War contribute in any way in the creation of interest in American literature outside the U.S.?

Hoelbling: The fact that during those years American studies flourished under the umbrella of the U.S. hegemony in the western hemisphere and received ample funding because of the cultural war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. was an ambiguous blessing. On the one hand, it provided a solid material basis for academic exchange and cooperation projects, international conferences, publications, etc.; on the other, American studies activities were often suspected of being propelled more by propaganda purposes rather than by scholarly thirst for knowledge. Today it is an acknowledged fact that until about the end of the 1960s, American studies in Europe could not have survived without the material as well as personal input from U.S. resources. Intellectually and methodologically, the flow of information during the early years appears to have been somewhat lopsided and mostly one-way: many of the great names of American cultural history taught and lectured in Europe, mostly under the Fulbright Program, the Rhodes Scholar program, or with grants of the Rockefeller Foundation. Henry Nash Smith, Henry Steele Commager, Leo Marx, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Boorstin, F.O. Matthiessen, Perry Miller, Richard Hofstadter, Edmund Wilson. All spent time at European universities. Given this situation, European American studies scholars often had to walk a fine line, professionally as well as politically, in order to maintain their intellec-tual independence as well as their material support.

Ghosh: To be precise, what really led to the arrival of American studies in Austria?

Hoelbling: Following the establishment, in 1948, of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies at Schloss Leopoldskron (a lovely baroque palais sold to the Harvard-initiated Seminar by the widow of Max Reinhardt for the symbolic price of one Austrian Schilling), the founding of the European Association of American Studies (EAAS) in 1954 at Schloss Leopoldskron is  Austria’s major ‘claim to fame’ in the history of America studies in Europe. More importantly, it was a highly consequential event; even though the EAAS was supported and mostly financed by U.S. sources, it provided a much-needed forum for an intra-European as well as international exchange of ideas about American studies and the U.S. The existence of the EAAS also became a strong incentive for European American studies scholars to get organized in national associations and thus be represented on the EAAS board. In the end, this organizational framework also contributed to the ‘Europeanization’ of American studies in Europe, which became noticeable in the 1970s. For quite a while, the first generation American studies scholars had been voicing their concern about the lack of a European perspective, and the willingness of European scholars to blindly follow the ideology of American exceptionalism and to continue practicing the methods and approaches they had experienced during their visits or studies in the U.S. By the end of the 1960s, aided by the turbulences around the U.S. engagement in Vietnam on both sides of the Atlantic that helped to create a more critical attitude towards the beacon of democracy, European scholars began looking at the U.S. from a more comparative perspective. They also started paying atten-tion to their countries’ national/regional relationships to the U.S., both in regard to emigration/ immigration as well as to the contemporary impact of the U.S. on their home countries. One of the visible results of this change in attitude was the foundation, in 1979, of a book series called European Contributions to American Studies, initiated by Rob Kroes of the Amerika Institut in Amsterdam. Under his editorial aus-pices, titles like Anti-Americanism in Europe, The American West: As Seen by Europeans and Americans, Within the U.S. Orbit: Small National Cultures vis-à-vis the United States, Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony, demonstrated the increasingly critical eye European scholars were casting on the interactions of European and American cultures. In addition to this series, American Studies publications of a more independent and critical nature started appearing all over (Western) Europe.

Healthy and, in fact, necessary as this development was for the survival of the discipline, it did in the beginning not always enthuse the ‘funding fathers’ in Washington, D.C., who suddenly found themselves giving money for projects that criticized certain aspects of the U.S. rather than benevolently advertising the American way of life. Yet this initial skepticism did not last long; not only was the somewhat hypersensitive response to criticism from abroad, developed during the Vietnam War years, giving way to a (Ronald Reagan-inspired) new confidence. It was also acknowledged that ‘constructive’ criticism – and academic critique usually belongs to that type – can be mutually inspiring and open up new horizons.

Ghosh: The opening up of the American frontier in the realm of its literature may have also impacted outside opinion pertaining to what Gunnar Myrdal calls the ‘American Dilemma’?

Hoelbling: Yes, it did. An exemplary issue was the question of the multi-ethnic/cultural character of U.S. society. Already for some time European scholars had eyed the myth of the great American ‘melting pot’ with a certain amount of skepticism; for many of them the U.S. presented a much more multi-cultured and multi-ethnic face, and their outsider’s view could not avoid perceiving a formidable variety of un-melted people. I believe it was not a coincidence that a major critical text in 1980s discussion of U.S. cultures & ethnicities – Werner Sollors’ Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture – was contributed by an emigrant academic who had come to the U.S. from the JFK Institute for North American Studies at the Free University Berlin and was then teaching at Columbia University, then Harvard University. This is not to suggest that we Europeans had ‘known it all’ from the beginning; but I believe that European perspectives may have contributed to certain changes of paradigms in U.S. self-perception. 

Ghosh: In what way?

Hoelbling: The recent resurgence of old racist and sexist stereotypes and violent events in the USA make it clear that this change of paradigms has not yet affected a statistically significant section of the (mostly ‘white’) U.S. population. There are a good number of additional political and economic paradigms where Europe and the USA have developed notably different positions over the past 50 years, especially regarding the use of military interventions around the globe and aggressive economic attitudes that threaten the delicate global political and economic balance.

Ghosh: What have your experiences been as a Professor of American Literature in Euro-centric Austria?

Hoelbling: When I started as a young assistant professor, the waves of European English Departments were ruled by Britannia – except in northern Europe, from where many of the founders of the European Association of American Studies (EAAS, founded in Salzburg in 1954) came. But I believe this was less a Euro-centric and more an Anglo-phile attitude. Europeans knew the British and their literature, loved their upper-middle class life style as projected by the BBC and the British Council, etc. Little was known about the Americans except that they were many, had lots of weapons, lived far away, loved jazz and chewing gum and Hershey bars and Coca Cola; literature was not their trademark. Even Americans discovered after 1945 that they had to present themselves to the (Èuropean) world in more than military terms, and it is no coincidence that the U.S. Association for American Studies was founded in 1951, and a growing number of books about U.S. history, politics, as well as literary history were published in the following years.

By the time I entered the conference circuit, American Studies was already established in Europe under the auspices of the EAAS. Eurocentrism – in the old traditional form or in the recently renewed version – was never a problem. In fact, when I applied for a study grant in 1980 to do research about U.S. war novels, the hesitancy came from U.S. institutions: I had to talk some extra length to convince the Fulbright Commission and the American Council of Learned Societies that this was worth their money. The trauma of the Vietnam experience as the first war that the U.S. had not won was still very much alive then.

On a different level, I also had to do some extra convincing at home, after coming back from my research year at Stanford, to start teaching my courses in English in order to end the rather silly regulation that all courses – except language courses – were taught in German but the final “Magister” thesis (now M.A,) had to be written in English.... Some extra effort was also necessary to start teaching my courses on Feminist Literature, Native American Literature, and African American Literature. But it worked.

Ghosh: According to P.B. Shelley, “Most wretched men/ Are cradled into poetry by wrong:/ They learn in suffering what they teach in song.” What inspired you to take to writing poetry? When did you write your first poem?

Hoelbling: Hmm ,,, I think it was on the occasion of a high school skiing week when a friend and I concocted some doggerel for the final evening get-together, presenting a humorous survey of the week’s events.  I wrote more of these for assorted high school occasions, and also some apparently not very convincing love poems to my high school crush; then did not write for about 10 years until I first went to the USA for a 4-month research stint and felt the need to express this new experience – in English. What inspires me in general are feelings, impressions, thoughts that are powerful, disturbing, irritating, beautiful, lovely ... so I try to give shape to them in my words.

Ghosh: Kindly name some poets from across the world who have impressed you more than others.

Hoelbling: William Shakespeare, John Donne, Heinrich Heine, William Blake, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, German expressionist poets, English & U.S. Imagist poets, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ernst Jandl, H. C. Artmann, Joy Harjo, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Yusef Komun-yakaa.

Ghosh: Coming to your two poetry collections, Love Lust Loss (2003) and Think Twice (2006), could you kindly share your major concerns?

Hoelbling: The 2003 collection Love Lust Loss was suggested by my now wife, Justine Tally (btw: she is an expert in African-American literature, esp. Toni Morrison), after a surprisingly well attended first poetry reading at the university; she read through Gabriele’s and my poems that we had given her, and we jointly selected the texts and finally came up with a title which, we assumed, most people could relate to. The major concern in this volume and also in Think Twice is mainly twofold – to present everyday experiences from differently gendered points of view, that’s why both volumes have a “She says/ He Says” structure, suggesting often contrasting positions yet also possibilities for dialogue.

Ghosh: One of your erudite essays is titled, "American Studies in Europe: Divided We Stand" Do you see Europe and America as binaries when it comes to American Studies?

Hoelbling: I would not really call it binaries, but we do have different views on some issues; apart from the fact that, when one looks at a society/culture from the outside, one notices different things and/or interprets certain characteristics differently, European opinions differ especially in regards to U.S. actions that directly affect Europeans and/or the rest of the world. In addition to these, there is quite a diversity among individual European countries because of their different relations/experiences/connections with the USA throughout history, influenced by a complex and interacting number of factors like two world wars, language, migration patterns, ideological preferences, economic ties, ideologies, etc. etc. Scholars in Great Britain view the USA within a context quite different from scholars in Austria or Russia or Bulgaria. Looking at the development of American Studies in Europe, the first 20 years or so after World War II happened mostly under the influence of our U.S. colleagues and the (financial) wings of U.S. government sources (United States Information Agency, USIA, 1953-1999).

Ghosh: Was there any noticeable change in attitude thereafter?

Hoelbling: A more critical look across the Atlantic, I believe, started with the Vietnam War; this was the time when European scholars began cutting the umbilical cord to their U.S. mothers/fathers and started writing more critical studies of the U.S. e.g., it was a 1972 German publication by Gert Raeithel, University of Munich, that was the first collection of essays about the literature of the Vietnam War, at a time when the topic was still taboo for U.S. scholars. With the rather unnecessary military adventure in Vietnam the U.S. had lost its repu-tation of being invincible and encouraged the rise of critical voices over a wide spectrum; no longer were the USA trusted as the undisputed beacon of democracy. This trend was, paradoxically, strengthened after the collapse of the Soviet Empire when U.S. funding for European American Studies projects started 1) shrinking because the Cold War was over and 2) because the funds that were still available were allotted to countries that had recently become independent from the Soviet bloc – from Hungary on eastward to Kyrgyzstan. Altogether, this development in my opinion had a liberating effect on European Ameri-can Studies: they were no longer dependent on U.S. subsidies, had to raise their own funds and decide how important American Studies were for them in their educational systems.

These (global) differences and pluralities were not always appreciated by the U.S. American Studies Association (ASA). The first ASA confe-rence I attended was in Boston in 1977 and left me with the impres-sion that the ASA was a rather navel-gazing insider organization that was not really interested in any outside opinion. There was a ghetto of two or three workshops for European/non-U.S. speakers, scheduled on the last afternoon, and these speakers talked to an almost exclusively non-U.S, mostly European audience. 15 years later, in 1992, things had changed considerably, as the ASA and EAAS held a joint conference in Seville, Spain, in a much-improved atmosphere of mutual interest in scholarly exchange of ideas. At the Atlanta ASA biennial conference in 2004, this was taken a few steps further, with multinational workshops on the future of American Studies, coopera-tions with and mutual acknowledgements of non-U.S. American Stu-dies publications, associations, etc. etc. It remains to be seen whether the last three years under an “American first” presidency will reverse his process. 

Ghosh: You are acknowledged as one of the “founding fathers” of the Austrian Association for American Studies since it began in 1974 and you have also enjoyed a fairly long stint as Secretary General of the European Association for American Studies. In both these capacities what have been your priority areas and your major contribution?

Hoelbling: Austrian Association: As mentioned above, Austria was a bit late in joining the American Studies community, and I wanted Austrian American Studies to be connected and have their own network and not to be just dependent on our neighbouring German Association. EAAS: When I was asked to become Secretary General of the EAAS in 1994 I had been on the board as the Austrian delegate for two years and had learned about major issues. As a citizen of one of the successor states of the Habsburg empire, I was particularly concerned about Austria’s immediate neighbours to the east who had then just recently become independent of the Soviet Union and were still busy building their own economic independence. American Studies were not a political priority there, and therefore a major concern of mine was to encourage the forming of national associations so they could network and receive subsidies. I also had to make the local organizers of the EAAS biennial conferences aware of the need to provide subsidies for Eastern European scholars to attend the conferences. This was no problem in central European venues, but I remember a meeting with the organizers of the Bordeaux EAAS conference in 2002 where they, a bit hesitantly, told me that they actually were more oriented towards the west, and I – after a short stunned silence – humorously reminded them that west of Bordeaux there was just water (the Atlantic) and that the European Union was expanding toward the east... Kindly, they DID come up with scholarships for Eastern European speakers....

Ghosh: What is your take on Shelley’s observation, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” in relation to Auden’s remark, “Poetry makes nothing happen”?

Hoelbling: I think I am in-between these two positions. Unless you are the author of a fiery national anthem or song of a protest movement, you cannot make people act – but with your words you can at least make them feel and, maybe, think.

Ghosh: In this digitized, social media-oriented and app-centred universe, how do you see the role and function of poets and poetry?

Hoelbling: Who knows ... The so-called social media offer a great opportunity to send your work to people worldwide and make them aware of what they have in common, what they share. I am posting on hellopoetry.com; allpoetry.com; and literarpro.de and get reactions/ comments from all over the world. Quality control, however, is certainly an issue.

These social media also favour the creation of a multitude of “interpretative communities” whose members may eventually forget to look outside their own bubbles. On a different level, it seems that LIVE poetry – poetry slams, performances, readings, etc. – have become increasingly popular, maybe as a reaction against all those digitized virtual excitements. It seems that listening to live human beings reading their poetry is becoming more interesting than listening to their avatars... I also believe that print books and journals will continue to have an important function. I guess poets and poetry need to do both – be present on the internet AND in readings from books in live performances.

Ghosh: Thank you, Professor Hoelbling. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh, former Head, Department of English Studies & Research, Agra College, Agra, is UGC Emeritus Professor. He has been a Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA during 2003-04. An eminent scholar and critic of American, British and Postcolonial literatures, he is Author/Editor of 14 widely acclaimed books and has published over 175 articles and scholarly essays on various political, socio-cultural and feminist issues in prestigious national and international journals.

Published in RE-MARKINGS Vol. 19 Number 1, March 2020

(www.re-markings.com)

Copyright © 2020 Nibir K. Ghosh March 2020.  

Comments on the 41st Issue 

The 41st edition of RE-MARKINGS (March 2020) was a bibliophile’s delight. A veritable smorgasbord of quality writing, the work reflects the editor’s excellent choice in terms of diversity in articles and contemporaneity of issues. Invoking Camus in the editorial sets the tone right. Salvation indeed lies in the efforts of the subaltern, ‘whose deeds and words negate frontiers’. In these liminal times when boundaries are giving way to bridges it is heartening to see such volumes assisting the cause of humanitarianism, as the Chief Editor has so succinctly pointed out. Hence there is hope that the collective effort will narrow down, if not eliminate, the yawning gulf between, as Dr. Ghosh says, ‘want and affluence, strife and peace, fear and security’. The ‘slumber of inertia’ is deep. It would take many voices to break the silence that has set in. Congratulations to RE-MARKINGS for having successfully emerged as a platform for airing out issues that matter.  The interview with Professor Hoelbling was remarkable, especially the reference to his poem ‘Happy News Year’. ‘The elevation of news by foregrounding the positive’, as Dr. Ghosh has beautifully emphasized, is the way out. Right from the aesthetics of the front-cover page, to the enriching Orwellian quote on the back-cover page, to the excellence of the varied writings, RE-MARKINGS was worth the wait.  

         

Dr. Nibir Ghosh, May your tribe increase!  

--Seema Sinha, BITS Pilani (Wednesday, February 26, 2020)      

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