Between Academia and Politics: Latin American Studies in Germany during the Cold War

The Cold War and the German Constellations

In both German states the Cold War played a significant role in shaping the takeoff of Latin American studies from the 1960s on. In the GDR, academic institutions were usually “drafted” and mobilized by the ruling communist party for the various statewide (often Soviet-bloc-wide) campaigns to fight colonialism and imperialism, support anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements, establish solidarity programs, contribute to the overall struggle of the socialist world against the capitalist world, and make the GDR more visible, respectable, and recognized in those parts of the world where that was possible (among them Latin America). In the Federal Republic things were much less organized and clear-cut, and the relationship between the political climate and constellations of the Cold War and the emergence of Latin American studies was less direct. It was also significantly different from what it was in the United States because the repercussions of the Cold War were different in West Germany (as in other West European countries) and because Latin America was much less important to Germans than to North Americans and Germans’ geographic priorities in fighting communism lay elsewhere. Their functional equivalent in politically “triggered” area studies would instead have been East European studies, and here indeed a stronger, more direct and conflictive early-Cold-War nexus could be observed. ² In Europe the Cold War—the antagonism of the systems, the polarized political climate and the politics and policies of fighting communist influence and “subversion”—does not seem to have played the same role in the funding and development of programs and centers for Latin American studies as it did in the United States after World War II and particularly after the Sputnik shock of 1957, the disastrous Nixon visit to Latin America in 1958, and the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Further, the general direction of Latin American studies in West Germany was not as much politically contested (grosso modo between left and right) and the profession not as polarized as it was in the United States (see Chilcote in this issue). This was not only because fewer people in a limited area may tend to talk more to each other despite their disagreements but also because the features of the Cold War had become less confrontational and, in a way, “softer” after the mid-1960s. Old-style witch-hunting for suspected communists had become less frequent, and the government refrained from radicalizing the ideological climate and indeed was not much involved in open or clandestine imperialist and military adventures as was the U.S. government (from Vietnam to the many interventions, CIA operations, and continuous “counterinsurgency” assistance in the hemisphere). What also made a significant difference was that from 1966–1969 to the early 1980s the center-left Social Democratic Party was in government and launched the policies of détente, more communication and careful negotiations with the countries of the Soviet bloc, that contributed to containing and “civilizing” the Cold War in Europe and substantially reducing its confrontational character, an achievement that not even the conservative governments after 1982 would reverse. This policy shift also affected the domestic political climate, making it more moderate and softening the impact of Cold War factors on academic debates.

At the same time a new discourse had emerged and emancipated itself from Cold War scenarios (although the competition-of-systems argument and the rivalry with the GDR in the age of the Hallstein doctrine ³ may have played a role initially and, to some extent, continued to help get projects for research and cooperation funded): the discourse on the development problems of the Third World after decolonization and the need for a reshaping of North-South relations. These debates were also prominently promoted by the Social Democrats, ⁴ and their arguments and findings were often combined with moral imperatives of responsibility and solidarity, whether social Catholic, Protestant, social democratic, or leftist in origin. ⁵ Since the mid-1960s these aspirations to policies and politics of development, backed by the usual factions and experts (particularly in the social sciences and the humanities), the churches, civil-society groups, and the major political parties, also began to join forces with the more radical anti-imperialist energies of the emerging student movement (visible, e.g., in massive demonstrations and marches against imperialism in Africa, U.S. policies, and the Vietnam War in Berlin and many West German cities from 1964 on).

This was a favorable context for the promotion of studies of the Southern continents, among which Latin America was somewhat privileged because of traditional exchange and close relations (e.g., emigrés and exiles) and the increasing popularity of its literature, its achievements in the arts and sciences, and its revolutions and often euphoric and heroic anti-imperialistic struggles, which inspired academic elites and the public at large alike. The Cuban Revolution, Latin American revolutionary experience in general, and the voiced strategic alternatives for fighting imperialism, building socialism, etc., have been very much present in the debates of the West German student movement since the 1960s. Also among the public at large, by the mid-1960s there was a widespread feeling that the United States had been almost completely discredited in Latin America and it was time Europeans cared more and did more to help. The various military interventions of the United States in the region (e.g., Guatemala, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Central America, Grenada, Panama) and its support for authoritarian military regimes in many countries since the mid-1960s (most prominently in the Southern Cone before and after the coup in Chile in 1973) increased interest in Latin American problems and stimulated engagement in all kinds of campaigns of solidarity with the respective movements, resistance groups, and victims of oppression.

Support and solidarity were also extended to the refugees and exiles from Latin America who came to both Germanies, particularly in the 1970s, among them many scholars and politicians. In their turn, some of the scholars, at certain points, made significant contributions to Latin American studies in West Germany ⁶ but less so in East Germany, where they were fewer (in contrast to leftist, particularly communist politicians, militants, and followers) and the system was not open to their input. In the West these contributions were very much welcomed by German Latin Americanists, who felt that their energies were limited and their numbers too small and that they lacked critical mass and needed to catch up with Latin American studies in Latin America and the English-speaking world.

In contrast to the situation in other countries (not least the GDR), in West Germany there was no specific “trigger” for the growth of Latin American studies after World War II (at least until the beginning of the twenty-first century), no commission report such as the Parry Report in the United Kingdom, no comprehensive memorandum, no government program, no blueprint, hence no tangible point where “it all began.” Latin American studies developed rather slowly, incrementally, almost pointillistically, and mostly, according to German federal tradition, in a decentralized way. The only exception to this was an important change that was to become highly influential for the development of Latin American studies and can in fact be linked to specific memoranda that led to further institutionalization and political routinization: the invention of economic cooperation for development during the first half of the 1960s. This meant the establishment of a new cabinet ministry and the respective budget titles and earmarks and the channeling of all noneconomic and nontechnical German development aid projects through the political foundations of the parties represented in Parliament, particularly the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. These foundations and those that followed are autonomous and independent nonprofit institutions (though committed to the ideas and basic values of the respective political parties and closely communicating with their leadership) basically working in the fields of political education and research, international cooperation, and counseling.

The foundations’ activities included all the measures necessary to help assemble the knowledge needed for understanding the problems of countries in development. Besides designing and implementing government-financed development aid projects, they began to move into documentation and research on Third World and development problems, and the Latin American countries soon figured among their prime targets. Thus the presence of political foundations and other development-oriented institutions and agencies in Latin American studies is a uniquely German feature that has sometimes and to some degree influenced the structures of funding and the priorities of research. Other significant German features may be found in the Cold War rivalry between the Federal Republic and the GDR and the limited energy invested in Latin American studies due to Germany’s short colonial tradition and the fact that, in contrast to those of the Anglo countries, neither German business nor German politics has had a substantial vested interest in Latin America.

Whereas Latin American studies in East Germany, on the whole, have followed a more or less steady course of planned development with few priorities, small numbers, and limited outcomes at only three (later two) universities, the West German case shows much more variation. Latin American studies in West Germany have developed in different clusters, with different speeds, and often (at least for a long time) in disciplinary isolation. At times an outside observer might have had the impression that the (mostly colonial) historians, on the one hand, and the sociologists and political scientists, on the other (to name just the two poles), lived in two different worlds with regard to their research interests, methodological problems, orientations, and international contacts. With regard to the latter, however, all of them seem to have respected from the beginning (and much avant la lettre) the principle of a two-way exchange between equals (forschen mit). ⁷ It also appears that in the older and more traditional disciplines such as history, geography, language and literature, and social anthropology Latin American studies have grown more steadily and incrementally, whereas in the more systematic social sciences that emerged after World War II they had the advantage of the massive expansion of the West German university system between the 1960s and 1980s and in a number of places became more politicized and ready to embark on new, often Marxist or Marxist-inspired paradigms (such as dependency theory). In economics and law Latin American studies have been much less represented in German universities (because the respective departments did not care) than in the more specialized nonuniversity research institutes that constitute the second tier of the German system of research institutions. The following points will address the stages of the growth of Latin American studies in the two Germanies and explore the motivations and the impact of political, scientific, and funding incentives and agency.

Latin American Studies in the GDR

As in all communist systems, Latin American studies in the GDR were more centrally regulated and politically instrumentalized than in the West; freedom of research and teaching was limited and scholars were strictly supervised, their findings monitored. Within politically defined limits, however, critical and productive research was possible. The absence of serious sociology, political science, and economics limited the disciplines incorporating Latin American studies from the beginning basically to history and language and literature, with some minor inputs from geography and ethnology/archaeology. In addition, the curriculum had to satisfy the political demands defined by the priorities of the GDR’s international solidarity programs and its relations with the Latin American countries, which often meant training experts, advisers, journalists, interpreters, and others. Since the centralizing university reforms of the late 1960s, Latin American studies have been coordinated by the Central Council for Asian, African, and Latin American Studies, supervised by the official Foreign Policy Institute. For the Cold War–induced strategic requirements of political coordination within the socialist camp there was also a second level of transnational coordination in the various subcommittees of the “Problem Committee” for multilateral scientific cooperation of the academies of sciences of the socialist countries.

The initially three GDR centers for Latin American studies established at the universities of Leipzig, Rostock, and (for a time) East Berlin from 1960 on became more centralized and institutionalized after the late 1960s. Their last stage, from the late 1970s to 1990–1991, which more or less coincided with the final decade of the GDR, brought an expansion of interdisciplinary Latin American studies, particularly in Rostock, where history was a latecomer, and more specialization in research in Leipzig. It also brought a clearer division of labor between the more “serious” history up to 1917 (particularly in Leipzig) and the more “political”’ and agitprop issues of contemporary history, Marxism/Leninism, “scientific communism” (later political science and sociology), and the standard international solidarity programs (particularly in Rostock). The arrival of political refugees from Latin America (particularly from Chile) during the 1970s did not, however, have the impact on Latin American studies that the Cuban Revolution and the various U.S. interventions and wars did in West Germany. While the East German authorities did a lot to accommodate the refugees and exiles and even organize (and supervise) communist exile politics, ⁸ the input of scholars in Latin American studies was limited from the beginning. Access was minimal, and for many of them the GDR, compared with Western Europe and West Germany, was unattractive. The final years of the GDR, during and after German unification, also affected Latin American studies, bringing severe cuts, closures, and the end of most of the established institutions (see Zeuske, 1994; 1995).

It all began around 1960, when, after the Alexander von Humboldt celebrations of 1958, Latin American historians from the GDR performed more visibly in international congresses in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Lisbon, Vienna, Paris, Mexico City, and elsewhere. The German Latin American Society was established in 1961, the same year as the publication of an impressive collective volume that had a great impact on Latin American historians all over Europe: Latin America between Emancipation and Imperialism (Markov and Kossok, 1961). At the University of Leipzig, Walter Markov (1909–1994, professor since 1949), the grand old man of the history of revolutions and struggles for national liberation in the continents of the South, established a research center for the history of Asia, Africa, and Latin America with a research group on Latin America. Markov had, in fact, from 1952 on, divided up the colonial and ex-colonial world among his doctoral students, assigning each a continent. Once his student and collaborator Manfred Kossok (1930–1993) had completed his Habilitation, ⁹ in 1961, a research unit (and later a chair) for Latin American history was institutionalized in the History Department. At Humboldt University in Berlin, the African historian Helmuth Stoecker in late 1960 founded a research center for the history of colonial and overseas expansion of German imperialism within which a Latin American group was initiated by Friedrich Katz, who had come to Berlin in 1956 with a doctorate from the University of Vienna based on a dissertation on the socioeconomic relations of the Aztecs and had done his Habilitation work on Germany and the Mexican Revolution. At the University of Rostock, the Romance-language professor (since 1958) Adalbert Dessau in 1961 established an Ibero unit within the Seminar of Romance Languages that in 1964, still without a historian or a social scientist, became the Institute for Latin American Studies.

In the further course of the 1960s and 1970s there was limited expansion and institutionalization. At Humboldt University, the anthropologist Ursula Schlenther joined the Latin American group, and Katz, after his Habilitation in 1962, became a professor, assembled a small team, and published extensively on Germany, Díaz, and the Mexican Revolution (Katz, 1964; see also 1981) and on German imperialism and fascism in Latin America. He also contributed substantially to many of the profession’s collective volumes on Latin America, comparative imperialism, labor relations and agrarian protest, and rebellions and revolutions, and he was one of the few, together with Markov and Kossok in Leipzig, who, despite the many difficulties the GDR bureaucrats caused them, managed to pursue their Latin American research interests in close communication with the broader debates in general history, particularly comparative history. Here he was assisted by intensive contacts not only with historians abroad but also with the group in Leipzig and colleagues at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in Berlin, where Fritz Klein worked on the general political trends before and around World War I and Jürgen Hell did research on Cuba. When Katz left Berlin for political reasons after 1968, first for the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the University of Texas at Austin and later for the University of Chicago, it was a blow to Latin American studies at Humboldt University from which they have never recovered. It was, however, a great opportunity for many younger Latin American historians (and other social scientists) in West Germany, who now saw Katz more often and could benefit more from his advice and encouragement.

In Leipzig there was more continuity. Kossok became a professor in 1963 and continued his work on European–Latin American relations in the nineteenth century, the “Iberian cycle of revolutions” (first in Kossok, 1969, a seminal piece), and the comparative history of revolutions with particular emphasis on bourgeois revolutions and the social and political forces behind them in Latin America and in Europe. Together with Markov, whose research primarily focused on imperialism, anti-imperialism, and decolonization in Africa, he established a center for the comparative history of revolutions in 1968–1969 after plans for a new department of Asian, African, and Latin American studies had been abandoned. The center, which in 1976 became the Interdisciplinary Center for Studies on Revolutions, fit very well with the particular Leipzig traditions of interdisciplinarity and global history (Universalgeschichte) along the lines Karl Lamprecht had established before World War I. The Leipzig group was prolific, producing numerous articles and comparative studies of modern bourgeois revolutions over a period of two decades (1969–1988) with Latin America and Europe at their core in the broader context of global history (see Küttler and Middell, 2011). The center also published a series of textbooks and manuals for students, teachers, and the general public. Among the members of the Leipzig group we also find, in the older cohort (Kossok’s and Katz’s), Max Zeuske, who started out from studies on Cuba and the “agrarian question” in Latin America and later went to Rostock University, Jürgen Kübler, who ended up in the Department of Marxism-Leninism (later Scientific Communism), and Jürgen Mothes, the best historian of Comintern activities in Latin America, and in the younger cohort Matthias Middell, Michael Zeuske, and Heidrun Zinecker.

At the University of Rostock, the Latin American Institute in 1968 became part of the new Department of Latin American Studies, remaining somewhat Romance-language-and-politics-heavy even though in 1979 Max Zeuske became professor of history there (see Mesa-Lago, 1978: 61–63; Zeuske, 1994). ¹⁰ Throughout the last decade of the GDR the Rostock department continued to provide (often on short notice) interdisciplinary area studies at the service of contemporary politics and solidarity campaigns. None of this survived the demise of the GDR and German unification. It was pure coincidence that at least one of the new professors of political science hired after unification was also a Latin Americanist (Nikolaus Werz from Freiburg). At Humboldt University, where the structures for Latin American studies had been terminated and the exodus begun much earlier, some of the last loners had left for the Latin American Institute at the Free University in West Berlin.

Only in Leipzig, where the critical mass had been greater, can we still find traces of continuity from GDR times, not only in the journals Comparativ and Quetzal but also in global and European studies and the Center for Advanced Study. Middell has established himself in French and comparative history, history of revolutions, and global history, Zinecker, with her expertise on Central American conflicts and wars, has come back to political science, and the chair of Latin American history has survived numerous reforms even though the professor now is a “Westerner” because Michael Zeuske rejected the offer of it and went to Cologne instead. With the demise of the GDR and the end of the Cold War (at least as we knew it) Latin American studies in the GDR also came to their end. Their legacy has been comparatively limited, but some of it is still visible, particularly in the innovative and productive contributions that pioneers like Katz, Markov, and Kossok and some of their students have made to Latin American history (see, e.g., Katz, 1964; 1981; Kossok, 2000).

Expansion in West Germany: The First Takeoff

In contrast, the West German trajectory of Latin American studies has been more extensive, diversified, and complex and in the end more sustained. In the beginning, there was not much for Latin American studies to build on after World War II. A modest first institute founded in Hamburg in 1917 had not survived for long, and the incipient institutions of overseas history and foreign studies of the late 1920s at the universities of Hamburg and Berlin had not cared much about Latin America and had later been instrumentalized and abused by Nazi politics and propaganda. The latter was also the case with the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin, which had been established in 1930 by the Prussian state as a library, repository, and agency for cultural exchange with Spain and Latin America and after 1945 was in need of physical, programmatic, and organizational reconstruction. In their initial postwar phase West German Latin American studies were usually represented by a small number of loners in some of the traditional disciplines and departments, mostly in history, geography, language and literature, and social anthropology and/or archaeology in a few places. Expansion began in the 1960s, first rather incrementally and after 1970 on a broader scale, eventually with synergetic and interdisciplinary impacts, in the reform and expansion of the West German university system, in the course of which more than three dozen new universities were founded and the number of universities almost quadrupled. In contrast to the British case, there was no hierarchy implied. In essence, all universities were considered equal (and this was reflected in their budgets) and the achievements, problems, or special merits of a university had little to do with the date of its incorporation. ¹¹ This process also triggered a proliferation and diversification of the more recent social sciences, particularly sociology and political science, a constellation from which the emerging Latin American studies benefited substantially.

In the old Federal Republic there were five rather substantial centers of Latin American studies, a number of smaller and often unsustained units (usually in a single discipline), and some individual professors or researchers. In their beginnings even the centers were rather modest, usually one professor (who often was not a catedrático) with his or her assistants and some doctoral students specializing in the field and trying to mobilize funding for books and travel. The critical mass for interdisciplinary takeoff was two professors, mostly in language and literature (the most numerous group) and history (or geography, social anthropology, and later sociology or political science). Latin American history played a particularly important role given its function as a linkage between the cultural and the social sciences. One of the five centers, Cologne, was dominated by historians from the beginning. In the more systematic social sciences, in the mid-1960s students and scholars with an interest in Latin American development problems (or trendy issues like revolutions, anti-imperialist struggles, dependency, etc.) could turn to the Institute for Social Research of Münster University at Dortmund, later to become the core of the Department of Sociology of the new University of Bielefeld, and the research group of the sociologist Richard F. Behrendt (1908–1972) at the Free University in Berlin, which became instrumental in the establishment of that university’s Institute for Latin American Studies. The other two centers were in Hamburg and Nürnberg. In the late 1980s this group was joined by a latecomer: the Catholic University of Eichstätt. A more detailed look at these centers may be useful here.

Cologne. In Cologne it all started with Richard Konetzke (1897–1980) and his group of Latin American historians. Konetzke came to Latin American history through his work on Spain. ¹² Since the 1940s he had studied the Spanish colonial empire, making extensive use of the sources in the colonial archives in Seville; therefore the label of his unit in the Institute of History (later to be copied, in a modified way, in Bielefeld) was “Iberian and Latin American History.” The unit was institutionalized in the early 1960s, parallel to a new unit of North American history, in the course of a kind of “Atlantic opening” of German and European historiographies that had begun in the 1950s and indirectly reflected some Cold War (and NATO)–induced constellations, while the professional and academic arguments for the establishment of the trans-Atlantic extensions referred more to the organizational models of North American universities. Konetzke taught at the University of Cologne from 1954 on, did his Habilitation in 1955, and became a professor in 1961 when he was already 64 years old. In 1964 he founded, together with the economic historian Hermann Kellenbenz, the Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas, which became one of the leading journals of Latin American studies in Germany. ¹³

Konetzke attracted numerous students who later made their way in academia, among them his successor for 25 years (1967–1992) Günter Kahle, Günter Vollmer, Johann Hellwege, Horst Pietschmann, and Reinhard Liehr. Most of them worked on colonial history (see Pietschmann, 1980; Liehr, 1971 [a pioneer elite study of late colonial Puebla]). Kossok (from Leipzig) studied for some time with Konetzke in the 1950s. The manpower of Latin American history at Cologne was further increased throughout the 1960s by Kellenbenz. ¹⁴ Among Kahle’s students in Cologne was Barbara Potthast, who in the 1990s taught at Bielefeld and in 2000 returned to the chair in Cologne. In her work she moved from studies of Paraguay to broader issues of comparative family, gender, and social history (see Potthast, 2010 [2003]). ¹⁵ In the early 1990s Michael Zeuske moved from Leipzig to Cologne, which since then has been the only German university with two senior professorships in Latin American history.

Bielefeld. The history of Latin American studies at the University of Bielefeld until the end of the twentieth century was one of high ambitions, failed interdisciplinary integration, and separate strategies and achievements. It started in Dortmund, at the Institute for Social Research of the University of Münster, which, from 1960 on, under the leadership of the sociologist Helmut Schelsky, was one of the biggest, best-funded, and most prolific institutions of social science research in West Germany—a hotbed of promising social scientists, with more than 100 researchers and fellows in various fields from sociology and economic history to welfare economics and development politics. A few of them had a problematic past, and many of them ended up in prestigious professorships or in the Hall of Fame, like Niklas Luhmann or Fernando Henrique Cardoso (who was a fellow for some time). Schelsky, who had a great interest in but not much knowledge of Latin America, had established a research group on Latin America led by Hanns-Albert Steger that in 1969–1970, along with the whole Institute for Social Research, was transferred to the Department of Sociology of the new University of Bielefeld, a research-intensive university with a strong sense of interdisciplinarity. Here Schelsky joined forces with fellow founding father the historian Reinhart Koselleck in creating an interdisciplinary center for Latin American studies. Its Department of History, including Koselleck, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and Jürgen Kocka and their colleagues and students, and the influential journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft soon became a prolific center of innovative critical social history research (labeled the “Bielefeld School” by some foreign colleagues). The first Bielefeld professor of Iberian and Latin American history, Johann Hellwege (1972–1977), and his junior Reinhard Liehr (until 1979) both came from Cologne and worked on early modern Spain and colonial Latin America. In 1978 I took over for 12 years, focusing more on twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American history, whereas younger colleagues Nils Jacobsen (from Berkeley) and David Cahill (from Liverpool) focused more on the nineteenth century and late colonial times. Throughout the 1990s Barbara Potthast taught Latin American history at Bielefeld.

The ambitious interdisciplinary center that Schelsky had had in mind when he moved his research groups from Dortmund to Bielefeld did not prosper for long. Despite cooperation among participating historians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, and culturalists in teaching and servicing the joint curricula for Latin American studies, transdisciplinary research projects remained limited from the beginning and faded away after the sociologist Steger left for Nürnberg in the mid-1970s and his younger colleagues embarked on somewhat intransigent feminist theories of patriarchy and subsistence production. Separately, however, the groups of the center and particularly the historians were among the first to acquire substantial grants for significant research projects in the field of Iberian and Latin American studies. Since 2002 a new and refocused transdisciplinary effort has been made with the establishment of a research network and center for inter-American studies.

Berlin. For a long time, Latin American studies in Berlin suffered from the lack of communication and cooperation between an older and potentially strong nonuniversity research institution and a more recent university institute going through difficult times. The Ibero-American Institute of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation ¹⁶ and the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Free University did not make much use of their potential for more productive cooperation until the beginning of the twenty-first century, when both institutions were in severe crisis and did not have much of an alternative. For about three decades they had existed side by side in a relationship of benign neglect except for some cooperation in the field of pre-Columbian cultures. ¹⁷ When the Ibero-American Institute, in the 1960s and 1970s, had recovered from its Nazi past and finally moved from the Villa in Lankwitz to the new quarters at Potsdamer Strasse (in 1977), it had also changed its character. In addition to being among the best libraries on Latin American issues worldwide, it had become a solid research institution that published scientific journals and book series and in which significant scholars engaged in research. ¹⁸

The most ambitious effort in the institutionalization of interdisciplinary Latin American studies was the establishment in 1970 of the Institute for Latin American Studies at the Free University in Berlin as one of three interdisciplinary centers for area studies at this university, with six disciplines fully represented. In the beginning, the social sciences prevailed programmatically and politically. Among other interests, the most dynamic group instrumental to the institute’s establishment was the research group around the sociologist Behrendt, who also became one of its (later disillusioned) founding fathers. Behrendt, a German remigrant from Latin America and the United States (via Bern), can be considered as a key figure in the establishment of the sociology of development in Germany (see Behrendt, 1965). In addition he was a Latin America specialist. In the seven years he taught, from 1965 on, at the Free University, he influenced a whole generation of young scholars working on Latin America. Some of his students later shaped the course of sociology and political science at the Latin American Institute and elsewhere.

The six disciplines represented at the Institute were pre-Columbian cultures (ethnology, social anthropology, archaeology), literature and cultural science, history, sociology, political science, and economics. In some of them the institute could build on the expertise and energies of the various departments of the university and beyond. Ethnology, for example, was for about a decade taught by Gerdt Kutscher, a prolific ethnologist in the German tradition who also worked at the Ibero-American Institute, until his assistant, the Peruvianist Jürgen Golte, took over in 1980. ¹⁹ Literature and cultural science in the beginning could draw on some members of the Ibero unit of the Institute of Romance Languages such as Ronald Daus and Gisela Beutler until Alejandro Losada (1978–1985) and later Carlos Rincón (1990–2003) took over. ²⁰ In history Enrique Otte, who worked on Spain, early Spanish colonial history, and colonial merchants, had been teaching in a somewhat marginalized role in the History Department since 1966 and continued until 1984; in 1987 the social historian Liehr was brought over from the Ibero-American Institute. ²¹ In sociology and political science Behrendt’s students Volker Lühr and Ignacio Sotelo became the first professors and remained there for the rest of the century. An important complement here was, from 1980 on, the sociologist Renate Rott, who initiated gender studies and major projects on labor relations, labor organization, and social movements, particularly in Mexico and Brazil (see Rott, 1979). Rott’s student and longtime collaborator Marianne Braig (a Mexicanist who succeeded Sotelo in political science in 2002) became a key figure in the reshaping of Latin American studies in Berlin in the twenty-first century. ²² The economics of development was represented by the heterodox Manfred Nitsch (1977–2005) and from 2002 on also by Barbara Fritz (Liehr, 2007).

The establishment of a large and diversified interdisciplinary institute for area studies on Latin America at the Free University around 1970 still reflected—though with less intensity—some of the antagonistic Cold War mentalities and motivations that had inspired the founding of its two predecessors, the Institute for East European Studies in 1951 and the (later JFK) Institute for North American Studies in 1963, shortly after the building of the Berlin Wall. These mentalities and motivations had contributed to conditioning the political authorities’ caving in to pressure from lobbyists in academia in favor of a new institute. The Institute for Latin American Studies, however, had an additional problem that the other two had not had, and that was that its establishment coincided and interacted with the conflictive institutional university reforms triggered by the student revolution after 1968. Particularly in Berlin, radical demands for more student participation and democratic procedure in university governance were very popular and accepted by many politicians. This led to a first institutional crisis when shortly after its founding five of the six professorial founding fathers left the institute in disagreement over the composition and competences of its governing bodies and the assistants and students de facto took over (Müller-Plantenberg, 2001).

The institutional crisis endured for some years and was reinforced and intermittently prolonged by an intellectual crisis that had to do with the unimaginative leftist dogmatism of some of the actors involved (after the intransigent traditionalists had left the institute). Along with a number of sociologists in other places, they basically embraced dependency theory as a principal approach to analysis but often prevented its use from being productive by following a simplified undialectic, ahistoric, and almost ideological German variant of the theory (mostly along the lines of André Gunder Frank) instead of building on the diversified findings of the more sophisticated dependency authors like Cardoso, Weffort, Sunkel, and Quijano, to name just a few, and other unorthodox theories of imperialism, unequal exchange, cultures, and the world system, Marxist and mixed, that were being debated at the time. Their productivity therefore remained limited for some time. ²³

For the students, however, the institute was attractive. Their numbers were in the hundreds and doubled between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s in the newly established curricula for pre-Columbian cultures and Latin American studies and the social sciences, although the distance between the Latin Americanists among the latter and their respective disciplinary mainstreams was growing. Attraction was further enhanced by politicization triggered by the reforms of the Unidad Popular government in Chile and the subsequent military coup of 1973, which brought many politically or intellectually interesting exiles from Chile into German universities. The Latin American Institute welcomed many of them, organized grants or lectureships (as did other West German universities), ²⁴ and became an important center of information and documentation on Chilean affairs. ²⁵ Politicization, however, also meant polarization and continuous infighting within the university and in the aggressive climate of parochial West Berlin city politics. In the mid-1980s the conflicts around the Institute for Latin American Studies escalated again and came to a climax in 1988 when the students began a long strike after a committee of experts named by the city government came up with the unrealistic recommendation of shutting down the institute and starting over from scratch. The institute was saved only by the elections in early 1989, which ousted the center-right city government and brought in a center-left one. Conflict, gridlock, and stagnation, however, continued throughout the 1980s, despite successful projects in some areas, a number of productive young scholars, and the benefits of the influx of Latin Americanists from the East German centers that were closed down or shrunk after German unification (Rostock, Leipzig, East Berlin).

Hamburg. The fourth West German center for Latin American studies developed— rather slowly—at the University of Hamburg, for a long time completely unaffected by the fact that outside the university there had since 1962 been another institution dedicated to Latin American affairs, the Institute of Ibero-American Studies of the German Institute of Overseas Studies (now the Institute of Latin American Studies of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies [since 2007]). This institute, an outgrowth of Hanseatic interests in colonial and overseas trade, by tradition focused more on trade, economics, politics, and general information about the countries of the region before it and the whole Overseas Studies Institute underwent substantial reconstruction in the twenty-first century (see Leibniz Gemeinschaft, 2004). As in Berlin, cooperation between the university and a research institution outside the university had for many decades been a problem, and the departments of the university had long been unable to establish sustainable forms of interdisciplinary cooperation among themselves. The most ambitious effort, a collaborative research center set up in 1969, had collapsed after a couple of years, and a new center for Latin American studies did not come into being until 2002 (Meyer-Minnemann, 2002).

Within a number of important disciplines, however, Latin American studies have been flourishing in Hamburg since the 1960s, particularly in geography, Romance languages, and (for some time) pre-Columbian cultures. ²⁶ Latin American history began with a loner, Inge Wolf (later Buisson), who worked on the history of highland Peru and on problems of nineteenth-century state and nation building. She became a professor in 1970 and taught at Hamburg for some 15 more years. ²⁷ When she retired and Pietschmann from Cologne took over in 1985, the chair was for the first time officially earmarked for the history of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. In the two decades Pietschmann taught at Hamburg he not only produced a number of active younger scholars ²⁸ but also played an active part in the more recent takeoff and institutionalization of interdisciplinary Latin American studies there through coordinated research and teaching involving close cooperation among cultural studies, the historical and social sciences, and the energies of the reconstructed Institute of Latin American Studies of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies.

Nürnberg. A smaller center evolved in kind of a rotating mode in the Department of Economics of the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Here Latin American studies developed along two lines. The first was in economic history, where Kellenbenz taught from 1957 to 1960 and then, after his Cologne interlude, again from 1970 until his retirement in 1983. He produced a number of pioneering quantitative studies on trans-Atlantic trade and on traders, entrepreneurs, and financiers (such as the Fugger family) and their activities in colonial Latin America. ²⁹ Since he retired his replacements have no longer been Latin Americanists. The second line was in what in Nürnberg has been called “foreign studies,” a term coined in the late empire. There were two chairs in the Economics Department, one for the Anglo cultures and one for the Romance-language cultures, and the latter has been dedicated to Latin American studies. It was first filled in 1954 with a culturalist politico who had fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War (Georg Schiffauer) and in the late 1970s and 1980s with the sociologist Steger before Walther Bernecker, a specialist on Spanish and Mexican political and social history (see Bernecker, 1987; 1990), dedicated it, for two decades, to Spanish and Latin American history (1992–2012). ³⁰

Smaller units and loners. The most influential among the smaller units of Latin American studies since the mid-1960s may have been the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute of Freiburg University, codirected by the political scientist Dieter Oberndörfer, with a broad interest in comparative development politics. The institute has produced a great number of practitioners of development policies, many of them with a specialization on Latin America, and scholars in Latin American studies such as Robert K. Furtak, Patrick Dias, Nikolaus Werz, and Manfred Mols. Mols, who started out as a specialist on Mexico and from 1973 on for almost 30 years taught comparative politics at the University of Mainz, was a gifted networker and organizer. He became a key anchorperson for many students of political science writing on Latin America (see Mols, 1981). The same can be said of his colleague and contemporary Dieter Nohlen at Heidelberg (see Nohlen, 1973). Both have attracted many doctoral students, both European and Latin American. Economic research on Latin America, beyond the research divisions of the interested banks and industries and the development cooperation agencies, flourished for some time at the Ibero-America Institute for Economic Research of the University of Göttingen (Helmut Hesse, Hermann Sautter) and around the development economist Klaus Esser at the German Development Institute, who also became an anchorperson for many social scientists.

In addition there were a number of loners or part-time Latin Americanists teaching at West German universities from the late 1960s on, most of them into the first decade of the twenty-first century. They moved into Latin American studies from general history, sociology, or political science and dedicated only part of their research and teaching to Latin American issues, as I did in the late 1960s and most of the 1970s in Münster (in history and political science) and from 1990 on in Frankfurt (in political science) before and after teaching Iberian and Latin American history at Bielefeld (see Puhle, 2015). Other examples would be the historian Bernecker when he started out at Augsburg University, the sociologists Peter Waldmann (Augsburg), who wrote the first German study on Peronism (Waldmann, 1974), Klaus Meschkat (Hannover), and Dieter Boris (Marburg) and the political scientists Wolfgang Hirsch-Weber (Berlin, Mannheim) and Andreas Boeckh (Essen, Tübingen). Geographers have particularly focused on Latin America in four or five places, among them Hamburg, Heidelberg, Bayreuth, and Nürnberg. In social anthropology and archaeology Latin American studies were particularly strong in Bonn, Berlin, and Hamburg. In the language and literature departments of the universities the intensity of Latin American studies usually depended on the priorities of the individual professors. Among them were few full-time and many part-time Latin Americanists but usually enough to be able to establish an integrated interdisciplinary curriculum of Latin American studies at the Master’s level where there was a similar critical mass in history and/or the social sciences and an interest was voiced. These processes evolved slowly, however.

One important factor that contributed to the takeoff in Latin American studies during the 1960s and 1970s was the availability of funds for research. In the beginning, the Ford Foundation, through its programs for assisting European universities, helped by buying books and giving travel grants for field and networking trips (e.g., in Cologne and at the Free University in Berlin) such as Kellenbenz’s first postwar visits to centers for historical research in Latin America in the 1950s. Social scientists followed a bit later, now on German grants or project funding. ³¹ The first substantial research project on Latin America financed by the German Research Foundation, Germany’s principal self-governing funding organization for science and research, from 1962 on for almost two decades, was the German-Mexican Puebla-Tlaxcala Project, which involved more than 100 researchers from historical and area-related disciplines in many German and Mexican universities and research institutions (35 natural scientists and 70 cultural scientists [see Lauer, 1979]). Although its productivity for the social sciences appears to have been rather limited, the importance of the project for networking and building up institutional cooperation (between the two countries and also within Germany) should not be underestimated. The founding by 11 institutions and some individuals of the German Latin American Studies Association in 1965, a year after the Society for Latin American Studies (which was the model) and more or less simultaneously with the Latin American Studies Association, also reflected an advanced state of communication. For a long time, however, the association remained less attractive and less political than the English-speaking associations; its notorious factionalism reflected old-fashioned idiosyncrasies of the disciplines and personalistic rivalries more than left-right or otherwise Cold War–induced divisions.

In the following 10 years the German Research Foundation and particularly the Volkswagen Foundation ³² financed a number of major research projects in various places, particularly on regional development in Argentina and Chile and in Central America (both in Hamburg) and on nontropical countries (Cologne/Bonn). Between 1964 and 1975 the foundation invested 7.4 million DM in research on contemporary problems of Latin America; the German Latin American Studies Association alone received a 2 million DM institutional subsidy (Mesa-Lago, 1978: 16–17). Some of the big conferences drew international attention. ³³ Latin American studies boomed for about a decade, as can be seen by comparing the surveys of the profession in the mid-1960s (Steger et al., 1967), at the end of the 1960s (Siefer, 1971), and in the 1970s (Ferno and Grenz, 1980; Mesa-Lago, 1978: 15–45; Van Oss, 1976). Carmelo Mesa-Lago, in his review of Latin American studies in Europe for the Tinker Foundation, stated that West Germany had the “strongest Latin American studies program in Europe” (1978: 15), a view that was not shared by all German scholars in the field. Many of them thought of “feet of clay,” saw the programs as scattered, and considered their colleagues in Britain and the Netherlands (and also historians in Italy, Sweden, France, and Spain) more productive and often more innovative and as building more sustainable structures.

At the same time, the notion of a “crisis” of German Latin American studies in the 1970s, also reported by Mesa-Lago and first suggested by Steger (1974) and others, seems an overstatement. Though it is true that some of the big organized projects set in motion during the 1960s came to an end or faded away, generous Volkswagen funding ended in the mid-1970s, a number of envisaged interdisciplinary centers failed (in Hamburg, Bielefeld, Freiburg, and Cologne/Bonn), and conflict and stagnation characterized the two potentially strongest centers in Berlin (the Institute for Latin American Studies and the Ibero-American Institute), we should not overlook the significant output of individual and collective research in the late 1970s and 1980s, the number of promising young scholars who qualified for further careers, and the achievements of a sizable number of organized projects, particularly in history and other disciplines. According to the surveys the balance sheet at the end of the 1980s was a mixed one (Grenz, 1993; Mason, 1986; Pietschmann, 1991; Werz, 1992). In some places it was the 1990s that were a period of institutional immobility and stagnation despite continuing production and many individual achievements (see Pietschmann, 2000; Potthast and Bodemer, 2002). What went into crisis early on, however, was the German Latin American Studies Association. This organization, the history of which has yet to be written, took many years to develop the potential for integrating the various disciplines and representing Latin American studies vis-à-vis politics and the public because many German Latin Americanists considered the meetings of the Society for Latin American Studies or (in the case of historians) the Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanistas Europeos (AHILA) more productive and less faction-ridden. ³⁴

Development Cooperation as a Stimulus

It would not be sufficient, however, to look only at the universities. In a number of sectors and disciplines, nonuniversity actors and institutions have contributed to Latin American studies and influenced the research agenda. In fact there has been a two-tier landscape that on the whole seems to have been beneficial for Latin American studies: scholars working in nonuniversity institutions could usually dedicate more time to (often also more specialized) research than their colleagues in the universities and often had more generous funds available for research and travel. The other side of the coin was that they often had to produce under pressure, on short notice, and respond to the demands of their financiers, mostly government or other political institutions that set most of their agenda (though often in a rather general and flexible way). Two key institutions that have already been mentioned are an exception here because they were designed from their beginnings as relatively autonomous service and research institutions: the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin and the Ibero-American Institute in Hamburg. All the other nonuniversity institutions, in one way or other, had to do with politics and, with the exception of the government think tank the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, which dates from the 1960s, mostly with development politics and policies.

Here the invention of development cooperation around 1960 provided new dynamism to and produced new agencies and channels for development studies in general and for Latin American studies in particular. The Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development was established in 1961 to coordinate the activities of the West German government toward and in developing countries, which had become more important in the course of the Cold War. Among other things, development cooperation was considered a mechanism for fighting communism in general and “leftist influences also from the Soviet Zone” (as one German ambassador put it [von zur Mühlen, 2007: 71]) in particular. In the same year General Lucius D. Clay, President John F. Kennedy’s representative in Berlin and former U.S. military governor in postwar Germany, launched a plan for the creation of a German institute to train specialists in issues relating to developing countries. The German Development Institute was established in 1963–1964 as a joint venture of the new Federal Ministry and the West Berlin city government, and over the years (since 2000 in Bonn) has become one of the leading development research and training institutes in the world. From its beginnings it has been present and productive in research on Latin American issues, particularly in the fields of development economics, debt problems, sustainability, global governance, environmental policy, and natural resources management.

The important thing, however, was that the Federal Ministry (eventually jointly with the Foreign Office) now controlled almost all sectors of German development politics and policies (and their budget titles, restructured in 1969)but mostly acted not directly but through its agencies for implementation and that all noneconomic and nontechnical German development aid projects ³⁵ were channeled through the political foundations of the parties represented in Parliament. The funds available were earmarked for the various foundations according to the parliamentary strength of the parties in question, and the foundations presented (sometimes coordinated) project proposals that were then funded by the Ministry. In the beginning the bulk of the funds went to the two most important foundations, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (founded in 1964–1966) of the Christian Democratic Party and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (founded in 1925/1946) of the Social Democrats; others came later. ³⁶ Both foundations moved into Latin America at the same time, around 1963–1964, and more or less the same places, particularly Chile and Central America.

The Adenauer Foundation began its Latin American career helping the Chilean Christian Democrats in their successful election campaign of 1964 and building party structures (for future victories) in El Salvador and Guatemala. Among their (at the time rather moderate) agents were some who later made careers in Latin American studies, such as Franz Hinkelammert, Norbert Lechner, and Dieter Nohlen. The Ebert Foundation had first been working in Africa and Asia, according to an informal division of labor between the foundations (Catholic Latin America for the Christians), but when in 1962 U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and then Senator Hubert Humphrey asked it to expand its activities to Latin America in order to help “prevent the dangers of communist infiltration” (Günter Grunwald, secretary-general of the Ebert Foundation, quoted in von zur Mühlen, 2007: 121), it also began to send “advisers” to unions and cooperatives in a number of Latin American countries (where in some cases, ironically, it had no choice but to cooperate with communist union leaders). In Costa Rica, from 1964 on, it assisted the social-democratic Partido Liberación Nacional in establishing intensive educational programs in La Catalina, an academic training center after the model of the German Social Democratic residential adult education centers (see Hermann Benzing’s contribution to von Hofmann et al., 2010). Seminars and programmatic debates for young cadres of center-left and leftist parties in search of a somewhat social-democratic profile were also held in other countries; an all–Latin American international seminar of young party leaders in Bogotá in January 1968 achieved particular prominence (even in the CIA’s files). ³⁷

Besides designing and implementing government-financed joint development aid projects and educational and assistance programs, the foundations also moved into research, particularly (but not exclusively) development-related social science research, establishing research divisions in their headquarters and founding new research centers abroad. Here the Ebert Foundation pioneered when in 1966 it founded the Instituto Latinoamericano de Investigaciones Sociales (ILDIS) in Santiago de Chile in loose cooperation with the Universidad de Chile, with ILDIS scholars becoming visiting professors and taking part in founding the Institute of Political Science. Establishing ILDIS was not easy at the time, because social research organized by a European foundation that also did political work was suspicious in a country as nationalistic and anti-imperialist as Chile shortly after the scandal around Project Camelot had exploded (Horowitz, 1967). I was founding codirector of ILDIS at the time, and it took me several hard debates and some dinners with Salvador Allende, then president of the Chilean Senate (and of the Senate Committee on National Security), to obtain the Senate’s approval after President Frei had signed the order legalizing ILDIS. ³⁸ The Cold War issue, its particular political climate (in Germany and elsewhere), and East-West competition were often present, but they were usually handled pragmatically. When, for example, students at the Universidad de Chile organized a public debate between Kossok and myself on Latin America and the two Germanies and we had to listen to the subsequent reprimands of our countries’ respective (quasi-)ambassadors (which we easily survived), or when I threw a couple of (usually omnipresent) CIA agents out of an ILDIS seminar and the U.S. ambassador decided to be very understanding.

ILDIS became a success. Its political scientists, sociologists, and economists produced and published (e.g., on problems of adult education, civic activities, the role of students in Latin America, political parties and elections, labor unions and cooperatives, the military, development policies, administrative reforms, and later social movements and problems of democratization), organized conferences, journals, and book series, and networked all over the continent. They also helped establish Nueva Sociedad, the leading theoretical political journal of the Ebert Foundation in Spanish, which, since its founding in 1972 and through the various ups and downs of authoritarian rule and democracy, has served as a forum and platform for the exchange of political, philosophical, and social science ideas, paradigms, and positions of the unorthodox left between Europe and Latin America. ³⁹ Branches were established in other Latin American capitals, first in Quito (where the headquarters moved in 1974 when the Pinochet regime ousted it from Chile), Caracas, São Paulo, and La Paz (see von zur Mühlen, 2007: 126–128).

The activities of ILDIS complemented and enhanced the expertise of the expanding research division of the Ebert Foundation, which—along with its counterpart at the Adenauer Foundation—eventually made significant contributions to social science research on Latin America in Germany. A good example here was, through the 1970s and early 1980s, Klaus Lindenberg at the Latin American desk of the Ebert Foundation research division, who has written excellent (often comparative) analyses of party change and of the role of the military in Latin America (see Lindenberg, 1976). ⁴⁰ The political foundations also gave grants for doctoral dissertations on Latin America and helped in collecting documentation, networking, publishing journals, organizing conferences, and editing collective volumes. Because of their organizational and financial potential they also played a major role in the German Latin American Studies Association. Compensating, in a way, for the deficient critical mass of members and projects from academia, they helped it to survive the critical period of the 1980s and 1990s and finally recover (cf. Potthast and Bodemer, 2002; Werz, 2014). The political foundations also helped to represent the professional interests of Latin American studies vis-à-vis the government and the public, and their scholars participated, together with colleagues from the universities and from other think tanks, in the long debates of the Foreign Office planning staff in the preparation of a comprehensive strategy paper for Germany’s Latin America policy, which in fact came rather late in the mid-1990s, after the Cold War (as we knew it) had ended. ⁴¹

Toward a Second Takeoff after 2000

What also came late was the recovery of Latin American studies from the symptoms of crisis and stagnation that in many places had characterized the last phase of the Cold War and the 1990s. Recovery was delayed, but it came. It took place in a significant second takeoff of Latin American studies in Germany after the turn of the century that also triggered important processes of restructuring and reorientation. Although it may be beyond the scope of the Cold War problématique, at least some hint as to the key elements of this second takeoff must be offered here. As a consequence of the cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences (Lackner and Werner, 1999) and in reaction to the various crises and conflicts (including 9/11) of a more globalized world, area studies in general experienced a new boom, intellectually and organizationally, in Germany after 2000 (Braig and Hentschke, 2005; Hentschke, 2009; Wissenschaftsrat, 2006). Funding conditions became more favorable and remained so throughout the first two decades of the century. Substantial outside research grants were available, a situation of which many of the existing centers for Latin American studies—which also contributed intellectually to the respective debates—could take advantage.

A prominent example here may be the case of Latin American studies in Berlin, where at the end of the twentieth century the two major institutions, the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Free University and the Ibero-American Institute, were both in severe crisis and just short of facing a shutdown. They had two advantages, however. First, the critical evaluation of the Latin America Institute coincided with generational turnover in most of its professorships, and second, both institutions were being evaluated and significantly restructured at the same time (see [the different] Expertenkommission, 2000; 2001). This coincidence made it possible to coordinate some of the elements of the new beginnings at the two institutions, to realize the potential for more synergies and cooperation, and to launch a number of important joint projects. This led to an unprecedented new takeoff of Latin American studies in Berlin manifested in a number of ambitious and well-financed research clusters, graduate schools, centers, and networks of all kinds. ⁴² These new forms of coordination and organization of research and studies have some features in common. They tend to be trans- or interdisciplinary and imply transnational cooperation, and they situate their research on Latin American problems in the broader context of transregional comparison, North-South and South-South relationships, global exchange, global interactions, and global history (see Berliner Wissenschaftskommission, 2006). (This trend could also be observed rather early in the centers at Leipzig and Bielefeld.)

The traditional Latin American studies centers in Cologne and Hamburg have also, in the twenty-first century, advanced to the world of coordinated project clusters, substantial funding from outside, networks of competence, graduate schools, and newly organized transdisciplinary curricula. At the University of Cologne the still hegemonic historians of Latin America, together with their colleagues in literature and cultural studies, have built a wide and productive research network extending to other centers in Germany, Europe, and Latin America. In Hamburg new synergies were drawn from closer cooperation between the Institute of Latin American Studies of the reformed Overseas Institute (now the German Institute of Global and Area Studies) and the respective departments of the university. The latecomer among the larger centers, Eichstätt, has become consolidated in the meantime, while other former centers for Latin American studies have shrunk. ⁴³ A survey conducted by the Ibero-American Institute in 2009 on Latin American studies in Germany in the field of economics, the social sciences, and the humanities accounted for a total of 356 persons, among them 75 in nonuniversity institutions (mostly ethnologists in museums and geographers, social scientists, and economists in political think tanks and research institutions). Of the 281 persons with a university affiliation 123 were tenured professors, most of them in literature (28) and language (13), geography (16), theology (13), history (10), and political science (10). ⁴⁴ Only 35 of the 123 professorships were explicitly earmarked for Latin American studies (data as of spring 2007; Göbel et al., 2009: 17–19).

Various Patterns of Growth

On the whole, Latin American studies in Germany have gone through two periods of expansion and extension, the first from the 1960s to the 1980s (differently in the two states) and the second, after the turn of the century, with bigger and more focused, coordinated, and interrelated transdisciplinary networks. These movements, although I have called them takeoffs, have not always led to sustained growth. Particularly during the 1980s and 1990s there was consolidation in some places but stagnation or even regression in others. Most important, we find, from the beginning, a variety of patterns of growth. In contrast to what happened in East Germany, Latin American studies in West Germany developed in a decentralized way without much coordination. There was no blueprint and no leadership, either from politics or from business, despite the two notorious exceptions outside the universities, the Ibero-American Institute in Hamburg and the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. Even within the federal institutions for research and science administration such as the German Research Foundation, to this day we lack an adequate committee for Latin American studies or for area studies in general. Also, because of the variety of patterns, Latin American studies in Germany have not experienced a complete shift in leading science from history and geography to the social sciences, as they did in Britain during the 1970s (see Miller in this issue). There was a somewhat similar shift at the Institute for Latin American Studies in Berlin, but in places like Cologne or Hamburg continuity prevailed.

Among the triggers and incentives for the growth of Latin American studies the political climate of the Cold War and the division of Germany played a role but mostly indirectly, reflecting the particular German constellations and a certain moderation. Most of the triggers were more specific to academia (though following general political trends), such as the university reforms from the 1960s on and the expansion of area studies after the turn of the century. The big exception and uniquely German was the establishment of development cooperation and the prominent agency of the political foundations and its repercussions for Latin American studies, particularly in the social sciences, the agenda of which tended to lean more toward problems of immediate political concern and their “solutions.” This was particularly the case in the field of international relations. The high degree of politicization and ideological and organizational polarization (between left and right and between more and less productive research approaches) that could be found in some centers, seminars, and publications of Latin American studies during the 1970s and early 1980s had nothing to do, however, with the closer proximity to politics established by the mechanisms of development cooperation. Rather, it was a consequence of the mobilization of the student revolution, the mechanisms of solidarity, proximity to movements, and antagonistic debates on the various models (revolutionary or not) for fighting imperialism, dependency, and underdevelopment (see, e.g., Feltrinelli, 1968).

Variation in development patterns could also be observed in the characteristic two-tier system of university and nonuniversity institutions for research and in the mixed funding structures, with potential funding agencies in addition to the universities and major donors such as the German Research Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the Federal Ministry for Education and Research—among them, for example, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Humboldt Foundation, the Thyssen Foundation, some of the institutes of the Max Planck Society (Germany’s most successful research organization), the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, some programs of the European Union, and, of course, the political foundations.

Another characteristic constellation for Latin American studies in West Germany for a long time was that in some disciplines scholars with expertise on Latin America lived and worked at some distance from the (often Germany- or Europe-centered) mainstreams of their disciplines and felt that they lacked the critical mass and opportunity for engaging in strong, self-reliant, and sustainable structures for Latin American studies and needed to catch up with what their colleagues in Latin America, the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands were doing (for the early 1980s, see Puhle, 1982). In fact, the output for many years, with the exception of some better-staffed traditional disciplines, often seemed a bit basic: introductions, readers, small handbooks, and extended country reports such as the dozens of “X [country] Today” volumes of the only specialized publisher, Vervuert, prevailed. Among the best were usually the collective volumes from conferences (mostly in Spanish or in German; one of the few in English was Jacobsen and Puhle, 1986). There were not many good original monographs such as those from the more prestigious Anglo university presses and only a few journals of wide circulation. The three-volume Handbuch der Geschichte Lateinamerikas was exceptional; it appeared late (1992–1996), and among its five editors were two Germans (Bernecker and Pietschmann) and three non-Germans (Raymond Buve, John R. Fisher, and Hans Werner Tobler).

Much has changed in Latin American studies in Germany since the end of the Cold War and particularly since the turn of the century. This process is beyond our topic here, but perhaps it should be mentioned that, though with regard to numbers change still may have been rather limited and mostly incremental, with regard to contexts and constellations there has been substantial change. Against the background of the achievements and processes I have outlined, it looks as if Latin American studies in Germany have moved away from the margin toward the center of the general debates and the supposed mainstream of the professions. This is indicated by a whole list of new cross-regional topics such as democratization, inequalities and life chances, women, gender, and minorities, migrations and intercultural exchange, labor conditions, socio-ecological problems, sustainability, postcolonialism, neo-imperialism, and neo-extractivism. Here it has also helped that, during the past two decades or so, the social and cultural sciences, as disciplines and professions, in Germany have become more global than ever before.