Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 63, Issue 2, 2025

Language and culture departments at universities are obvious sites where cross-cultural contacts manifest themselves. In the relatively rich historiography of Dutch Studies departments in Germany, however, not much attention has been devoted to the student perspective. This article zooms in on survey data gathered from first-year students between 2018 and 2022, and documents their numbers and background profiles, their motivation and professional orientation, and their perception of the Low Countries. In particular, the article addresses the fact that student intake is tightly connected to contacts with Dutch in everyday life, the position of Dutch in the school curriculum, and the sudden decline of student numbers in the years following the covid pandemic.

On the occasion of Lut Missinne’s farewell as Professor of Dutch Literature at the University of Münster the author portrays an atypical branch of Dutch Studies: the ZNS Centre for Dutch Studies at the same university. He reflects on its activities in research, education and transfer as well as on its future as an intermediate institution in Dutch-German relations.

In recent years, a few articles have been published about Dutch studies in Germany up until 1965, when the first chairs were founded in Cologne and Münster. These articles dealt with, for instance, a department or institute or a person, such as Johannes Franck, the first professor of Dutch in Germany. In this contribution, I focus on women in Dutch studies at German universities. There has been no research on this so far. Teaching and research at universities was the domain of men for a long time, and women often did not or could not make a career. It was not until 1992 that Helga Hipp was appointed the first female professor of Dutch Studies in Germany (Leipzig). In this article, I will present three categories: first, language teachers from the Netherlands or Belgium who worked briefly at a university in Germany, then Germanists at universities who worked on subjects from Dutch studies or switched to Dutch studies and, finally, lecturers or professors of Dutch Studies, who, for various reasons, worked in Germany for a longer period of time.

Over the last two decades, the notion and concept of ‘mediator’, and its variations, have been increasingly used in translation studies and comparative literature. However, both also might be used concerning the relation between different societal domains as literature, politics and law. An interesting case in that regard is the Dutch lawyer Hans Richard Eyl (1926-2016) who initially defended Gerard Reve in the most famous Dutch literary trial, the so-called Donkey Trial (1966-1968). The present article analyses to what extent Eyl can be characterised as a mediator between law and literature, taking as its point of departure his memoirs Een eigenaardig broederschap. Episodes uit het rechtsleven (A strange kind of brotherhood. Episodes from legal practices), published in 2012 under a pseudonym.

Sophocles’ Antigone is frequently drawn on to stage and interpretate contemporary societal conflicts. This contribution focuses on two Antigone adaptations written in the past ten years, Stefan Hertmans’s play Antigone in Molenbeek (2017) and Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017). The emphasis will be on Hertmans’s text which was produced in direct reaction to the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels in November 2015 and March 2016. It shares with Shamsie’s adaptation a critical interest in identifying and analyzing the structures of conflict and power in, and the democratic self-understanding of multicultural societies. By way of the Antigone, both texts take up a political discourse in which the radicalization of young Muslims and the terror of the so-called Islamic State triggered fundamental debates about cultural and political belonging. Hertmans and Shamsie both provide complex explorations of these debates, but with different emphases, namely, decision making in Hertmans and possibilities of mediation in Shamsie. In their nuanced actualizations of tragedy’s characteristics, they thereby showcase both the ongoing importance and the affordances of Greek tragedy today.

Anthologies of translated literature, especially poetry, constitute a special case of transcultural mediation. They are literary phenomena in which mediation, selection and translation play a complex game with each other. This contribution focuses on German anthologies of Dutch-language poetry using concepts from Steiner (1970), Marja (1963) and Missinne and Zindler (2018).

Over the past forty years, literary translation from Dutch into German has established itself as a thriving profession. This interview with the pioneering translator Helga van Beuningen provides an overview of her personal experiences in that period. It addresses the professionalization of the field and the role of key stakeholders in this process, including publishers, the Frankfurter Buchmesse, universities and funding bodies.