American Association of Teachers of German

Speech given by Lynne Tatlock on November 17, 2006
AATG/ACTFL Business Meeting - Nashville

It is a privilege to be allowed to stand before you each year to talk about the AATG’s Endowed Scholarship Fund.

This year I have the best news to report since we made our first target of $100,000; we have hit our second target of $250,000; in fact we have overshot it.  We got there about nine years before I reasonably thought we could. Our original target was the year 2015; last year I said it might be 2010.  It is now 2006 and we’ve made it.  Let me explain.

2006 has been nothing short of a miraculous year for the endowed scholarship fund. Our fund has grown since last November by $79,530.  In part we have to be grateful to the stock market and good investments, but astoundingly the better part of this sum is the gift of a single person, from one of us. In a moment I will undertake a laudatio in his honor, words of praise for someone who quite apart from this generous gift has served our profession in countless ways and who, with this gift, has found yet another way, so to speak, to do his job.

But first I need to say thank you to all of you, not merely those of you have so generously contributed to this fund, but to all of you who have made the AATG, the profession, and the educating of students in the German language and in the culture, history and literature of German-speaking peoples worthy and honorable, made the profession so worthy and honorable that a relatively small organization would have the power of persuasion to raise over $250,000 in under ten years, and would have the ability to see to it that the fund immediately benefited students.  This past summer we funded Danielle (Dani) Relyea from Fayetteville-Manlius High School in Manlius, New York, near Syracuse. I hope that you had the opportunity to read her charming and thoughtful account in the AATG newsletter. It may lead you to recall, as it did me, your own first experience in a country not your own when the simplest activity presented a challenge. Dani writes that her summer study taught her to “break out of the box.” We so need our students to learn this lesson, and with this fund, we are making this intellectual reframing possible. Dani is continuing her German this fall in college. Chances are good that this trip made of her a life long learner of and advocate for German.

As teachers of German, we all have our bad days, even our bad years, but this is a good profession to be in and this is a good life to live.  It is a good life because it matters, and we have proof every day that it matters because our students and sometimes even their parents tell us so. Thank you on behalf of all of your former, present, and future students.  And thank you in particular for donating to this fund to help students realize both their dreams and our dreams for them.

But let me now turn to that one of us who stands in the spotlight today and who deserves our deep gratitude.

Around eight years ago, when I was in my first year as president of the AATG I made a typing error. Such errors are not unusual for me, but this one was prescient. As I busily listed the officers and the committees, I typed instead of “national treasurer” “national treasure: Karl Otto.”  Since that time Karl Otto has been known to many of us who were on the Executive Council at that time as our national treasure.  The epithet is apt for many reasons, not the least of which is that Karl has modeled for our profession a life well lived, a life devoted to teaching, scholarship, counseling of students, leadership, service, fund raising and now to philanthropy on a grand scale.  Who is Karl Otto?

I first came to know Karl many years ago in Wolfenbüttel as a name in a book that I found in the stacks there.  A palindrome, Otto, his family name stuck in my memory, but more importantly Karl was among the first scholars to write on women in baroque studies, that is, in a field of scholarship that was at the time resistant to the study of women and gender, even as such inquiries were considered cutting edge in adjacent fields. Karl has maintained his commitment to fostering new lines of inquiry in the baroque and has been for me personally and I’m sure for many others in my generation and those younger a tremendous source of professional support and encouragement.  Never dogmatic, Karl has been ever willing to hear something new and willing to laugh uproariously about a literature and culture that invite laughter but about which German scholarship sometimes seems to have lost its sense of humor. This past summer I found myself again consulting one of Karl’s first publications, his Sprachgesellschaften des 17. Jahrhunderts, a standard work. One of his most recent publications, The Companion Volume to the Work of Grimmelshausen (2003), promises also to become a standard work. Mara Wade observes of it in Monatshefte, “For the first time in English we have a scholarly and highly accessible compendium offering a variety of theoretical and historical perspectives on one of the best-known authors of the German Baroque.” Indeed, this anthology can remind us that the seventeenth century is in fact an interesting, even exhilarating place to be as a scholar.

Karl’s life work straddles several fields.  Seventeenth century studies is one of them.  The second is foreign language pedagogy. Karl is the principal author of Die deutsche Grammatik klar gemacht and the author of Alles klar? An Integrated Approach to German Language and Culture.  The latter book is now available as a sound recording for teaching the visually impaired.  But Karl has not only written text books, he has walked the walk.  He has trained generations of teaching assistants.  The training of teaching assistants is a very hard job. It takes tremendous stamina, intellectual fortitude, self-confidence, and optimism.  Karl has all these things.

The training of teaching assistants is, however, only one of many ways in which Karl has registered his faith in and care for his students.  Some years ago when I visited Philadelphia I was startled to learn that for many years he had lived in a student dorm as a resident faculty adviser.  Most colleagues I know would flee such commitment and responsibility—at some level a resident advisor is on call 24/7.  One can certainly speak of self-sacrifice here, but in truth more impressive to me is that Karl was happy doing this.

Members of the AATG of course know Karl best for his long-time service to the organization in many, many capacities. His work as Treasurer of the AATG marks just one of these capacities. On the Executive Council his duties were by no means confined to his work as treasurer; if I’m not mistaken he was one of the architects of our highly successful TrainDaF program.  Because of the close proximity of Philadelphia to Cherry Hill he was called in unofficially on countless occasions to aid and advise. The AATG owes him far more than any of us—with perhaps the exception of Helene Zimmer-Loew—actually know.

Karl asked me to keep this short, so I will not enumerate the countless remaining facts, the large things and the small things, which testify to a life in academia well-lived. Instead I will return to Wolfenbüttel for a concluding vignette.

When I began working in the seventeenth century, I did so largely under duress.  I was a nineteenth century specialist, but I was told that I needed to work up this second field; my tenure depended on it.  So I dutifully went off to Wolfenbüttel to figure something out. As my word choice indicates, I did not really know what I was doing and, moreover, at this time in my life, I regarded spending time in this sleepy Lower Saxon town and researching in the great Herzog August Bibliothek there, with its then forbidding atmosphere, as a trial in two senses of the word: both as a tedious undertaking and as a test I might fail.  I recall observing a man in the library whom I could not help but envy. He seemed to know everyone, and everyone appeared to like him.  What is more, this man was clearly having a wonderful time that summer. It dawned on me finally that I perhaps had the wrong attitude and that perhaps there was pleasure to be had in even the most arcane and difficult scholarship, indeed that being in this profession was both a privilege and a deep pleasure; perhaps I should simply embrace my task.  In any case, this man, this role model, was Karl Otto.