A tribute to Janis Solomon

Janis Solomon, the Lucretia, L. Allyn Professor of German and Director of Film Studies, listens as James McFarland shares remarks about her 41-year teaching career. Photo by Vincent Scarano

By P. James McFarland, Assistant Professor of German Studies
(These remarks were delivered at the Trustee Dinner in Hood Dining Room on Friday, May 19, 2006.)

Because my colleague Geoffrey Atherton, the next head of the German Studies Dept., is in Berlin, I have been given the undeserved privilege of delivering a laudatio for the contributions of Professor Janis Solomon, the Lucretia L. Allyn Professor of German at Connecticut College. There are many other people who could do this better than I can, but no one who could do it more gratefully.

I remember my first meeting with Janis a little more than three years ago, when I was interviewing for the chance to teach some German courses on an adjunct basis. I went to her office in Blaustein, and was greeted by a soft-spoken, courtly and friendly woman sitting at a desk on which teetered precarious towers of books and videotapes and DVDs. The books were on German literature and film theory, the most sophisticated sort of hermeneutic explorations; the films ran the gamut from the classics of world cinema to the edges of popular genre entertainments. The collection bespoke above all range: it told of a powerful and curious mind that reached restlessly across boundaries and around corners.

Assistant Professor of German Studies James McFarland speaks about his colleague Janis Solomon. Photo by Vincent Scarano

Janis welcomed me and asked me to sit down, and as I did so I glimpsed on her desk a coffee-cup with a slogan that immediately appealed to me: “Keep Austin Weird.” Janis Solomon is from Texas, and Austin is Austin, Texas where her alma mater the University of Texas is located. What appeals to me about the phrase is the way it combines a respect for the preservation of tradition—the keeping—with a delight in the unprecedented, the weird. To follow that imperative requires an unusual amount of human sympathy, a sensitivity to the precarious nature of human creativity and the fragility of the expressive traditions that make it possible. These are qualities Professor Solomon has exemplified so successfully and so long at Connecticut College.

Janis Solomon came to Connecticut College in 1965, fresh from Yale University’s graduate program in Germanic Languages. In the 1960s Yale University, like other elite American universities, was still benefiting from the wartime exile of Germany’s last generation of philologist scholars. A German degree from Yale at this time means a training to the very highest standards of scholarship. Janis has contributed too much to Connecticut College that it is very hard to decide what to focus on, but I thought I’d say a few words about her scholarship. Professor Solomon’s specialization is in the literature of the German Baroque period and the literature of German Expressionism and Film Studies. I would like to try to draw out what these areas of specialization seem to me to have in common, and then to relate that to Janis’s role here at Connecticut College. To anticipate, I think what holds all these projects together is a sensitivity to the importance of preserving a space for the unprecedented.

The German Baroque is Central Europe in the 1600s. We call it the “German” Baroque but there was no German state at that time, just a hodge-podge of different principalities and kingdoms. What the Baroque did have was chaos, violence and war: thirty years of it between 1618 and 1648. A war between Protestants and Catholics that devastated everything it came in contact with. Baroque literature is ornate and artificial, but it is only against that catastrophic historical background that the artificiality of Baroque literature shows its true meaning. It was an attempt to maintain and assert civilization itself in a bestial and barbaric environment.

The figure Professor Solomon worked most closely on was the poet Martin Opitz, who had the general misfortune of being born in 1597 and the specific misfortune of dying of plague in 1639. Opitz is seen today as learned poet who established many of the rules of German prosody that later and happier epochs would use to create the German poetic tradition. He preserved a humanist outlook beyond the vicious religious antagonisms that were destroying his culture, and made available to those who followed him the means for recreating that culture. Professor Solomon’s book rediscovers the pathos of Opitz’s effort, and allows us to hear behind the impersonal formality of his work the urgency of his mission. It is really a remarkable performance, conducted at the very highest levels of philological stringency while never losing the imaginative relation to the poet’s troubled existence. She keeps Opitz weird.

German Expressionism is a movement in German art three centuries later, in the wake of the First World War. Again, historical catastrophe is the background to formal experimentation. Janis Solomon’s work on Expressionism displays the same acute historical sensitivity as her work on the Baroque. Again, a commitment to the unpredictability of culture at its moment of greatest historical vulnerability.

Finally, the role of German film in the postwar years is also one in which formal experimentation responds to historical catastrophe. Again, a sympathy with the historical context of the works characterizes her understanding of these documents. Now she is exploring the role of film in mediating the cultural conflicts in central Europe unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. In all of these cases, what is so striking is the vitality of the role Janis Solomon finds in art, together with the rigor of her analytic methods. She keeps these things, and she keeps them weird.

There is, of course, much more that could be said about Janis Solomon’s 41 years of service to this College. The prizes that the German theater workshop won so many times, the hard institutional work of establishing a new interdisciplinary major in film studies, the filmmakers and Germanists she brought to campus, and the teaching that opened the world of culture to so many students. If I have concentrated on Janis’s scholarship it is not to slight these other aspects but because scholarship is so often the loneliest and least appreciated part of a professor’s life, even if it is also in some respects the most personal. It is also for me an exemplary dimension to her character.

But I would certainly be remiss if I did not also mention how generous and supportive and encouraging Janis has been to younger scholars, to my professional career, and Geoffrey’s as well. The warmth and assistance that she showed me on that first afternoon in her office has only continued in the subsequent years. I hope the assembly will pardon me if I take this opportunity to thank her for that personally. I consider it an honor and a privilege to have gotten to know Janis Solomon. Like Connecticut College, like everyone else who has had the good fortune to meet and work with Janis, I come away enriched. I will try to stay weird.