Opening of the Brode Wing

An address delivered by Martin Swales (1958), Emeritus Professor of German at University College London, on the occasion of the opening of the Andrew Brode Wing on Wednesday October 16, 2013.

"I want to begin by expressing my gratitude for the invitation that brings me here today. It is a great joy to me personally toreturn to Birmingham because I owe a huge amount to the two splendid institutions of learning situated on either side of Edgbaston Park Road - to KES where my love of foreign languages was first ignited, and to the University of Birmingham where I wrote my PhD under the guidance of Professor Roy Pascal of the German Department, an Old Edwardian, and a superlative scholar.

"Much more important than my personal feelings, however, is the occasion that brings us all together this evening in this splendid new building. Thanks to Andrew Brode's imagination and creativity and generosity, KES has acquired a new building which bears his name, and whose opening we now celebrate. One of the chief purposes of the Andrew Brode Wing is to support and further the teaching of modern languages in the School.

"It is in my view particularly important that he has highlighted the needs of the modern languages because the situation in the country at large as regards that subject is dire. Now some people might say that subjects come and go, there is no point in grieving if one particular discipline falls into disfavour, another will take its place. But that is not true of modern languages; they are irreplaceable. They matter deeply. Let me give you three reasons why.

"The first has to do with what I might call life chances. To study any subject that fires your interest is a life-changing experience. With the modern languages this is true in a profound, almost visceral way - because, more than is the case with any other subject, you can immerse yourself totally in it. Let me offer an anecdote from my own experience. On 28 August 1999 - the date is significant because it marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of Goethe, Germany's greatest writer - I was in Cologne because I had been invited to lecture that evening to the Goethe Society there. In the afternoon I was by the Rhine, below the railway bridge. And suddenly I was transported back some 44 years to the summer of 1955, when I stayed with a German family for a month. It was primarily physical sensations that triggered the memories (something about which Proust writes incomparably in his great novel In Remembrance of Things Past). Firstly, there was the sticky heat of the Rhine basin that allows wine to be grown so far north. Then there were the sights - that great cathedral towering above the railway station. And sounds - of the trains thundering over the bridge, their wheels screeching as they make the sharp turn into the station, of the barges on the Rhine; for those travelling with the current their engines were more or less idling whereas those going upstream emitted the raised heartbeat of higher revs. And everywhere, all around me was the German language. That summer of 1955 was one of profound happiness. In the course of those few weeks, I gradually ceased to think and feel in English and to translate into German. The German started to come naturally, I began to indwell in its rhythms, structures and cadences. It was a revelation; it was my life chance.

"My second justification for the study of modern languages is in a sense philosophical. Of course, to work on a foreign language demands a great deal of learning by heart. But, alongside that grind, one can use the German language to think about the English language and vice versa. German has two pronouns for ‘you' - the familiar ‘du' and the more formal ‘Sie'. English is much simpler; we only have one. That simplicity might be registered as a gain. But it also entails a loss - a loss of subtlety and richness of meaning, of differing gradations of intimacy. There is a wonderful play by Hofmannsthal (who wrote many libretti for the operas of Richard Strauss) called Der Schwierige (The Difficult Man) in which a man and a woman discover their love for each other; and they first begin to realize what they feel when the pronoun of formality starts to slip into the pronoun of familiarity. It is a beautiful scene - tender, erotic, and completely untranslatable into English (because we only have one pronoun). Then there is German word order; in a subordinate clause the verb has to go to the end. This seems perversely difficult to native English speakers. But when a great writer such as Kafka sends the verb to the end, the world moves, it goes brittle and uncertain - in ways that English can never capture. My second philosophical reflection has to do with language as such. Let me give you four words - ‘hund', ‘chien', ‘skilos' and ‘dog'. In German, French, Modern Greek, and English they all signify a four-legged creature that goes ‘woof'. But none of those words is better, more truthful, than any of the others. None of those words has four legs and says ‘woof'. The point I am after is that languages are complex systems in which the actual process of signifying something extra-linguistic is arbitrary. So: no one language is truer to the world than any other. But: to those who have grown up in a language, that language does not feel arbitrary; it says the world the way it is. It feels completely natural and right. To study a foreign language, to immerse yourself in it, is, then, to understand the sheer artificiality and the sheer naturalness of any language. And that is one of the profoundest lessons any of us can learn in life.

"My third justification for the study of foreign languages is practical. As far as the job market is concerned, foreign language study is a prodigiously useful qualification - not just for an academic career. My students at UCL went into the City, Marks and Spencer, Mothercare, London Transport, personnel management. They were employable. Let me invent an example of what I have in mind. There is a country called Germany which is an all-important player on the European, indeed the world, stage. Imagine you are working for an English engineering company. The possibility is emerging of a collaboration with a German company. In the morning a 20-page German document arrives from the German firm. Your boss asks you for a two-page summary, in English, of that text by the end of the day. That is something you can do if you have a degree in German. Of course you will have to learn the technical terms for engineering design (in both English and German). Your degree will not have trained you, it will not have given you specialist expertise. But it will have educated you; and you will be able to acquire the technical knowledge and language you need very quickly. So, by the end of the day, the management committee of your firm has before it your two-page summary, and it will be in good English. There is a preliminary discussion. And the boss asks you to send an email to Germany, in German, expressing good will and interest from the English side, but also indicating that there may be one or two thorny problems that will need to be ironed out. The boss asks you to keep the tone relaxed, relatively casual - and you will be able to do that, you will be able to get the tone right. So: my final plea is the following. Never believe that the whole world speaks English. It does not. It speaks a kind of Anglo-American cyberlingo, which is great for conveying information, for landing aeroplanes, for technology transfer. But when it really matters, the real languages of the world are essential.

"In conclusion: I have offered three reasons - psychological, philosophical, practical - for learning modern languages. Sometimes I cannot help feeling that no other course of study has quite so much to offer. That may, admittedly, be a slight exaggeration. But what is not an exaggeration is to say that the achievement brought about by Andrew Brode's generosity and far-sightedness is nothing short of miraculous, and we are hugely indebted to him.

"Andrew, thank you so much. It gives me enormous pleasure to declare this building - your building - open."