2011 Chapter Reports Midwest Region - American Association of ...

Ongoing throughout the year: Daily Infoblatt and periodic announcement regarding local events
and job opportunities sent out by Paul Schons; preparation for Deutschfest (which took place
this year on March 13)
Submitted by Jae Cody, Chapter President
029 Missouri
January: (MO‐AATG's Chapter Project for 2011):
Instructor's Day ‐ Christian Martin ‐ Politics and Economics in Germany
The Missouri‐AATG was able to offer its members a captivating Chapter Project,
"Deutschlands europolitische Wirkung." In accordance with the efforts of the Missouri AATG to
maintain a useful dialogue on contemporary topics of interest and importance in Germany and
the United States, Missouri‐AATG and Washington University in Saint Louis sponsored this event.
It was held at Washington University in January of 2011, and attended by members from all over
the state.
How did this event come about? When Missouri‐AATG met in the Spring of 2010, we asked our
members what kind of topics they would most like to learn about, and their responses led us to
invite Dr. Christian Martin, who was at that time Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern
University in German and Political Science, as well as serving as the local representative of the
German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). His research interests include international
political economy, processes of policy diffusion, and agent‐based modeling of social phenomena.
He is also the author of the book “Die doppelte Transformation”. We feel very fortunate that he
accepted our invitation.
To advertise the event, we created a flyer we hoped would be catchy, and entitled it:
GERMAN POLITICS & ECONOMICS 101
Since we were hoping to serve the needs of a diverse audience, we asked Dr. Martin to speak
primarily in English but to add, where possible, German vocabulary which might be employed in
classroom lessons on these topics. He did so, as well as provided his entire power point for all
who attended.
Though I have already mentioned two titles for the event, Dr. Martin entitled his talk: "Politics,
Monetary Policies and Economic Performance (and why all this matters to students and
teachers of German)."
Dr. Martin shared with us intricate details and analyses of some very complex topics, and did
indeed help break them down into information that we could all understand. He began with the
idea of Germany being "the sick man of Europe" with sluggish growth and high unemployment,
which then emerged from the financial crisis of 2008 as an economic powerhouse. He spoke of
"two types of capitalism: 'Liberal Market Economies' and 'Coordinated Market Economies'," of
which the U.S. and U.K. belong to the former, and Germany and countries of continental Europe
to the latter. He told us how a climate of compromise is the hallmark of German labor relations
and policy‐making. Near the end of his talk he explained how the Euro was first and foremost a