Summary and results

In the first part of the preliminary phase, the agents involved develop cooperation through convergent relations work. The German agent seems - for a German - to put a lot of work into developing a positive atmosphere for discussion, with however also substantial, active support from the students. In the second part of the preliminary phase the interacting persons agree together on a common procedure for the lessons to follow which corresponds neither to the German idea of a course in literature nor to that of the Chinese. The main phase of the first lesson then follows, in which the teacher, probably in response to her perceptions as a foreigner of the behaviour of the Chinese students, undertakes to reduce the complexity of her questions and in general simplifies her own language acts.

The students, on the other hand, are hesitant in the first lesson, possibly because they have not been prepared for the new way of working just introduced. In the next lesson, however, the initiative displayed and the forms of interactions developed are astonishing - compared at least to the stereotype of the passive Chinese learner. Especially noteworthy is how the students manage to circumvent established structures, turn-taking arrangements or thematic organisation when issues which really matter to them are at stake: such as the questions of whether Schlink wants to show the SS protagonist Hannah as sympathetic, or the possible reasons for brutal crimes taking place.

This kind of emotional engagement then culminates in the last lesson, where the issue is the role of the text for people in China. And here two present-day worlds clash, Germany and China, each with different ways of dealing with the past. Nevertheless, as already was the case in the methodological-didactic area, the interacting persons find a new, "third" space in which irreconcilable differences are no longer held on to, become negotiable (Bhabha 1994, 218) and at the same time lose their fixed character (cf. Bachmann-Medick 1998, 23 f.) so that something new can be created.

In this public space within the larger space of the PRC the Chinese students debate, together with the German teacher, the Chinese (half-) taboo theme of the Cultural Revolution, while in what they say and the words they use, however, remaining in their own fashion indirect.