Although the history of German language teaching at Croatian universities goes even further back (the German Language Lectorate of the Faculty of Philosophy was founded in 1876, two years after the founding of the University of Zagreb), the beginning of the scholarly study of German language and literature dates back to the year 1895, when the German Language Chair was founded. However, the first courses started a year later; in January 1896. In 1904 German Language and Literature Studies in Zagreb became a department, or - as it was officially called for decades, the German Philology Seminar. In the area of teacher education, German Language and Literature Studies in Zagreb formally drew level with the German departments at German universities in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy already in 1897 by giving students the possibility of taking the teacher certification test (Lehramtsprüfung).
   The central figure of the foundation years was Stjepan Tropš, a graduate of German Philology at Graz University. In 1895 he became apprentice teacher, and in 1902 a full professor, Tropš headed the Department for more than 40 years and is greatly responsible for its development and growth; for example, the number of students increased from four per year in 1896 to twenty-five already in 1902. Tropš and several of his colleagues - as was generally customary in philological departments in Europe - held both literary and linguistic courses.
   In accordance with the historicist tendencies of the time in which the department was founded, both teaching and research focused far more on older language and literature phenomena than on contemporary language and literature. Courses in Middle High German were part of the curriculum from the very beginnings of the department; in 1901 courses in Gothic were introduced, followed by lectures on the general development of the German language from Indo-European and Proto-Germanic. A similar situation was to be found in the field of literature: already in his first year at the university, Tropš started lecturing on the oldest German written monuments. With time, more recent literary periods found their place in the curriculum as well, but there still was - nowadays difficult to imagine in German Departments worldwide - a prevalence of medievalistic courses. Among teachers who gave their contribution to the early years of the department, we must single out Gustav Šamšalović, the author of the well-known German-Croatian dictionary, first published in 1916, the year in which Šamšalović joined the department, first as a language instructor (lector), and later as a teacher of more recent German literature and language.
   In the same way in which teaching was influenced by the situation in contemporary European German Language and Literature Studies, research adhered to the predominant model of positivism, the method on which Tropš based his research as well. His papers and articles, some of which appeared in prestigious foreign publications, mostly deal with literary and language influences and connections, for example, connections between South-Slav folk songs and epics and German literature.
   Numerous dissertations and papers of those times - with rare exceptions - sprang up from the same research methods and interests. Although there are some among them which have significantly contributed to the further study of individual aspects of language history, literature, and culture in German (Austrian)-Croatian relations (e.g., the doctoral dissertation of Blanka Breyer on German theater in Zagreb in 1937), they rarely moved away from bare positivist listing of facts. However, in the period leading to World War ll some authors managed to overcome these comparativist-positivist methods and in many ways achieved results comparable with leading contemporary German scholars, and are even cited by today's scholars. This primarily refers to a study by the Croatian-Austrian German scholar and writer Camilla Lucerna on Goethe's Fairytale (Das Märchen, Goethes Naturphilosophie als Kunstwerk, 1910), and the doctoral dissertation of Zdenko Škreb on Grillparzer's epigrams from 1931, a supplemented version of which was published in 1960. At that time Škreb was already a scholar of international renown, who laid completely new foundations for German language and literature research and study in Croatia after World War ll, bringing them to a more contemporary and significantly higher level.
   The foundations of this new structure of German Language and Literature Studies in Zagreb were laid under the most difficult circumstances imaginable: during World War ll (in the fascist Independent State of Croatia) and the immediate after-war years (during the Stalinist phase of communist Yugoslavia). With the support and encouragement of German visiting professors, Škreb proceeded to successfully put his intentions into practice in an - officially - extremely Germanophobic atmosphere in the period following 1945.
   As we have already said, alongside new teaching methods, changes were also introduced in the area of research. With the help of the younger generation of Croatian philologists, Škreb initiated discussions on methodological innovations in literary studies which had happened in preceding decades. These efforts resulted in the so-called Zagreb School of Stylistics, an informal circle of literary scholars which evolved from recent literary and theoretical trends and found its best expression in the journal Umjetnost riječi, founded by Škreb in 1957. The most well-known of Zdenko Škreb's publications in German is a monograph on Franz Grillparzer's dramatic work (Grillparzer. Eine Einführung in das dramatische Werk, 1976), whereas his publications in Croatian focus more on methodological aspects Uvod u književnost (lntroduction to Literature, 1961, 1985); Studij književnosti (The study of Literature, 1976); Književnosti i povijesni svijet (Literature and the Historical World, 1982).
    Towards the end of the 1940s, when the situation at the university and the department had gradually begun to improve, Škreb started bringing in young colleagues, and the number of students started to increase. In 1961 the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature was divided into individual sections, and German Language and Literature became an independent degree program. At that time the department was also further subdivided into the newly founded German Literature Section (headed by Zdenko Škreb), the German Language Section (headed by Blanka Jakić-Breyer), and the Germanic Philology section, which, however, has still not found its realization in practice. Among Škreb's associates from this early period, apart from the above-mentioned Blanka Jakić Breyer, mention must also be made of Mira Gavrin, Ljerka Sekulić, and Viktor Žmegač.
   The arrival of Viktor Žmegač at the German Literature section was of great significance for its further development. Žmegač's doctoral dissertation on the role of music in the work of Thomas Mann (1959) already attracted significant interest outside Croatia, and his subsequent papers and articles - alongside Škreb's - brought the German Department in Zagreb indisputable international renown. After he had published a series of monographs - Kunst und Wirklichkeit (1969) - and anthologies - Methoden der deutschen Literaturwtssenschaft (1971); Zur Kritik der literaturwissenschaftlichen Methodologie (co-authored by Škreb, 1973) - in the 1970s Žmegač increasingly turned to issues of literary history. The first synthesis of this interest was Povijest njemačke književnosti (The History of German Literature), co-authored by Škreb and Ljerka Sekulić, which was in published 1975 in the fifth volume of the history of world literature, Povijest svjetske književnosti, and later individually reprinted outside the series (Zagreb, 1986). In early 1980s a supplemented German translation of this history of German literature was published in Frankfurt (Kleine Geschichte der deutschen Literatur) with great market success, leading to a number of reprints.
   ln the mid-seventies Žmegač also initiated a new project: an innovative socially and historically based survey of the last three centuries of German literature, which was realized under his direction and in collaboration with leading German scholars from Germany, Austria and Switzerland between 1978 and 1984. The series in three volumes, entitled Geschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, has remained until today one of the most renowned and best-selling German literary histories ever. Žmegač's German publications in the 1990s include, among others, a comprehensive monograph on the poetics of the European novel (Der europäische Roman, 1990), a collection of essays on turn-of-the-century German literature (Tradition und Innovation, 1993), and the glossary Moderne Literatur in Grundbegriffen (1989), which was co-authored by Dieter Borchmeyer. Žmegač also published a series of studies in Croatian, e.g., Književno stvaralaštvo i povijest društva (Literary Creation and the History of Society, 1976), Krležini evropski obzori (Krleža's European Horizons, 1986), Duh impresionizma i secesije (The Spirit of lmpressionism and Secession, 1993), Bečka moderna (The Viennese Literary Modernism, 1998).
   The courses in the Literature Section are still structured along principles worked out by Škreb and Žmegač: a three-year cycle of lectures on the history of German literature from the 18th to the 20th century (today held by Marijan Bobinac), lectures in contemporary German literature (lvo Runtić), and an introductory course on literary scholarship (Dragutin Horvat and Svjetlan Lacko Vidulić), as well as a number of seminars held by the above teachers and Milka Car.
   After the retirement of Blanka Breyer-Jakić at the end of the 1960s, the German Language Section was headed for several years by Emilija Grubašić, previously a German language instructor at the German Department in Sarajevo. Soon afterwards, in the early seventies, the position was taken over by Stanko Žepić, assistant lecturer at the department since 1963. Žepić's dissertation, Morphologie und Semantik der deutschen Nominalkomposita (1967), already pointed to one of his later areas of research, word formation. Žepić tackled this and several other linguistic areas in his later studies from a contrastive point of view:
   Wortbildung des Substantivs im Deutschen und Serbokroatischen (I, 1976, II, 1986), Wortbildung des Adjektivs im Deutschen und Serbokroatischen I (1978), Das Verb im Deutschen und Serbokroatischen (1983), Grundbegriffe der Phonologie und ein Vergleich der phonologschen Systeme des Deutschen und Kroatischen (1991). Since the early 1970s Žepić has lectured on contemporary and historical German grammar. A survey of his research on the history of German is presented in his Historische Grammatik des Deutschen (1980).
  Linguistic courses at the German Department have been taught since the 1970s by Mirko Cojmerac (lntroduction to the Study of the German Language, Linguistic Seminar, Theory of Translation) and Zrinjka Glovacki Bernardi (lntroduction into the Study of German Language, Contemporary German Grammar, Linguistic Seminar), who were joined in the 1990s by teaching assistants Velimir Piškorec and Slađan Turković.
   An important role in the study of German Language and Literature Studies, just as in all other modern language departments, belongs to language teaching: in this respect the contribution of our language instructors (lectors) is of great importance. Many among them have been with the department since the end of World War ll: Daša Devčić, Roland Knopfmacher, Zlatko Muhvić, Marija Uroić, Ksenija Petrović, Nada Filipović, Gertruda Postl-Božić, Tamara Marčetić, Christine Reiser-Dumbović, Jasenka Kljaić, Nina Sokol, Marija Lütze-Miculinić, Marija Crnić, Vesna lvančević, Sonja Strmečki, Inja Skender-Libhard, Snježana Rodek, and Antonela Konjevod.
   A specific range of issues is addressed within Maja Häusler's course Methods of German Language Teaching, in which theoretical issues are explored in a series of lectures, and various practical methods of teaching German as a foreign language are tackled in a number of seminars and applied through teacher training in primary and secondary schools.
   Even though purely Germanistic periodicals were almost non-existent for decades, Croatian Germanists of both the older and the younger generation developed a prolific production of scientific works and articles. This lack of periodicals can partly be explained by the fact that some department members were preoccupied by founding and editing professional journals in Croatian. The only exception was Zagreber Germanistische Studlen, which published more extensive scholarly texts in three volumes that appeared between 1959 and 1970. The first Croatian periodical focussing on German language and literature, however, was Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge - Jahrbuch fur Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaft, which was initiated in 1992 by a group of young Germanists (editor-in-chief Marijan Bobinac). In contrast to its predecessor, which published mostly monographic studies, the new publication aims at giving a survey of the present state of Germanistic research in shorter contributions. A broad collaboration of Germanists - not only from Croatia, but also from Europe and the United States - shows that the editorial board has so far done the right thing. Alongside the regular publication Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge, six additional thematic volumes with proceedings from Croatian-German and Croatian-Austrian Germanistic symposiums have also appeared, as well as a Festschrift for the occasion of Viktor Žmegač's 70th birthday. Future such thematic volumes will bring contributions from research carried out recently at the department within several research projects. Involved in these projects, dealing with linguistic and literary relations between Croatia and German-speaking countries, are also several junior researchers.

Marijan Bobinac (2004): Department of German Language and Literature, in: The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb (ed. Miljenko Jurković, Stjepan Damjanović), Zagreb, pp. 109-113.