Germanistische Beiträge 38.2016
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Transylvania was not exempt from the witch hunt of the 17th century; the city of Sibiu itself witnessed a series of trials and death sentences. While the phenomenon itself has been widely studied and written about in Western Europe, it has been scarcely mentioned in Romanian history works. The original documents from the Transylvanian archives, written down in German, have not been translated and presented to the Romanian public. The present paper intends to present aspects of the witch hunt in Sibiu during the 17th century starting from the case of a midwife judged and condemned to death by burning in 1692. This case will be presented through the original documents of the trial, found in the National Archives of Sibiu and containing the depositions of witnesses, of the accused herself, as well as the sentence passed. We hope that this will be the starting point for a selection and translation into Romanian of the German written documents, in order to make them available to the Romanian speaking public.
Since the Danube Swabians had a very big cultural and economic impact on other peoples, it’s to be discussed of their importance for the Serbian people, to be specific for the Serbian District Srem and its capital Sremska Mitrovica. From the 19th century up to the Second World War, the Danube Swabians have strengthened the economy, enriched the culture and beautified the city. After the Second World War, only a small part of the settlers remained, but the traces they have left are not gone. The Danube Swabians in Mitrovica and their importance for the city are not being ignored but protected and appreciated as a part of the history of this city.
The study deals with two texts from the year 1654 that belong to the administrative and judicial documents of The Romanian National Archives in Sibiu. The translation of these documents into Romanian is very important from a historical and linguistic point of view as it reveals to the Romanian reader major aspects regarding the history of Transylvania and the evolution of the German language in this area in the 17th century. The translational analysis goes from Antoine Berman’s ethnocentric vs. ethical theory to Julianne House’s theory of the „overt translation”, process in which the translator decides on a combination of elements from both theories.
The present study aims at analyzing the names of international airlines from the point of view of their origin, being based on both Hengi’s list (2012), which consists of 340 names, and the Wikipedia.de list, which is made up of 833 proper names.
The names of airlines could be considered nominal groups, consisting of an appellative nucleus, which describes the activity, and onomastic determiners, which particularize the activity of the company.
The particularizing function of the names of international airlines does not consist in the meaning of the name, but in its noteworthiness, in the types of associations it triggers in the mind of the perceiver.
Thusly, depending on the origin of names of international airlines, four types of constructions can be distinguished: 1. Airlines named after the people or the companies which own them (Antonov Airlines, NIKI Luftfahrt, Widerøe, TUIfly), 2. Airlines that have toponyms included in their names (Air France, Carpatair, Air Caraibes, Alaska Airlines, Air Pacific), 3. Symbol – names (Lion Air, Blue Air, Edelweiß Air, Pegasus Airlines, Silkair, Mandarin Airlines), 4. Conceptual names (ANA, Luxair, IndiGo, W!ZZ, Hello, WOWair).
By suggesting either positive or at least neutral traits through their names, such as seriousness, trust, transparency, safety, expressiveness, creativity, attractiveness, originality, modernity, internationality, airlines manage to faultlessly accomplish their marketing and advertising functions.
Not only in literature there are hunting vampyres. Especially in the history of eastern europe there are a few cases of this phenomena. But it is an phenomena of borders. Military borders, borders between faith and superstition and our common knowledge. In this paper I shall examine well-known sources of cases leading toward the an edict by Maria Theresia to force the end of this superstition. The sources show that there was an existing problem at the military borders of Austro-Hungary in the 18th century. When diseases came to a village and the legends about vampires were well-known there, than brave locals exhumed the body of a suspicious deceased. And they found a dead corpse in good shape. The skin had still a fresh colour. Hair and nails seemed grown and even blood was found between mouth and nose. These descriptions can be found in many sources of vampire exhumes in historical sources. But every exhume had a danger of infecting the whole society in a village if the deceased had a disease. Even if doctors and theologians examined the cases, there was never an intention to give a proof of vampyres. The phenomena of vampyres was part of a barbaric world – far away from vienna. Today's knowledge about decay of a human body shows that the descriptions in the sources are correct at this point. A body buried in a coffin still can be in a good shape. So the history of vampyres is a history of the culture transformation of legends and the history of science, to understand what happens after someone went down to his grave.
Space is important in all arts, that attempt at representing a certain mood and at suggesting the idea of embodiment. Space results from the presence of objects, of characters and environment, it is generated by and generates itself performative acts and structures. Starting from speech act and performativity theories relevant in literary and theatre studies, our article aims at an analysis of the space dimension in some texts of German authors writing in Romania. The main accent will be laid on the role of literary province reflecting both a sense of universality and of spacelessness.
Starting from the current preoccupations of areal phraseology, this article presents directions and ways of researching the phraseological stock of the German language with regards to the particularities and to the area of circulation in dialects or in the standard variants of the German language.
The paper presents the legal framework regulating the selection of alternative school textbooks for German language education in Romanian schools and compares the list of manuals recommended by the Ministry of Education for years 3–12 in 2015/16 with those currently used in practice by teachers. The 20 teachers surveyed for the current study were asked to indicate what textbooks they used in the classroom. Survey results were compared with the ministry-approved lists to check for concordances and discrepancies. Survey participants were further asked to give three reasons for their textbook selection and to indicate whether and to what purpose they used additional text-based resources in their teaching.
Occasionally the Transylvanian Saxon thesaurus deals with terminology related to certain domains of agriculture. The following article deals with livestock enclosures, fencing erected in the fields for livestock, especially for sheep. The selected case samples are native terms with explanatory compounds, in addition there are terms borrowed mainly from Romanian, less so from Hungarian. The borrowings can mostly be assigned to sheep farming. This branch of agriculture was not familiar to the medieval immigrants, so they were not used to sheep farming. The breeding and herding of sheep was usually left to the Romanian population, the Saxons did not engage in it, even though they owned sheep. The Saxons were more inclined to cattle and pig farming. The terms are mainly extracted from the Transylvanian-Saxon Dictionary (SSWB), the Northern Transylvanian dictionary (NSSWB) as well as other specialized literature.
Symbole zu unsicheren und mehrdeutigen Identitäten im Roman "Ascheregen" von Joachim Wittstock
(2016)
Joachim Wittstock uses a large number of symbols to illustrate the ideas of his novel Ascheregen. His characters' unclear feeling of identity due to the war troubles is a key topic of his text. Thats why a lot of important symbols that refer to this topic can be identified. This study deals with the unsettled front line and the mixed uniform parts but also with the fissured lime tree and the parly loss of the eyesight as examples which can be connected with the feeling of identity of some of the characters. Besides the use of symbols Wittstock also builts on the mix of real facts and fiction. This way he creates a vagueness that can be connected with the identity topic too and that is dealt with in this study.
Through the emergence of a mysterious wall a nameless protagonist is forced to lead a life of isolation behind this wall. Through the resulting threshold the space is divided into a separate space of the defunct civil society and an interior, insulated survival space. The exterior space is marked by elements of dissatisfaction, basically caused by the lack of interpersonal communication. The initially hostile enclave gradually becomes a space of militant feminism, in which a recluse is compelled not only to surviving but also to establishing herself at the zero point of civilization. The paradisiacal environment, leading to the dissolution of formal boundaries and to the comunion with the nature is visibly disturbed by the appearance of a stranger. It congeals to a space of creation, as the unnamed woman writes down her experiences in this place on the backs of old calendar pages. The natural environment of the mountains becomes through writing a place a self-insurance.
The latest publication of Professor Ioana Crăciun from the University of Bucharest deals with the (de)construction of bourgeois values and norms in the silent movies during the Weimar Republic. In five substantial chapters the author approaches the representation in the silent movies of different aspects which she considers relevant for that epoch. The themes range from the metropolis and its psychopathological aspects, the male homosexuality, the destiny of children, the law-breaking and the Doppelgänger motif.
The following study is dedicated to the city of Sibiu as the literary place in the short story “The Blue Sphere” [Die blaue Kugel] by Joachim Wittstock.
Starting from the selection of historical monuments and buildings evoking important personalities of the Transylvanian Saxons, Joachim Wittstock recalls cultural and historical aspects of the Saxons who have left their mark on the present. Using the blue sphere as a metaphor for perfection and balance, the writer from Sibiu describes the city as a literary topos in a time when German culture had reached its peak (18th-19th centuries) suggesting the eventual final decline.