Germanistische Beiträge 39.2016
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The Western European culture in the 18th century builds an impressive reference framework for the intellectual life in Central and Eastern Europe, where the ideals of the Enlightenment had spread rapidly mainly by means of translations of secularized works from all fields of knowledge. Among these, one should mention a series of historical writings that give account of the great monarchs of the time. In the following study we try to illustrate the concept of “cultural translation” by analysing a historical text about Catherine II of Russia. The Moldavian manuscript illustrates the process in which ideas and concepts have circulated in the European space: it is an Austrian (Habsburg) portrait of a German princess that managed to be crowned empress of Russia under debatable circumstances. This portrait written at the court of Joseph II in 1877 was translated in the same year in Greek and through this intermediary entered the Romanian speaking soil, where it was translated a year after. The circulation of ideas and conceptions respectively misconceptions can be illustrated in then textual mutations that occurred during this cultural transfer process from East to West and then to East again. The ideological and political intent of the text can be also seen in the self-aware translation that aimed to bring plusvalue to the Enlightened discourse of its original text.
The subject of the present study represents the artistic personality of the German writer Mite Kremnitz (1852-1916), which takes into consideration both facets of her work, as a translator and as a novelist. On the one hand and as an author in her own right, Mite Kremnitz is the carrier of Romanian realities; on the other hand she has the merit of having been the first one to translate contemporary literature from Romanian into German.
Each language has its own silence, which is a mirror; one gets to see in it that the unsaid is not uttered. The fact that people from different cultures understand one another is not self-evident. Practice shows that understanding does not run smoothly. The way cultures can understand other cultures is to be pointed out with the help of conversation as the prototype of language use, as the source of all uses of language. The present article deals with silence in communication. He who is silent imparts something as well and the others react to it. They react differently, depending on the situation, on individually and culturally determined contexts. Words and silence are all of communicative nature. They influence people, who react to them. Every instance of communication contains a piece of information and reference to the communication partners. Each linguistic exchange involves a cultural exchange, and consists of the contribution of speaker and listener to the linguistic utterances, of the turn-taking of speakers. Silence can more precisely be defined in a conversation as ‘meaningful silence’ or as ‘the act of falling silent’, as ‘quietness’.
The language in the communist era represents one of the most important means of expressing legitimization of socialist ideology and political power. The analysis of journalistic texts with political content reflects obviously the values enforced by the political authority and the ideological point of view on social life, while constructing the cultural identity of a social group. The cultural identity, as the sum of values, principles, confesses, beliefs, customs, shared by the members of the same ethnicity, is constructed and revealed by means of language. On this basis, the present paper aims at presenting some aspects regarding the way in which cultural identity is represented in the speeches of some communist politicians, published in the German newspaper Neuer Weg. The authoress analyses in the journalistic texts the way in which the content becomes manifest in language use. There is a matter of debate and controversy at ideological level, as the speakers drop hints and give clues to the deficiencies and shortcomings of the internal economic situation and of the foreign policy. The language use is marked by aggressiveness and virulence, while the linguistic material used for this purpose contains specific features at lexical, morpho- syntactic and pragmatic level. The authoress takes the theoretical stance of sociolinguistics and pragma linguistics in assessing the language facts.
The modern lexicography must meet certain requirements in order to ensure an adequate lexicographical coverage of the presented lexical inventory. The relevant published literature dedicated to the profile of lemmas within the current lexicographical practice reveals shortcomings that reflect the gap between the current linguistic reality and the usual lexicographical practice. From the user’s perspective and his consulting needs modern metalexicography stresses the need for a fair lexicographical exposure, empirically grounded, capable of indicating peculiarities and restrictions of the usage within the language. Parting from theoretical considerations, regarding the relevance of the criteria that define the quality of a lexicographical work, the principle of addressability and the current phraseographic practice, the article presents directions and ways of researching for the phraseological inventory in terms of relevant peculiarities for the mono- or bilingual lexicographical practice. Exemplary there are discussed modern empirical methods meant to improve the current lexicographical practice insisting upon the evidence provided by the corpus as object and means of verifying the hypothesis of theoretical or applied research. The analysis of occurrences extracted from corpora is a valuable tool for the lexicographer because it allows the identification of the specific characteristics belonging to fixed structures within usual multiple contexts, patterns of use, concordances and co-selections. An authoritative body of linguistic evidence allows observations of mutations occurring in use or frequency of distributions, as well as identifying outlying areas of phraseology which so far have been insufficiently investigated or ignored by the lexicographical practice.
: German in East Central and South East Europe is deeply rooted in the area’s multilingualism. It shows specific developments in different countries, though. In this article the examples Slovenia, Czech Republic, and Romania represent German in very different situations, historically as well as contemporary.
Art is always an expression of the unconscious. By archetypal images, the artist addresses in addition to the conscious side also the unconscious side of the reader. For literature, this means the existence of two levels of text- a superficial one on which the conscious and deliberate act takes place, and a deeper, symbolic, expression of unconscious contents. According to Jungian theories of the archetype in literature, the choice of the archetype allows us to draw conclusions on the historical and social environment of the writer, because such images often have a compensatory nature.
The motif of silence falls not only on Herta Müller‘s first collection of short stories, but is a basic recurrent idea of her entire work. Silence and fear emerge through various mechanism of power and manifest themselves violently on the psyches of Herta Müllers figures. As the child of Niederungen is aware of his command of silence, he tries to turn against the instrumentally generated norms of the Banat Swabians society. The speech prohibition is a shocking experience, which he perceives physically.
While the title of Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1799) bears the name of a woman, the eponymic protagonist in Dorothea Schlegel’s novel Florentin (1801) is a man. Both novels have remained fragmentary as well in the literal as in the romantic sense of the word, both novels deal with literary constructions of femininity and masculinity. While Dorothea follows a more traditional role model in her primarily narrative novelistic text, Friedrich pursues in his predominantly speculative novelistic text rather new ways of thinking. According to the romantic concept of ‚progressive Universalpoesie’ he combines the two distinct principles of femininity and masculinity by establishing a connection between them and at the same time dissolving them in a universal context.
Language teaching through the medium of film may prove very rewarding in that it moves the focus away from language and its general markers (grammar, vocabulary) alone and casts it onto culture, cultural boundaries and rules. Among them, space plays a very important role. It defines who we are, where we come from. Especially the fine line between what is considered public or private space is worth being analyzed. With examples from two movies, students of German as a Foreign Language are meant to discover this fine line, look beyond it and restore an equilibrium between the public and the private in order to be prepared for intercultural experiences.
Aspekte der Raumgestaltung in Andreas Birkners Erzählung "Der Brautschmuck des Sebastian Hann"
(2016)
Since the twentieth century, literary critics have identified as study component space and its meanings in literary texts. The Russian semiologist Yuri M. Lotman developed a theory based on the concept of space divided into several subspaces necessarily delimited by a boundary. These spaces are characterized by opposite features on topological, topographical and semantic level. Based on this theory, this paper aims to examine from this point of view the story Der Brautschmuck des Sebastian Hann [The Bride’s Jewels of Sebastian Hann] written by the Romanian German-language author Andreas Birkner. Concrete examples are given listing aspects of Lotman's theory , which enable reception of both the text and the author from a different perspective.
This article focusses on the question of howfar thenew figure of the continuum can capture the categories gender, migration and spaceand how intra- and intercategorial shifts, variabilities, polypolarities can be specified. Also the article will be discussed to what extend the figure of the continuum can meet the challenges of pluralities existing in realities of the lived lifes of human beings as well as in literary texts dealing with gender, migration and/or space.
The German writer Gabriele Wohmann, who passed away in June 2015 at the age of 83 wrote over 100 books (novels, short stories) essays, poems, more than 20 filmskripts being translated into 15 languages. She ist known for her sharp, ruthless view on German everyday-life and its neurotic, lonely, frustrated protagonists, especially women. But it is not a distant and unaffectedportrayal, but one out of profound sympathy. The literary critic Reinhard Baumgart, even invented the term „Wohmannisieren“. He was referring to the seemingly unspectacular flowing ofher stories, but „under the surface it rages, however“. We then refer to a short story (Flitterwoche. Dritter Tag– Honeymoon. Third day) from her latest book Eine souveräne Frau. The main theme of this narrative, as well as in numerous other texts by Wohmann, is the familial relationship disorders in everyday middle-class existences. The main problem is the inability of the protagonists to communicate in a familiar and natural waywith each other, as one might expect of newlyweds.
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The hereby article deals with situational integration in Franz Hodjak‘s poetry. The lyrical work of the Sibiuborn author never refers to a classical „arrival“, but to a permanent voyage, that does not act exclusively as selfknowledge, but especially as a univocal refusal of identity. Hodjak creates his own topography, looking for an interspace beyond common categories, a place that provides a possibility of non-hindered existence for the human being.
Due to the fact he describes the south-eastern European area, Oscar Walter Cisek is a unique case in the German expression literature in Romania. It is praiseworthy the way he experiments on the oriental space in the short story Die Tatarin, the way he outlines the Balkan atmosphere in the story Spiel in der Sonne, or how successfully he renders the archaic atmosphere in the novels Strom ohne Ende and Vor den Toren. Thus, a reader has the opportunity to discover the motley world of Balcic, of the periphery of Bucharest, of the Danube Delta or Maramures area.
Klingsoriana : Poetisches aus dem Umfeld einer Kulturzeitschrift und ihres Redakteurs Harald Krasser
(2016)
The term „Klingsoriana“ from the title of the article is a derivative of the name "Klingsor", the legendary minstrel of the Middle Ages; and of its cultural heritage, the magazine Klingsor. It appeared monthly in the years 1924-1939, first in Braşov, later in Sibiu, being the most significant interwar German cultural periodical in Transylvania for a decade and a half. The derivative describes the documentary background of the publications, sources, manuscripts, partly unpublished or inaccessible printed material, almost everything that was once in the gravitational field of the journal. References from the inheritance of the editor Harald Krasser are selected, particularly those pages that refer to native German poetry written during the last publication period of the magazine. Mentioned are names of poets of those times and of some connoisseurs and promoters of poetry, as well as of historiographers concerned with the literature of the first half of the twentieth century.