Germanistische Beiträge 40.2017
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The article presents in its first part approaches to the concept of text genres and some milestones in the evolution of text linguistics. The aim of this linguistics consists in the research of different ways of constructing texts, regardles of style and genre. Starting from the premise that some textual elements are indices for the text genres, the article exposes some observations regarding delimitations between text genres and research approaches from the intercultural and interdisciplinary perspective.
Life in Saxon and Romanian neighbourly communities in the common homeland of Transylvania is reflected in the vocabulary of the Transylvanian-Saxon vernaculars. This lingual contact results in “collective bilingualism”, a term used in the respective specialist literature. This contribution aims at the analysis of the loan verbs from a semantic viewpoint, at their classification according to their phonetic levelling to the vernacular phonetic system and at giving recapitulatory comments concerning the loan words’ integration process. The case examples are taken from the Transylvanian-Saxon Dictionary, from the North-Transylvanian-Saxon Dictonary and other specialist literature.
The present paper accumulates information and studies the etymology of the Romanian ethnonym “Aleman” and its versions, beginning from their geographical spread throughout Romania and Germany. The Romanian surnames “Aleman” and “Aloman” (highest prevalence in the area of Transylvania, in the Sibiu and Alba counties), as well as “Aliman”, “Alimănescu”, “Alaman” and “Alman” (highest prevalence in the areas of Muntenia, Oltenia and Dobrogea) do not come from the French term “allman” as their German equivalents “Allman”, “Allmang”, “Lallemand” do, which are concentrated in the Western Germany (in the Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate German federal districts), due to the fact that there are no correspondents to the surnames of the Transylvanian Saxons. Therefore, the origin of these Romanian surnames is more likely to relate to the Turkish term “aleman” (see Iordan, 1983, p. 25 and 23), which also refers to the Germanic tribe of alamans or alemans, having the same meaning of “German”. The geographical proliferation of the “Aleman” and “Aliman” versions of the term is specific to the East to West population migration phenomena. These versions are the only ones existent in today’s Germany. Thus the “Aleman” and “Aliman” surnames are to be found in strongly industrialized centers such as Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Wiesbaden, Bielefeld, Hamburg and not in the area of the German-French frontier (see following map).
Based on the specific use of fixed expressions in everyday communication or in written messages, the paper presents modifications of reiterated discourse (suppresion, addition, substitution, permutation) that are illustrated by adapted common phrases and innovations of text types with formalized language.
In our “House Europe” the exchange of ideas is going on intensively and the multi-cultural societies are in continuous transformation. An interesting example for cultural transfer in a multi-lingual and multi-confessional society is the reception of the St. Martin’s Day combined with the lantern procession organized by the German schools in Transylvania. The schools with German teaching language in Romania became a practice area for intercultural communication. Since 1997, first grade students at German schools in Romania learn from a new reading primer. One of the reading passages, “Our Lantern Festival”, initiated the spreading of a feast which had not been popular before neither with the German speaking minority of the Transylvanian Saxons, nor with the Romanian majority. The Lantern Festival is closely linked to the celebration of St. Martin, who is a European figure of high symbolic power. We can allege that the cultural diversity is an additional value for Europe. In the era of globalization, when migration processes and cultural hybridization are getting more intense, the intercultural communication has to adjust its inherited paradigm to the contemporary dynamics and heterogeneity of cultures.
Undoubtedly, the episode referring to the ,Minnegrotteʼ contains the most different interpretative approaches from the entire Tristan narrative. It is nevertheless possible that many motives and methods of procedure specific to various traditions (antique and Christian, in particular) merge into one unity, in order to legitimize the extramarital relationship between Tristan and Isolde in a secluded space which subordinates itself to a completely different view of the world. When contemplating the parallelization to the sacred love, Gottfried implies that the lovers find themselves in a place, which serves them as shelter, and within this place only the harmony generated by love may prevail. This creates an alternative reality in the Minnegrotte, where the transition between Marke’s court and the ,Lustortʼ can be observed. Providing a detailed description of the latter (with the main focus on the food miracle and the autobiographical excursus), the author has succeeded in bringing together the conceptual topological features of the locus amoenus, the ,love cathedralʼ, and the paradisus, in order to include the real ,minneʼ in the memoria.
Auf Wolke Siebenbürgen … : eine Kindheit voller Gefahren. Die „Deportation“ und Rettung der Mutter
(2017)
Transylvania is a region that frequently appears in the texts of the German speaking writers from Romania. Walther Gottfried Seidner‘s story makes no exception. In the center is the narrator, a kindergarten child, who explores the history of Europe experienced from a subjective point of view. His attention is directed especially to the mother, who is in danger of being deported to the Soviet Union. The red thread of the narrative is interrupted by retrospectives, which complete the image of Transylvania at the beginning of the year 1945. This analysis refers to several aspects within the original text: the Cibin River and its significance to the community of Sibiu, the Christian cross and the swastika, the German National Socialism and the Communism, the deportation of the German minority.
It is well known that the media has strongly shaped the life of the people in many respects and that it exerts a sustained influence on our value systems and ways of thinking. Thus it also shows a clear extension of the human life. By far less famously however is the fact that nowadays media is the basis for all forms of mental development. This is why the relation between the people and the media is extremely tightened. Nevertheless, this ambivalent relation offers multi-complex material for the literary inspiration. Addressing the topic of the media in the literature combines two aspects ritically: On the one hand it reflects the human behaviour compared with the media and, on the other hand, it underlines emphatically the intermedial writing itself. My speech will be dedicated to the question: how these both aspects interact with each other. The narrative text of Alfred Andersch’s Erinnerte Gestalten will serve the answers to my topic. In this three prosaic texts Andersch shows the subject of the intermedial writing from different perspectives and he discusses certain human reactions to the media.
Erwin Neustädter was a novellist and poet of the German minority in Romania, who published two novels and some poems in the period between the two World Wars. After WW II he has been inprisoned several times. I want to present in my text his report about the time in prison between 1961 and 1963. The typoscript of about 200 pages has been found after his and his wife’s death in 1995 and has been published by the family in 2015. I want to present this book to a larger audience, because it is an authentic report on the situation during the 1950s and 1960s in communist Romania, which doesn’t focus on the political aspects of detention but on the psychological ones.
