Germanistische Beiträge 43.2018
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Film is a wonderful means of reflecting upon the identity of the self and the other. A movie like Didi Danquart’s Offset (2006), which deals with intercultural conflicts, even more so. The clash of the Romanian and German cultures depicted in this movie illustrates how the construction of identity – of the self and the other – works.
Inspired by the general theme Interculturality in language and literature. Assimilation – distinction – exchange, the contribution offers a short survey over the linguistic situation at the schools with instruction in German language in Romania and outlines the evolution, problems and perspectives in this domain. The long tradition of the church-sponsored, Lutheran German schools of the Transylvanian Saxons belongs to history. The present linguistic situation at schools with instruction in German language in Romania is a totally changed one and all participants are facing huge challenges. Very briefly, current aspects of the linguistic situation (school types, staff, students, acquisition of the language of instruction, multilingualism, language competence, phenomena of language contact, intercultural learning etc.) as well as possible actions in the field of multilingual didactics and educational politicy are pointed up.
Until World War 1 tried Adolf Meschendörfer differently to modernize the German-Transylvanian cultural scene. Therefore he published the magazine Die Karpathen (1907-1914), which included the novel Leonore. Roman eines nach Siebenbürgen Verschlagenen. Leonore is in several ways prototypical for the modernity
Nowadays, the Bukovinian writer and psychiatrist Robert Flinker is a familiar name only to those interested in the German literature of Bukovina. His literary legacy, which consists of poems, stories and two novels, was published more than twenty years after his death. This paper intends to analyze Flinker’s novels, Der Sturz [The Downfall] and Fegefeuer [Purgatory], from a psychiatric and psychoanalytical perspective. As a psychiatrist in the first half of the 20th century, Flinker was familiar with the benefits of psychoanalysis in treating patients. This raises the question of whether thewriter Robert Flinker was influenced by the new psychoanalytical discoveries and, if so, which theories he used in his novels. Moreover, it must be taken into consideration that Flinker, who had Jewish origins, wrote his novels during the Second World War. In this regard, the socio-cultural context had an impact on Flinker’s literary work.
The present article is based on the premise that Europe is currently in context of migration dynamics between 'home' and 'foreign' ideas, between 'soft' strategies of inclusion, social participation on the one hand, and 'hard' tactics ofexclusion of the 'others' or 'Migrants' on the other hand. Against this background and based on some ideas of Zygmunt Bauman, Navid Kermani and Amin Maalouf, I will firstly discuss some factors of the 'We-debate'. Then, using the example of the novel So tun, als ob es regnet of the German-Romanian author Iris Wolff I will analyze how far literature uses translation and multilingualism to initiate a poetological process of understanding others and therefore counteracts cultural we-phantasms in Europe.
The border experience is the basic experience in the novel Engelszungen. There are characters who escape, emigrate, moving between several countries whose identity is unstable and changing. Life between cultures and with different identities determined their nomadic wandering around, where the transit movement as the basic experience has also a political dimension. The scientific contribution analyzes inner and outer boundaries, examines identitary border crossings, illuminates the major characters, their different identity designs, the restless in theirwandering and strategies of adaptation to the West.
This text is based on the novelette „The Disarmed Bullet – The Frost Pattern On the Thirteenth” by Walther Gottfried Seidner (from the prose volume „On The Cloud Called Transylvania, A Paradise Inmidst Of Hell – Good Night Stories” with a preface by Ph.D. Gerhard Konnerth). Both, research and critical essays on the topic of the deportation of the German minority of Transylvania to the Donetsk valley in Ukraine are marked by the tendency to victimize this ethnis group. The writer Walther Gottfried Seidner publishes his novelette as a reaction against this perspective and as a general humane reflection as well, retelling from the point of view of an six-year-old boy how his mother (a mother of four) is saved by a Russian soldier, who disarms a bullet, lying he would have killed the woman, in order for her to stay with her four small children. The story is captured from the memory of the grown-up child, from a distant perspective, valuable for its subjective but very profound reflections. The present analysis focusses on three dimensions of the post-war novelette: 1. The narrative, 2. The characters, 3. The langauge, especially the elements of the German Saxon variety. The novelette is regarded as being representative for the work of the German Saxon author, as it voices a positive humanism in the face of a warlike Regime, in the period of the Iron Curtain. The work can be seen as a cornerstone of the European idea in the context of the 100th jubilee of the Romanian Unity and of 29 years since the Romanian Revolution.
The materialis based on the fact that German citizens which have been born in Transylvania (Saxons) and immigrated to Germany return even “in death” to their homeland, be that through the choice of the medium where the death notice is published, or through the content of the death notice itself. The article follows the mechanisms through which this reference is built and analyzes the objective, geographical and cultural referentiality as well as the subjective recollections of the former, now far away, homeland, relying on death notices published in the Siebenbürgischen Zeitungbetween January 2012 – December 2015 und January 2017 – March 2018.
The study deals with the large variety of judicial trials found in the records of the magistrate and judge of Sibiu of the 16th and 17th century. The topics of the magistratedocuments include heritage, the changing of the property right, guild regulations, rules for day laborers and servants and even orders regarding the number of persons that could attend to a feast and the number of dishes that should be served. The judicial papers deal with litigations, robberies, unpaid debts, frauds, adultery, crime and witchcraft trials.