Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (13)
Language
- German (13) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (13) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (13) (remove)
Keywords
- identity (13) (remove)
: The concept of the foreign view is a recurring theme throughout all of Herta Müller’s prose. This kind of view derives from her biography. Certainly an unique biography but it is also transferable to many other people. Expressions like „remaining in order to leave“ or „arrived, but long not here“ become guidelines of leaving and arrivals or non-arrivals. The individual acts in-between languages, worlds and in-between cultures. Identity has to change continuously, as it is always in a process.
Danubeland scapes have been a recurrent topic in the German-language literature of Southeastern Europe, especially in German literature from Romania, which was the only one to survive the end of the Second World War in the Eastern Bloc. They developed different forms on both-sides of the Iron Curtain. In the West, the Danubeservedas a frame work for the consolidation of a common identity of many disparate groups of former German minorities from Southeastern Europe under the collective name “Danube Swabians”. Additionally, writers from Romania who emi-grated to the West recalled in their works bothwonderful and frightening images of the lower Danube. In Romania, Danube landscapes are to be seen as attempts to negotiate the concept of homeland from a contemporary perspective after its appropriation by the patriotic literature of the court literati. They emergedas a stage for projecting new sensi-tivities: the suffering of isolation, economic misery and environmental pollution. Subversively narrated landscapes also set hidden signs of the memory of the isolated deten-tion camps on the periphery of the country. The transfor-mation of Danube landscapes is analysed by using literary examples after 1945.
This study analyses the role of the Romanian language in Christian Hallers novel Die verschluckte Musik (2008). The Romanian words are linked to the content and symbolical context, and also to intimacy or strangeness. Single words and expressions are connected to memories and rituals. For the family residing in Bucharest they are everyday elements. By migration they become cultural artefacts, are included in family stories. In the new home country Switzerland, the Romanian language is an element of intimacy. The language is also a method of exclusion and dissociation. Ruth, the first-person narratorʼs mother, is excluded in Bucharest until she learns the national language. In the Swiss environment the already familiar Romanian language is for Ruth a method of dissociation. For the first-person narrator, the few Romanian words are details connected to gastronomic culture which distinguish him from the Swiss environment. While travelling through Bucharest, the Romanian language becomes a method of exclusion, it is connected to an area that was not attainable for a long period. His journey updates the language for him.
Erinnerungsdiskurs und Identitätskonstruktion in Carmen Elisabeth Puchianus Roman "Patula lacht"
(2013)
The novel of Romanian-born German author Carmen Elizabeth Puchianu Patula lacht, was published in 2012 by the Karl Stutz Passau publishing house in Germany. The novel is hybrid in nature, with discourse oscillating constantly between the factual and the fictional, many of the events being autobiographical and rendered in the form of recollections. The present article sets out to analyse Carmen Elizabeth Puchianu’s above-mentioned novel in terms of the recollection techniques used. This study is based on research in literary and cultural theory issued over the past several years. The interference between recollection and identity – which is not regarded as an entity proper but rather as one that is built and enriched with multiple facets throughout the narrative – is also investigated.
The paper attempts at outlining some aspects of experienced intercultural phenomena in Transsylvania starting with the late 50ies and deals with the question of cultural and linguistic choice of an individual born into a multilinguistic and multicultural family. The close connection between mother tongue and identity is analysed under the particular circumstances of the author’s biographical background. The paper should be read as an autobiographical statement which the author considers necessary for the understanding of her legitimate status within present day German literature written in Romania.
The present article focuses on the preservation of identity in the works of three Romanian-born authors (two of them of German origin – Herta Müller and Hans Bergel and the third of Jewish origin – Norman Manea). Their existence has been highly influenced on the one hand by being born in Romania, by the interaction with Romanian people, on the other hand by the oppressive communist regime under Ceaușescu, having to undergo censorship, imprisonment and even deportation. Therefore, all three authors have chosen to leave Romania and emigrate to Germany or America. These experiences have added new dimensions to their concept of identity. At the same time, they act as intermediaries between cultures, and keepers of their own multi-layered and complex identity.
Beyond the communicative function of death notices, to informe about a death case, one will be repeatedly surprised by auxiliary functions of this category of private notices. The following article analizes from an intercultural perspective the representation of the (professional) identity in obituaries and death notices pertaining to a Romanian and a German corpus – the achievements attained to in the job environment and – in case of a blurred or merely outlined professional identity – on interests outside of one’s job, which were cherished by the deceased to the effect of shaping and defining him.
For intercultural language teaching, coaching students on how to perceive the cultural “other” is of crucial importance in order to avoid culturally based misunderstandings. This paper explores how perceiving the other can offer conclusions for perceiving and becoming aware of the self. Through that, a process of giving and taking ensues in which perceptions of the self and of the other are constantly fluctuating depending on the context in which the communication is taking place. At the crossroads between members of two different cultures, a dialogue emerges in which the points of view of both parties are changed. The paper outlines how perception is a construct in which one’s own origin, education, and emotions are blended in. Intercultural learning is the way to deal with this constructs in a flexible manner so as to create new interpretation patterns. It teaches how to sympathize with the other and how to better understand oneself.
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.
This article aims to trace different hypostases of alterity as they occur in the novel Vaterlandstage (Days at Home) by contemporary Romanian-born German author Dieter Schlesak. The paper draws on the distinction suggested by Volker Barth between the concepts “das Fremde” (i.e. “the stranger” that remains unknowable and impossible to control) and “das Andere” (i.e. “the other” which is excluded as a result of othering). The analysis of the way in which these two forms of alterity are represented in the novel shows that they go beyond the ethnic and cultural meaning of the terms and are closely linked to Schlesak’s antimimetic poetics, his identity concept based on estrangement and not-belonging as well as to his rejection of a materialist view of the world.