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The article introduces Austrian writer Marlene Strееruwitz as a socially and politically engaged artist and examines how her latest work relates to the immediate present. It explores the strategies of coping with the present represented in the novel, but also the role of writing in the writer's biography at a specific historical moment (the first locкdown during the 2020 covid-19 pandemic). The analysis is based also on media appearances and poetological works of the author.
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The article is an attempt to trace the problematic of the broken logical space language – identity in works of Ingeborg Bachman and Robert Musil – “Malina” and “The Man without Qualities”. The two texts are seen as experimental fields of research into existing social and linguistic phenomena and attempts to transform these “untrue” spaces into the constructs of creative genius. Restoring the truth between identity and language is tied to the process of self-reflection and to exploring the limits of language.
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My purpose in this essay is to answer the question: What is the symbolic territory of European culture for Stefan Zweig? The material I am working on is The Royal Game (Chess Story) and a part of Zweig’s essays. In The Royal Game, the Vienna Cultural Centre, where Dr. B. is born, is opposed to the non-cultural field of Banat from which the other main character, Mirko Czentovic, comes. It does not matter exactly where the Banat region is located, because in the novella it functions as a place that is outside the culture of Europe. For Zweig, the culture of Europe is equivalent to that of Western Europe. In some cases, Scandinavian writers are included in this culture. Through European humanism, Zweig transforms Western Europe into an image of humanity. Zweig’s suggestions from the 1930s on how to create a European cultural identity are later applied in EU cultural and educational policy: to elect a European capital each year; pupils and students to have a permanent opportunity to stay in other European countries; scholarships to make it possible to study abroad. What Zweig could hardly have imagined is that European cultural exchange would be completely subservient to an American linguistic imperialism that would virtually destroy Europe’s linguistic diversity. Of the countries in Europe that exist in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Habsburg Empire provides the greatest basis for the theme of “Europe”; in the East-West direction, it covers territory from present-day Italy to present-day Ukraine.At the end, I discuss elements of the critical reflection on the reception of Zweig in Bulgaria.
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The article deals with Bodo Kirchhoff’s documentary writing style in his autobiographical novel "Dämmer und Aufruhr. Roman der frühen Jahre" (2018). The focus is on his experiment with different memory spaces and photographic narratives. This approach sets his writing style on the border between factuality and fictionality.
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The present paper analyses the German–Yiddish contact variety of the first chapter of the novel Die Peschl (1969) written by the Czernowitz-born author Otto Seidmann. The novel Die Peschl is written in German; however, the discourses and inner monologues of the main character, Gitl Peschl, as well as most of the dialogues with her appear in a German–Yiddish contact variety. My contact linguistic analysis identified 25 subtypes of transference from Yiddish in the inner monologues of Gitl Peschl in the first chapter of the novel. As a result, the German–Yiddish contact variety of the first chapter of the novel Die Peschl can be classified as code mixing, with congruent lexicalization as its subcategory. Congruent lexicalization is typically the case when the languages involved in language contact exhibit a high amount of grammatical and lexical similarities. According to literary historian Hartmut Merkt, Otto Seidmann’s texts stand in the tradition of sketch writings that aim to depict the everyday life and vernacular of the Bukovinians in the first half of the 20th century.
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The concept of community is considered in a sociological, philosophical and cultural context, tracing the transformation that the idea of community undergoes in the development from traditional to post-traditional society. On this theoretical foundation is based the analysis of seven works from the latest German-language fiction, which examines the literature representation of the community. Its conclusions are again correlated to the theory in order to contribute to the knowledge of the community.
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The article on „The Motif of Ulysses and its Transformations: Myth and Narrative in German Postwar Literature“ by Eva Patsovska-Ivanova focuses on the reception of the mythological motif of Ulysses in German postwar prose and more specifically on its quality to influence the narratological approach of the authors. With its associative power and flexibility the myth enables them to meet the challenges of their complicated historical situation by adapting the basic mythological story to their own aesthetic purposes. The article studies the mechanisms for adapting the myth and their functions.
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The paper examines the functions of representations of foreignness in Felix Kanitz’s travelogues about Bulgaria. It presents the theoretical split in the postcolonial discourse of the traditional opposition of the Own and the Foreign in two new oppositions: the Own – the Other and the Familiar – the Foreign, which have different functions. The first opposition is important for building one’s identity by distinguishing yourself from the other culture, the second is important for understanding the foreign culture and for shortening the distance with it. The examples given concern the subject of materialism of the Bulgarians, who are described as a sympathetic primitive culture.
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The present study focuses on media-supported online instruction on the discipline Ages in German language literature through video productions emphasizing independent, self-organized online learning employing the flipped/inverted classroom method to cooperative learning through learning platforms. By combining the media-supported instruction and traditional teaching approaches, advantages are likely to be enhanced and disadvantages minimized. The focus of the present study is on educational video clips and the aim is the empirical description of media integrative teaching especially regarding its educational effective aspects after presenting different forms of educational video clips.
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The present work focuses on the analysis of the short story Forstbetrieb Feltrinelli by Joachim Wittstock, published in 2018 by “hora” Publishing House in Sibiu. The first part of the present study will discuss the problems and narrative characteristics of the work. Following this, the construction of literary space and the processes used by the Romanian-German author in configuring the space of this work will be examined based on theoretical contributions pertaining to literary geography. The main emphasis will fall on the analysis of geographic localization, chorographic constitution, and “atmospheric specification” [„atmosphärische Spezifikation“] (Dünne 2015: p.31). Geographical topographies and detailed descriptions of places and landscapes confer authenticity to the constructed southern Transylvanian space where the action takes place. But for Wittstock’s literary space, the atmospheric specification is of great importance, designating the linguistically constituted space and pointing to the mythical character and the special symbolism of the text.
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Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was one of the most renowned political writers of the twentieth century, whose dramatic and lyrical texts had a strong impact on German post-war literature. His poems for children occupy a significant position in his impressive lyrical oeuvre, showing both clear political tendencies and a distinct didactic note characteristic of his work overall. His poetry is of significant interest in the context of the discussion of children’s literature as a specific kind of literature, which straddles the boundary between art (ars) and didactic literature, aiming at a pedagogic message (utilitas). Brecht‘s poems from various periods are analysed in this paper, in order to discuss the axiological problem of children’s literature, which critics have often been denying its artistic value. His texts are regarded as examples of crosswriting, being written for children, the youth and adults. Brecht himself did not make any distinctions between adult and children’s poetry, as he did not underrate his youngest readers, and therefore he did not adapt his texts, which resulted in a twofold consequence: their artistic value has not been questioned; instead, their appropriateness for children was brought into question. However, Brecht published his children’s poetry in cycles with univocal titles “Children Poems” (Kinderlieder) in 1939 and 1950, and therefore he himself explicitly identified the poems as belonging to children’s literature. He used specific children’s poetry genres like the counting rhyme, poems on alphabet, animals, and nature, dealing with the children’s reality and everyday life, with family and political events. He also tended to use adequate language and style, which children could easily understand. Brecht’s intention was clear: he wanted to encourage young people to think critically and to feel empowered to change the present and influence their own future. Therefore, he used parody, irony, satire, symbols, allegory, parable, open endings, which made his text ambiguous, in concordance with the rest of his work and his own values, which he wanted to convey. Therefore, his poetry is authentic and artistic, not only didactic, as he discusses the social injustice and the position of children, in particular girls and the poor, as well as the agents of socialisation that put the future of the youngest population in danger (parents, teachers, priests, politicians, and the police). As Brecht did not always state his morals explicitly, his poems are sometimes considered to be difficult and inadequate for children. But he did not choose to be explicit because he believed in children’s power of understanding, and wanted to activate them, instead of merely passing his messages and ideas so that they be passively received. All things considered, it can be concluded that Brecht’s children’s poetry undisputedly poses a valuable part of artistic children literature, and it cannot be denied either artistic value or adequacy for the youngest recipients. As it coalesces ars and utilitas, it can be regarded as “hybrid” literature, belonging to both categories, thought traditionally sharply separated and valued differently, due to obsolete attitudes, which need to be adapted to present and future.
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Designed as a case study of Austrian author MARLENE STREERUWITZ’S novel "Jessica, 30". this contribution deals with the ambiguous as well as dynamic image of women in contemporary German literature. The focus is two-fold, where on the one hand, Jessica’s transformation of identity is discussed, and on the other, her attempts at certain transgressions and the resultant conflicts are explored. In addition, the contribution also discusses STREERUWITZ’S use of language, especially as a discursive device for configuring the constitution of women’s identity within the ambivalent constellation of order or disorder of social power relations and structures.
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The following paper offers a transgeneric analysis of three contemporary German literary texts which shows how the plot setting - which is in all these cases an urban environment, i.e. a city – can be described as a topos to address ongoing migration crises. These urban places of action and the depicted migration crises create a state of paradox and irony: big cities attract the population and represent a place that is desirable to live in, yet they seem to marginalize and ostracize the very groups that migrate towards them. The research presented in this paper stems from an ongoing research project that deals with the phenomenon of crisis in contemporary English, German and Croatian literature, with an emphasis on systems in crisis, where the systems are defined from a sociological perspective as the family, the local community, the state, the region, and so on. The research was conducted within the installation research project “UIP-2020-02-3695 Analysis of Systems in Crisis and of New Consciousness in 21st Century Literature” (2021.-2026) funded by the Croatian Science Fund. The aim of the project is to prove the hypothesis that what we have at hand is a predominantly subversive attitude on the part of literature towards the phenomenon of crisis and towards systems in crisis. The research done in the first year of the project (2021) shows that of the 126 German-language prose and drama texts included in the corpus, focusing on texts published from 2000 to 2021, 29 deal explicitly with crises in the local community or in the city and 23 with migration crises (cf. Novak et al. 2021, p. 3). The literary works selected for analysis, which offer urban areas as the setting of the narrative, show how, at the expense of the protagonists’/characters’ isolated experience, a shared, global view is illustrated that might indicate literary trends in dealing with contemporary problems in society, such as the attitude towards the ‘other’, the marginalized, or the ‘different’. Paradoxically, at the same time, through the way they subtly address these problematic attitudes, the literary texts become topoi that allow space for criticism. The novel and two plays that are the focus of this research have all been published in German since the year 2000 and are part of the project’s corpus. They have been selected as representative examples of how the urban, civilized, dominant community acts and reacts when it comes into contact with the ‘other’. They encompass both the individual and the collective, tragedy and comedy, but also social satire which addresses many problems of the world we consider to be structured and ordered, revealing that it is in reality a place of complex dynamics of centricity versus provinciality and inclusion versus exclusion. The paper takes a close look at Robert Menasse’s novel Die Hauptstadt (2017), Philipp Löhle’s play Wir sind keine Barbaren! (2015) and Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz’s play Phantom (Ein Spiel) (2015). The transgeneric analysis of the selected literary texts shows how the migration crises in the big cities are not explicitly addressed, but rather pushed to the sides and margins – both literally and figuratively - and overlooked, and thus made even deeper within the system of the narrative (that is, in the narrative of both the prose as well as the drama text). The term topos is used in connection with the literary and cultural studies’ term of topos, in which places such as a (big) city, a centre, a foreground, a middle point and others are used for the geographical or spatial and cultural positioning of the plot in the literary work The theoretical framework for the analysis is based on Aristotle’s Topics and Rhetoric, Ernst Robert Curtius’ conception of topos, as well as Theodor Adorno’s and Hans Georg Gadamer’s contemporary conceptions of topos. Having used Aristoteles’ theory on the term topos, we attempt to use it as a commonplace for the expansion of an argument or a place of systematic discussion, where people begin to illustrate their ideas. We thus argue that contemporary authors choose cities and urban, centrally-positioned (central European) places to point towards the flaws in the geopolitical and social system. Moreover, considering Curtius’ understanding of topos as, again, a common place, an image and/or motif, we believe that it can be argued that even since the beginning of the industrialization period in Europe and with that the process of urbanization in the 19th century, major cities such as Berlin, Vienna, London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and so on, have generally become literary images, representing the different social problems such as a lack of housing opportunities, poverty and misery, anonymity, decadence, a lack of employment opportunities and various others. This hypothesis leads in the hermeneutical sense to the contemporary understanding of topos found in e.g. Theodor Adorno and Hans Georg Gadamer, especially in terms of Adornos‘ theories regarding space, utopia and the topos of the bourgeois Interieur and mimesis as a process of assimilation with space. The terms geography, place, and space are thus in the following paper used as real, relatable, physical central European cities and urban places, but also as literary images thematizing migration crises, flawed geopolitics and social systems with distorted values. The city as topos thus points toward the fragmentariness and discrepancy between the dominant ‘we’ or ‘us’ and the ‘other’, the centre and the periphery, the foreground, i.e. the focus, and the background, which in the end leads to a subversive attitude towards the system. Philipp Löhle’s play Wir sind keine Barbaren! and Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz’s play Phantom (Ein Spiel) are both set in mid-sized or large western European city, while Menasse’s novel Die Hauptstadt takes place in Brussels, the capital of Europe and a place that is nominally a symbol of multinationality and multiculturality, but Menasse’s changing narrative perspectives also outline other parts of the EU, such as Krakow. It can be said that contemporary authors choose cities and urban, central locations to show the flaws of the geopolitical system, in which the complex dynamics of integration, separation, segregation and exclusion are constantly at play, at the expense of marginalized groups. While the migrant crisis in Menasse’s novel Die Hauptstadt is only a fleeting occurrence in the extremely complex plot, the analysis of this event in the general narrative structure as a moment of repression can indicate how the processes of repression towards the periphery are uncovered and criticized. The EU, which is perceived as a centrally positioned union of states in which order, civilization, culture, progress, tolerance, and all the other enlightened ideals, turns out to be just the opposite. The exclusion of the ‘other’ primarily takes place in the minds and the self-image of the community, which sees itself as a homogeneous society, and this exclusion manifests itself as a symbolic, figurative, but also physical and material displacement of the ‘other’ to the periphery. The migration crisis is pushed aside, and migrants/refugees are driven out of the foreground of events and made invisible, remaining ignored or used for selfish purposes. In Philipp Löhle’s play Wir sind keine Barbaren! and Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz’s Phantom (Ein Spiel) migrants/refugees find themselves in the centre of the action, but their peripheral status in society is highlighted through processes of repression and exclusion. The romanticized notions of the “promised land” that Blanca and Bobo/Klimt have before they reach the new country disappear when they are confronted with reality, i.e. when they find themselves on the fringes of society and when their human rights are placed in question. When the apparent acceptance of migrants/refugee occurs, this again becomes an attempt to integrate the others into the new society, either to gain certain advantage because of it or because they want to clear their own consciences. In all three examples, the “we” is often emphasized as dominant, while “the others” are marginalized, both geographically and symbolically, due to this dominance. The migrants/refugees appear and remain on the geographical periphery, while also not even being recognized, and listened to, or else they become condemned to a life in symbolic parallel worlds. The community in all three examples acts globally in the economic and communication-strategic sense, but limits its self-image and the conception of “we” locally, and in doing so emphasizes the meaningfulness of their own tradition, while diminishing the existence of the others.
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This paper will use sociological cultural analysis to compare values and practices of shooting with the bow and arrow in Japanese vs Western culture, focusing on Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, first published in 1948. Herrigel shows the differences in mentalities between the two cultures with respect to shooting with a bow, which in Japanese culture is considered a philosophical act, rather than an act of strength. Japanese archery requires extensive training, as well as a certain state of mind, together with specific values related to the deep respect of the student for the master. As Herrigel is a Westerner, he can use the Japanese cultural approach to archery to guide his readers regarding their expectations for learning the practice. Herrigel’s book is of particular interest, due to current fascination with the specificities of the mindset and values inherent to any culture and civilization. The contemporary world urges us to be aware of the differences among cultures, and also to respect each and every way of thinking. Showing empathy towards cultural differences in thinking is customary, and even necessary, for anyone wishing to live in today’s society. Moreover, the contemplation of Zen archery, as presented by Herrigel, can be helpful even to those who have no intention of taking up the sport, particularly, though not intuitively, academics.The practice of archery and the symbol of the bow and arrow has been analysed from several viewpoints: religion, philosophy, cultural awareness and evolutionary anthropology.
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In the review article is the book by Georg Schuppener disscused under the title “The shadows of the ancestors. The reception of Germanic culture on the German-speaking far right”. This is the next book by the author, in which on the one hand he touches on topics related to the language of German far right, on the other hand he points out the different references, e.g. to Germanic history, culture or mythology, which right-wing extremists use to form their identity, tradition and to legitimize and underpin their beliefs and activities. As an introduction, the author explains the current state of research and what he believes to be the research deficits, as well as the concept and organizational forms of the far right. Georg Schuppener takes the diverse material for his research from social media, websites of right-wing extremist groups and their forums, and also analyzes song lyrics of the far-right bands. However, the author goes further in his research and examines the websites of the Internet shops that offer the far-right propaganda publications, clothing and music. Based on the corpus, he explains how and for what purposes various references to Germanic culture and Norse-Germanic mythology are realized by the far-right scene. He analyzes the wide range of T-shirts, jewellery, everyday objects or stickers that are used as carriers of symbolism related to Germanic cultural history or that convey messages of violence.
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Among the many ways in which Herta Müller engages in reconstructing historical memory in her prose is her extensive use of poetic devices. This article will focus on illustrating the role of words-images and the collage technique, in short, on the functioning of the visual medium, with its varied signifying potential, in conjunction with words, according to a logic in which the montage encapsulates a fragmentary, exploded, alienated identity. This study will therefore shed light on some central aspects of Herta Müller’s prose concerning the problematic layering of the characters’ consciousness. These are victims of the most lacerating historical traumas that marked the 20th century and they often appear within the frames of an autobiographical narrative that does not separate ethics from imagination, or the representation of the wounds of history from poeticism and fiction.
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Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel/ Atemschaukel is an innovative attempt to remember and narrate traumatic experiences. The novel reads like a document and, at the same time, like fiction. Through a complex overlapping and poetic condensation of the most diverse memories, Herta Müller has created a place where she and her readers commemorate all those who perished or were exterminated in dictatorships, labour camps and death camps. The challenge is to keep lived memories alive by reinventing them in the process of post-memorial writing.
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In the article I deal with the depiction of the fate of refugees in German-language literature. It is evident that the refugee figure is a link between exile, migration and displacement literature. It is productive for the literary debate to highlight figures and spaces of flight, because this can lead to the abolition of the marginal position of migration literature within contemporary literature.
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