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Teaching a foreign language and culture is always a challenge, but it has been especially problematic to teach the German language and culture in the United States in the twentieth century. The tradition of Germany's great poets and thinkers of the past has been joined by a starker legacy. Through explorations of such topics as the world wars, the Holocaust, women in the language-teaching profession, Jewish contributions, and technology's impact on scholarship, this volume inspects the fascination and frustrating relationships of the two cultures as they interact through the teaching of German in American educational systems--from small liberal arts colleges to large and famous universities. This volume resulted from a conference, "Shaping Forces in American Germanics," held in Madison, Wisconsin in September 1996.
The 1990s saw the appearance of many new works that have redefined and embellished the canon of Holocaust literature. While many of these works have quickly become classics, some have raised new questions about the processes of canonicity. This study concentrates particularly on works in German by Jewish Holocaust survivors written and published approximately fifty years after the fateful cataclysm, focusing on such crucial issues as genre and testimony. Despite the long shadow cast by the Holocaust on subsequent generations, the author shows that narratives on the Holocaust have continued to thrive, offering inventive interpretations of questions that have been thought to defy explanation.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the shifting of American foreign policy away from "old" Europe, long-established patterns of interaction between Germany and the U.S. have come under review. Although seemingly disconnected from the cultural and intellectual world, political developments were not without their influence on the humanities and their curricula during the past century. In retrospect, we can speak of the many different roles Germany has played in American eyes. The Many Faces of Germany seeks to acknowledge the importance of those incarnations for the study of German culture and history on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the major questions raised by the contributors is whether the transformations in the transatlantic dynamics and in the importance of Germany for the U.S. have had a major influence on the study of things German in the U.S. internally. The volume gathers together leading voices of the older and younger generations of social historians, literary scholars, film critics, and cultural historians.
Humboldt offered the world a vision of humans & nature as integrated halves of a single whole. He espoused the idea that while the univerise of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty & order are human achievements. Laura Dassow Walls traces the emergence of this philosophy to Humboldt's 1799 journey to America.
This study comprises an analysis of public spheres in National Socialist Germany. It investigates where and under what circumstances resistance to Hitler's regime was possible. The author focuses on the space of the crypto-public - defined as a politicized private sphere - as a potential realm for anti-state activism. Based on the activities of four organizations operating in Germany between 1933 and 1944 - the Jewish Cultural Association Berlin, the Kreisau Circle, the White Rose, and the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack Organization - she analyzes how this social locus functioned to foster resistance to National Socialism. She examines the artifacts of these groups - leaflets, pamphlets, politico-economic treatises, and theater performances - in order to establish models of crypto-public spaces and evaluate their possibilities and limitations as sites of resistance.
Although German Americans number almost 43 million and are the largest ethnic group in the United States, scholars of American literature have paid little attention to this influential and ethnically diverse cultural group. In a work of unparalleled depth and range, Waldemar Zacharasiewicz explores the cultural and historical background of the varied images of Germany and Germans throughout the past two centuries. Using an interdisciplinary approach known as comparative imagology, which borrows from social psychology and cultural anthropology, Zacharasiewicz samples a broad spectrum of original sources, including literary works, letters, diaries, autobiographical accounts, travelogues, newsp...
Among the many studies on German National Socialism that have appeared in the last forty to fifty years, one aspect has seldom been treated in detail: the cultural representations of Adolf Hitler from the late 1920s to the present. This book focuses on the image of Hitler in literature, photography, historiography, film, philosophy, theatre, and comic books by major artists and scholars such as Ernst Ottwalt, Heinrich Hoffmann, Bertolt Brecht, John Hearfield, Leni Riefenstahl, Charles Chaplin, Theodor W. Adorno, Heiner Muller, and George Tabori.
Explores notions of personal and cultural identity, and offers an introduction to the work of women in literature, film, dance, and visual art in Germany.
Focusing on the ideological contradictions inherent in the German alliance with Japan during World War II, this book analyses German discourse about Japan from the distinct yet intricately connected standpoints of the German-Japanese historical relationship, the scientific and pseudo-scientific presentation of Japan in Germany, and German fictional depictions of Japan. The volume examines the historical relationship between Germany and Japan in the light of their alliance. It also traces the origins and development of the image of Japan in Nazi Germany. Through non-fiction texts, the points of emphasis, friction, and outright contradiction are discovered between Nazi ideology and an alliance with Japan as they were discussed both publicly and privately in Germany at the time. Finally, by examining fictional depictions of Japan and the Japanese under the Nazis, the work reveals the means by which fiction addressed these ideological issues and incorporated the historical and non-fictional arguments of its contemporaries. This book looks carefully at its connection to other historical, political, racial, and ideological thought of the time.
From the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources and closing opportunities after decades of expansion, the frontier became a mirror for historically and geographically specific hopes and fears. From Asia to Europe and the Americas, countries around the world engaged with new interpretations of empire and the deployment of science and technology to aid frontier development in extreme environments. Through a century of political turmoil and war, China nevertheless is the only nation to successfully navigate the twentieth century with its imperial territorial expanse largely intact. In Birth of the Geopolitical Age, Shelle...