Volumen 47 (2021): Heft 1 (December 2021)

Gerda Mieß (born in Bistrita in 1896, dies in Cisnădie in 1954), is know for her verses published in periodicals and anthologies as well as for only collection of her poems (by Dr. Stefan Sienerth in 1987 in Kriterion Verlag Bucharest published). People interested in the history of literature knew that she had also written a novel in her youth, which, howeser, never came to the public during her lifetime or afterwards. Her descendants (the Herbert-László family) hade the manuscript prose work translated into computer script and took steps to publish the novel. It offers an insight into the mentality and behavior of the time around 1910, into the school system of the time and the problems of that time and the problems of women (education and employment of women).

This paper examines meaning-making processes in the contemporary Hungarian German literature as processes of identity construction. I give a description of exemplary identity models provided by this literature and discuss, how the models have established themselves and what has led to their modification, destabilization or replacement. The research method implemented in the paper offers a systematic insight into the sociological formation principles of the models and also into their ideological determination, moreover, it allows the question to be asked, to what extent the models can contribute to orientation in their social and historic context.

Herta Müller has written several volumes of postcards, describing the work on the collages as a “relaxation exercise” from the laborious epic work. Her collage work is heterogeneous, works with the principle of chance, deals with clippings. The author tries o writing with scissors that can be positioned somewhere between literature and the fine arts. The volume Father Telephones with the Flies enables a political reading in which an I speaks about his traumas during the dictatorship, about interrogations, shadows and also includes the family sphere. Image and writing complement each other.

Carmen Francesca Bancius trilogy that includes the novels Vaterflucht (1998), Das Lied der traurigen Mutter (2007) und Lebt Wohl, Ihr Genossen und Geliebten! (2018) make from a cultural-historical perspective individual and collective memory processes in post-communist Romania visible. Her last work shows most clearly what shifts the culture of remembrance underwent in post-communist Romania, and how the tone of remembrance changed from a radical criticism of the system in the 1990s to a conciliatory narrative in the 2000s. Considering the dominant memory discourses in non-literary spaces, the present contribution analyses the aesthetic possibilities that Banciu explores in order to humanize the image of the unscrupulous communist official that dominated her narrative in Vaterflucht (1998), and Das Lied der traurigen Mutter (2007).

The aim of the present article is to provide a comparative analysis between two important works of German and Hungarian literature on the background of the theory of Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of archetypes. Both works (the novel Demian by Hermann Hesse and the drama Erstwhile Solace [Ősvigasztalás] by Áron Tamási) approach the theme of the search for identity as well as for the absolute and the divinity, with the focus on the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Motifs such as androgyny, shadow or dream, the issue of polarity and unity form common points of contact between the two analysed literary works.

Gusel Jachina is a Russian writer. Her grandfather, a former German teacher in one of the villages along the Volga River, founded by German colonists, inspired her second novel “Wolgakinder” (Children of the Volga). She presents over 20 years of eventful history as it is seen by Jakob Bach, a German teacher in the village Gnadental on the banks of the Volga. It is an opulent novel of 600 pages, written in a rather baroque style, trying to not only present historic events from the beginning of the Soviet era but to recreate the atmosphere of those years full of Ups and Downs not only for the German speaking population.

The literature of the Eastern March is strictly local. A collection of several dozen German-language novels and stories from the circle of ‘Ostmarkenliteratur’ (literature of the Eastern March), which on a scale unknown before and afterwards sends the reader back to this specific region, shows how important the Poznań Province had become on the verge of the 19^th century. Geographical and topographic information in the creative output of writers constitute its ‘verbal map’.

Inspired by Barbara Piatti’s interpretative approach, I will attempt to answer key questions regarding the circumstances and conditions that are conductive to locating the plot of literary works in specific spaces and places, and to interpret the experience of space recorded in the literature of the Eastern March by means of this map.

The Corona pandemic confronts any academic exchange with major difficulties, with which Romanian germanists successfully come to turns. Considering the actual context of continuity and change the authors of the ensuing article analyse the Kronstädter Beiträge zur germanistischen Forschung Yearbook highlight ingone of its major points of interest namely the somewhat controversial phenomenon of German literature written in Romania. The article delineates the development of the journal from its beginning up to the present moment, when it can be found in important databases for academic use and research purposes.

Here the German language acts as a bridge between Eastern and Western Europe playing an important role. It is exactly on the Banat with its multicultural tradition that many hopes are pinned. The introduction of the subject German Cultural Studies within the framework of the Communication Sciences at the “Polytechnic” University Timișoara is only a stepping stone, but in the given context this is however a sign that betokens our will to participate in the task of building the linguistic and cultural bridge. The present paper elaborates on starting points towards a cultural history of the Banat.

The article initially covers the historical information regarding two biblical saints „Saint Bartholomew“ and „John the Baptist“ and their birthdays. In vernacular documents from 1900 to 1980 inclusively, the Transylvanian-Saxon names „Bartholomew“ and „John“ were related to the respective saint. The vernacular documents show that their birthdays were playing a role in seasonal determination for peasant work as well as being used in descriptive country sayings, in idioms and in traditional customs. The case examples are taken from the Transylvanian-Saxon Dictionary, the North Transylvanian Dictionary, as well as relevant specialist and vernacular literature.

The article is dedicated to language in public space. The COVID-19 pandemic not only dominates the media, but is the subject of numerous linguistic comments and scientific articles discussing the linguistic consequences of the health crisis (the emergence of new meanings and words or the penetration of specialized terms in everyday language).

This article is dedicated to present the most common word-formation strategies in German railway specialist terminology. The presentation of the most productive morphological nomination strategies in the analysed area is preceded by a short historical outline of the railway industry in Germany. The adumbration of the historical background and hints regarding the current EU environmental plans for railways are intended to expose the importance and relentless currency of the analysis undertaken here. The presented examples, which were extracted from the most extensive industry terminology database, RaiLLexic, have been correlated with their Polish equivalents. This contrastive procedure allows, going further, to draw conclusions about both language systems within which the professional terminology described here is constituted.

Information about culture and civilization has always been an integrated part of the courses for German as a foreign language. In the past few decades were developed several theoretical approaches regarding that aspect, for example the cognitive, the communicative or the inter-cultural approach. In course books and learning materials the culture and civilization component is most of the times related with the linguistic component, but recently, influenced by the development of the field of cultural studies, the cultural discourse has also become a priority. In the following article my aim is to depict to what extent this paradigm shift on a theoretical level is being reflected in learning materials. While the first part of the article is dedicated to the theoretical aspect, in the second part I intend to analyze examples of exercises and worksheets with regard to the educational objective.

In the phenomenon of globalization, the foreign language skills are part of both scientific field and everyday life. Though the number of learners of German decreased in the last twenty years, German seems to be again in greater demand as a foreign language all over the world. In the Romanian universities, the study of the German language continues to arouse great interest in the recent years. The following article deals with the role that German language plays in our country, and it tries to find answers regarding the Banat region/area, by using the example of the Polytechnic University of Timișoara. Another topic that the author emphasizes is the contribution of German as a foreign language - lessons in promoting the German language and culture in the Banat region.

The tendency to apply media in regional studies for students of German as a foreign language (Deutsch als Fremdsprache, DaF) is no longer a novelty. Thus, we see media applied as such in multiple different forms, like videos, press releases, radio segments or online statements. This contribution is focused on the radio interview, as a constitutive part of the regional studies’ courses for DaF students of Germanistik in Romania. As a starting point serves the assumption, that the application of visual media can be enhanced through dialogue sequences, which further highlight the subject of the course. Through chosen interviews, that have been aired by the state channels, students can become familiar with such issues, that affect the German minority in Romania. The authenticity that is being sought for, will result from the primary situation of the interviewer and the interviewee communicating, as well as through the utilization of Rumäniendeutsch as the standard language of the German minority, living in Romania. Thus can cultural, social, historical and linguistic phenomena that are specific for the local German speaking population and that are (re)constructing the cultural inheritance of Germans in Romania, be regarded in greater detail.

The present article is an interpretation of Claudia Spiridon-Șerbu’s study on censorship in Romania during the last 30 years of communist rule. Drawing on unreleased documents from the CNSAS (National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives) Archive dwelling on German ethnic authors from Romania, the author paints a vivid picture of the complex phenomenon of literary censorship. The study follows both the official censorship undertaken by the General Office for Press and Publishing and the unofficial prosecution of writers by Securitate agents and their collaborators.

This volume of studies goes back to research work that was carried out as part of a long-standing project, Deutscher Familiennamenatlas (DFA). The DFA and the individual studies record the family names in Germany and the border areas for the first time on the basis of telephone connections (as of 2005) and with a rich map material. The considerations on selected family names gathered here are preliminary studies of the DFA, which are dedicated to family names on -mann.

The present paper reviews the articles published in the 20^th volume of the Kronstädter Beiträge zur germanistischen Forschung, which focus on a variety of postmodern elements found within German culture, language, and literature. A special emphasis is set on the person and works of the German author living in Romania Joachim Wittstock, whom the given volume has been dedicated to, on the occasion of his 80^th birthday.

The following review presents an anthology about literary presentations of space or field as a concept described by Pierre Bourdieu in Central Europe. The anthology is conceived as a case study on the plurilingual Transylvanian town of Brașov in the first half of the 20^th century and is the result of a six-year-project at the Institute for Culture and History of Southeastern Europe in Munich. The editors are Enikö Dácz and Réka Jakabházi.