Volume 45 (2019): Issue 1 (December 2019)

Olga Grjasnowa’s debut novel The Russian Is One Who Loves Birch Trees, revolving around themes such as national and linguistic boundaries, borderline transgressions and border crossings, the sense of home and the sense of alienation and the search for one’s own identity in the face of a life in the threshold of cultures. Using the example of a young woman who has emigrated from Azerbaijan, who was traumatized as a child, and who is trained as an interpreter in Germany, the article explores subjects such as loneliness, identity, limitations and hunger for language. By making interpreting her profession, the figure solidifies the leap from one culture to the next as a pattern of action and acts transculturally between different spaces. She finds access to marginalized groups, she has ambivalent erotic experiences with men as well as with women, which reflects her cultural indecision.

The article deals with the so-called Musenhof of Weimar and highlights the outstanding figures who worked and lived at this artist’s court. The central role of the two «Dioscuri» Goethe and Schiller is highlighted and analyzed their initially tense relationship. The role of Herder as a writer is critically examined. Today, too, largely forgotten names are spoken of, which at that time occupied important functions at the court of Princess Amalia. It opens a wide field of further discussion in this area of research.

Unmotivated and unprepared, an Austrian young man leaves his home town Vienna, only to dive into the unknown Romania. He already has images of this country in his mind. He is on his way towards the magical, dark, sparkling Transdanubien, about which he only knows clichés: that Romanians barely have anything to eat, that it is a country of gypsies, that the official language is Russian, that it is an anachronistic country par excellence. With this perspective, his relationship with local Ilina can only fail. This article follows along the lines of a complicated inter-cultural communication.

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.

In the context of globalisation and internationalisation, multilingualism and intercultural interaction are indispensable prerequisites that are desired in all areas. The focus of this paper is to highlight the importance and necessity of multilingualism and intercultural dialogue on the example of Timișoara. The beginnings and traces of multilingualism and the intercultural dimension of Timișoara can be traced based on the geography and history of the city alone. Considering these historical, political, social, cultural and economic prerequisites, this paper presents how the intercultural character and multilingualism of the Banat capital has led it to become a unique phenomenon in Europe, and how it has influenced the history and existence of this region of Romania. The good interethnic relations between the minorities shape the spirit of this city and have helped Timișoara become the European Capital of Culture 2021.The multicultural character of the city has also enabled the emergence of numerous cultural institutions, educational institutions, associations and organisations, which in turn promote this diversity of languages and intercultural interaction.

After the First Wald War, the community of Transyvanian Saxons found itself in a new political context. This study analyses cultural representations as both self-identification and cultural dialogue in two of the main publications in German language of the early inter-war period, the cultural journals Ostland and Klingsor. Literary translations and the representation of other literatures through the selection of authors and texts are also subjects of this study.

This article focuses on the relationship that the famous 20^th century Viennese satirist Karl Kraus had with the major newspapers, particularly Die Neue Freie Presse. The aim is to argue that the language was the main means by which Karl Kraus unmasked the hypocrisy and ideology of Bourgeois Viennese society. In language he found both the problem and the solution to his social criticism, the central points of which represent the foreshadowing of his monumental World War I-drama, The Last Days of Mankind. The analysis of two characters in the play, Alice Schalek and Moritz Benedikt, shows us how Kraus used language to expose them as archetypes of their Zeitgeist.

The aim of the present paper is to analyse the trilingual Transylvanian toponyms (German, Hungarian an d Romanian) from the Terra ante Silvanum (The Realm Beneath the Forest) and to reconstruct and explain them.

When the Saxons arrived in Transylvania, in the 12th Century, they met Szekler, Hungarian and Romanian ethnic groups. The Realm Beneath the Forest represents, from a historical point of view, the Western border of the Transylvanian territory inhabited by the Saxons, which was not a compact area and which was divided into three districts

(Sibiu, Brașov, and Bistrița) and two ‘seats’ (Mediaș and Șeica). The Realm Beneath the Forest included three ‘seats’ (Lat. sedes, judicial and administrative forums): Orăștie, Sebeș and Miercurea Sibiului.

All the areas of the Realm Beneath the Forest, both those inhabited by German and/or Hungarian and Romanian populations and those inhabited only by Romanian people, have corresponding toponyms in all three languages.

The toponyms Orăștie, Romos, Aurel Vlaicu, Pianul de Jos, Petrești, Sebeș, Câlnic, Reciu, Gârbova, Dobârca, Miercurea Sibiului, Apoldu de Sus, Amnaș that are analysed in the paper can be classified according to the following criteria: according to their founder, to the river that flows through the area, to the local toponyms, to their origin and their way of formation.

A series of toponyms contributed to the apparition of some autochthonous family names such as Broser, Hamlescher, Kellinger, Mühlbächer, Polder, Rätscher, Urbiger.

Based on thecurrentacademic activities, the dominance of American English in science culture, and on the hereto related suppression of the traditional scientific multilingualism, the article deliberates on the relevance of German in the international knowledge industry. Given the increased demand for the MINT-subjects (Mathematics, Informatics, Natural sciences and Technology) and the exclusive promotion of English as (the only) science language in the globalization tide, fact that is mirrored in the altered publication practice, one must necessarily ask, wheth er there is still a future ahead for German as a science language or for German in science.

After the First World War and the Danube Monarchy, Transylvania became a part of the Kingdom of Romania on December 1, 1918. The desired minority rights played an important role for the Transylvanian Saxons. The relationships with Hungary and Romania were reflected in the media coverage by the Transylvanian newspaper Siebenbürgisch-Deutsches Tageblatt. The authors created awareness on their concerns by using ideological vocabulary. Such political lexis acts as an appeal to the recipients. There is a clearly identifiable dichotomy: On the one side, negatively connoted lexis arises for the former political conditions in the Dual Monarchy. On the other side, positively connoted lexis appears for the needs and for the behavior of the Transylvanian Saxons and for the concepts of new political conditions that were published in the newspaper. This dichotomy consists of ideological vocabulary and lexis in common language.

In this conference volume, edited by Enikö Dácz, scholars from Germany, Croatia, Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, and the United States analyze German-speaking literature from Central and South-Eastern Europe within the theoretical framework of regional and immigration studies.

This edited volume is in part based on a conference organized at the West-Timisoara University in October 2016. The conference marked the 60^th anniversary of the establishment of a German program at this university, and dedicated a section to the life and work of Richard Wagner, an alumnus of this very department, promotion of 1975. As Enikő Dácz und Christina Rossi explain, the essays have been organized chronologically according to aesthetic and thematic considerations, taking into account Wagner’s early poems and short prose, his essayistic and novelistic works. Given the scant Wagner scholarship, this book is meant as an invitation to discover and to inspire further research on this author’s multifaceted and challenging work.

The following paper presents the 19^th volume on German Studies Kronstädter Beiträge zur Germanistischen Forschung 2019. The volume is dedicated to Bertolt Brecht and it contains papers about him andon his activity as a poet, theatre practitioner, playwright and film director, as well as papers on different fields and versatile aspects of German Studies.