European History Commons^™

International And Area Studies Workshop – Germanic Collections, Brian Vetruba

WashU Libraries Presentations

The Center for Research Libraries, along with the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) and the Western European Studies Section (WESS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), is co-sponsoring an "International and Area Studies Workshop for Librarians" on Friday, June 26, 2015. The workshop is timed to coincide with the ALA Annual 2015 in San Francisco. The full-day workshop is designed to assist librarians who are newly responsible for Western European and Latin American humanities and social sciences collecting. It will cover publishing trends in Western Europe and Latin America, providing reference services, …

Luther And The Jews: An Exposition Directed To Christians On Martin Luther's Anti-Semitism, Defense, And Legacy, Megan Wilson

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis is an analysis of the historical relations between reformer Martin Luther and the Jewish people. Its primary purpose is to defend Luther’s image as a prominent figure in Christian history while considering the possibility of his anti-Semitic views. This thesis focuses particularly on a number of Luther’s written works in order to achieve this goal, with a secondary concentration on historical and incidental defenses that can be used to exonerate him. This thesis also serves to inform contemporary Christians of the controversy surrounding these views and the result of his legacy in more recent centuries.

Escape Artistry: Elisabeth Bergner And Jewish Disappearance In Der Träumende Mund (Czinner, 1932), Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

The late Weimar film Der träumende Mund culminates in the apparent but unconfirmed suicide of its female protagonist, played by Elisabeth Bergner. Bergner, whose background contributed to the film’s Jewish reception, and who later claimed to have written the film’s screenplay, left Germany and went into exile with director Paul Czinner in 1932. This film and the circumstances of its production and premiere link tragic modes of self-erasure, including the suicides of both many women and many German Jews, to notions of escape, emigration, and reemergence. Its success among Jewish spectators points to its enduring and international appeal.

Honoring The Victims: How The Change In Ethics Ruined Science In The Third Reich And What To Do With The Remaining Medical Data, Kathleen M. Mitchell

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper analyzes both sides of the debate over using the Nazi medical data and brings forth one possible compromise. While using the data can provide the scientific community information that can be beneficial for society—and thus salvaging some good out of the evil—are the survivors’ sentiments on the subject truly being heard? The idea that the victims are once again being abused by using the information without their consent is not a matter to be taken lightly. On the other hand, if the data is valuable, it can be detrimental to scientific experimentation to deny access or destroy the …

Working Towards A Globalized Minority: Regional German-Kurdish Cultural Organizations And Transnational Networks, Drew A. Hoffman

Student Publications

German-Kurdish cultural organizations and the Kurdish Diaspora they represent offer an example of a new type of actor in defining globalization. This paper examines how such organizations act as the lynchpin in transnational networks and how such organizations give a voice to Berliner-Kurds. These relationships are explored at the national, regional, and organizational level, in order to paint a comprehensive perspective. It argues that despite experiencing discrimination, the convergence of a global diaspora and local actors has contributed to the reinvention of the German-Kurdish community as a globalized minority. Such a concept is important for understanding how migrant communities can …

Germany And History In Flux: The Generational Changes In Approaching Germany's Past, Louis T. Gentilucci

Student Publications

Historical memory, how a people remember the past, is in a state of almost eternal flux. By following the development of historical memory in post-war Germany, historians can better understand the generational and contemporary impact on popular history. German history illustrates the importance of this concept, as German history has a great deal of 20th century historical baggage.

Weimar Jewish Chic: Jewish Women And Fashion In 1920s Germany, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

This volume presents papers delivered at the 24th Annual Klutznick-Harris Symposium, held at Creighton University in October 2011. The contributors look at all aspects of the intimate relationship between Jews and clothing, through case studies from ancient, medieval, recent, and contemporary history. Papers explore topics ranging from Jewish leadership in the textile industry, through the art of fashion in nineteenth century Vienna, to the use of clothing as a badge of ethnic identity, in both secular and religious contexts. Dr. Kerry Wallach's chapter examines the uniquely Jewish engagement with fashion and attire in Weimar, Germany.

Neue Jugend - Einleitung, Henning Wrage

German Studies Faculty Publications

Book Summary: This book discusses research on the culture of postwar Germany (1945–1962), a topic that has become increasingly complex in recent years. Virulent topics such as war, destruction, homecoming, flight, expulsion, guilt, daily life, religion, etc., are explored systematically, using examples and by focusing on fiction, nonfiction, and film in the two German states. Historians and scholars in the field of literature and film have contributed to this compendium. They address various core questions concerning aesthetic representation and the formation of contemporary history.

Gen Ms 27 Early 20th-Century German Print Collection Finding Aid, Julie Cismoski, Kristin D. Morris

Search the General Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Description:

Printed materials acquired by the donor's father while serving in West Germany during the Cold War. The Collection contains 37 items, books and ephemeral material. Materials deal with German history from the beginning of World War I to the end of World War II. Dates span 1914 to 1983, with the bulk evenly spread between the periods of 1915-1923 and 1934-1942. The collection includes propaganda, war humor, poems, songs, and a film promotional leaflet; stories from German prisoners of war during WWI; and materials related to revolution (following World War I). The two issues of Stern magazine were published …

Die Frauen, Der Strafvollzug, Und Der Staat: Incarceration And Ideology In Post-Wwii Germany, Andrea Moody Kozak

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how the material reality of Germany's women's prisons has been largely determined by their ideological foundations, and by the historical developments that have produced these ideologies. The German women's prison system is complex and imperfect, yet in many ways very progressive. It is the result of the last sixty years of tumultuous German history, and has been uniquely shaped by the capitalist and communist histories of the once-divided state. In its current state, it seems to have incorporated elements of a supposedly “rational” or individualistic conception of humanity as well as one that is relational and interdependent, …

An Austrian Identity Crisis: Conservative Thought, Political Posters, And Questions Of National Identity During The First Republic., Meyer Weinshel

German and Russian Studies Honors Projects

The political writings of Karl Lueger and Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the founders of the Austrian Christian Social and German National Parties, shaped the right-wing political discourse regarding national identity after the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich in 1867. As Habsburg hegemony in Central Europe crumbled after the First World War, this conservative political discourse concerning Austrian identity was resurrected in the political posters of the Austrian First Republic. Through an examination of Christian Social and German National constructions of national identity in both pre- and post-World War I Austria, this paper seeks to determine the role that conservative constructions of Austrian National …

"The German Discovery Of Sex", Gwen Walsh

Publications

News article by The Scarlet, Clark University's student-run newspaper on the symposium "German Discovery of Sex", held on April 16, 2011. This event was part of the Henry J. Leir Chair Programming for the 2010-2011 season, a position that Robert Tobin held from 2008 up until his passing in 2022.

Minhag And Migration: A Yiddish Custom Book From Venice, 1553, Lucia Raspe

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation focuses on a Yiddish book of customs written in Venice in the mid-sixteenth century, which describes synagogue and home observances over the course of the Jewish year. Comparing MS Oxford Can. Or. 12 to the fifteenth-century Hebrew custumal it is based on (MS Frankfurt hebr. oct. 227), the presentation will discuss the efforts of Ashkenazic émigrés to northern Italy trying to preserve their identity in the face of a Jewish world suddenly become complex.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

• Book of Customs (MS Frankfurt hebr. oct. 227)
• Book of Customs (MS Oxford Can. Or. 12)

Text As Resistance In Holocaust Literature: Struggles For Personhood In Wiesel, Levi, And Delbo, Gillian M. Mozer

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is an examination of the memoirs of three core Holocaust writers, Elie Wiesel (Night and Day), Primo Levi (If This is A Man), and Charlotte Delbo (Auschwitz and After), exploring the ways in which each of the three authors uses his or her memoir to simultaneously document and resist the dehumanizing influence of the concentration camp experience.

Germans, Jews And Turks (Spring 2010), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

This class studies the expression of cultural identity in central European literature. How have people come to think of themselves or others as “Germans,” “Jews,” “Turks,” or some combinations thereof? While the Holocaust is obviously central to the German-Jewish relationship, it is not the only focus of this course—we will read literary reflections of the emancipation of the Jews, of German-Jewish assimilation and symbiosis, of the rise of anti-Semitism and Zionism, as well as attempts to remember the past. And while the long history of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in Germany will be a major component of our …

The Cultural Memory Of German Victimhood In Post-1990 Popular German Literature And Television, Pauline Ebert

Wayne State University Dissertations

My dissertation analyzes the representation of Germans as victims of the Third Reich and the Second World War in post-1990 German memory. After unification, there no longer were two states that could each blame the other as the heir of National Socialism and this past had to be renegotiated. The claim that many Germans had been victims became central as evidenced by the vast number of popular literature, commercial cinema and television programs of this subject. I argue with Wulf Kansteiner (2006) that to understand collective memory, we should explore mass media representations. As the majority of highbrow artifacts do …

Die Darstellung Der Evangelischen Kirche Als Eine Neue Familie In Erich Loests Nikolaikirche, Beth A. Roberts

Honors Projects

Throughout the end of the 1980s the Lutheran Church in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) experienced a surge of attendance and social activism in an otherwise secularized society. Research shows that the church was the sole island of dissent within the communist GDR. St. Nicolas Church in the city of Leipzig became the prototype of social involvement; visionary pastors opened their doors to every citizen and provided a space for congregations to voice concerns, organize interest groups, and plan peace protests. The construction of an open environment in which citizens could speak and interact gave rise to a greater sense …

Early Modern Yiddish Readers: Immoderately Addicted To Rhyme?, Ruth Von Bernuth

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Roughly one third of Old Yiddish literature is based on traceable European literary sources, mainly German. Given how close Old Yiddish is to Early New High German, some of these Old Yiddish texts with European sources feel like mere transcriptions, others more like legitimate translations and yet others more like free adaptations. From the Yiddish reader's perspective, the texts become accessible through transcription into Hebrew characters and more accessible the more that the translator engages the text as representative Jewish reader. A large proportion of these Yiddish books with German sources are prose novels–a genre newly popular with German readers …

The "Art" Of War: The Influence Of Propaganda Music During World War Ii, Karissa L. Andrews

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduate requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Germany And Its Others (Fall 2007) (Whitman College), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

This course was taught by Robert Tobin at Whitman College. Professor Tobin worked at Whitman for 18 years as associate dean of the faculty and chair of the humanities, and was named Cushing Eells Professor of the Humanities.

"In this course, we will be investigating how German culture has defined itself against its others: If Germany has defined itself in opposition to the East, is it Western? If Germany has defined itself in opposition to the South, has it escaped the legacy of Rome? Or is it a developed country? How did Germany's relationship to its colonies structure its self-image? …

The Wess East German Study Tour: A Report, Richard Hacken, Kizer Walker

Faculty Publications

Ten WESS members were selected to participate in a study tour of eastern Germany sponsored by the Goethe-Institut, New York; the U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Germany, Public Affairs Section; and Bibliothek & Information International, in cooperation with WESS. Titled "Leipzig, Dresden, Weimar: Exploring a Library Landscape," the tour was intended to acquaint German Studies specialists from US academic and research libraries with developments in librarianship and publishing in eastern Germany since unification. The tour, which ran March 16-23, 2006, was book-ended, start and finish, by the Leipzig Book Fair and Germany's national professional meeting of librarians, the Bibliothekartag, held this …

Johann August Weppen's Der Hessische Officer In Amerika And David Christoph Seybold's Reizenstein: The American Revolution And The German Bürgertum's Reassessment Of America, Virginia Sasser Delacey

Institute for the Humanities Theses

While American, British, and French reactions to the American Revolution are well-known, those of the German people are not, despite the presence of almost 30,000 German soldiers in America fighting for the British army and hundreds of German volunteers fighting for the American patriots. The participation of German soldiers on both sides of the conflict inspired numerous works of German poetry, prose, and drama, all largely forgotten in the wake of the French Revolution and the rise of German Classicism and Romanticism. This thesis examines two works that have received brief mention in the past two centuries: Der hessische Officier …

Dreams Of Interpretation: Psychoanalysis And The Literature Of Vienna, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The first edition of Die Traumdeutung (translated as The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913) bears a publication date of 1900, although it actually appeared in Vienna in November 1899. This is consistent with the pivotal temporality of a work that looks retrospectively into the nineteenth century and prospectively into the twentieth. In 1931, Freud said of his first and arguably most important book, "It contains, even according to my present-day judgement, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. " In terms of the influence not only on his later publications, but also …

Claiming The Victim: Tokenism, Mourning, And The Future Of German Holocaust Poetry, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

This excerpt from Nelly Sachs's poem "You Onlookers" could be read as support for the contention, reportedly made by Adolf Hitler during a table talk, that "The Jews invented conscience." This statement, although fascinating in itself for what it implies about Hitler's psyche and moral sense, becomes even more provocative if read in association with Marina Zwetajewa's puzzling proclamation, made famous by its appearance as an epigram to a poem by Paul Celan, that "all poets are Jews." The connection of Jews to both conscience and poetry has significant repercussions for the genre of so-called Holocaust lyric, so-called because it …

Calvin’S Jewish Interlocutor: Christian Hebraism And Anti-Jewish Polemics During The Reformation, Stephen G. Burnett

Department of Classics and Religious Studies: Faculty Publications

The nature of Calvin’s tractate Reponse to questions and objections of a certain Jew (Ad quaestiones et obiecta Judaei cuiusdam responsio) has long been a matter of some dispute among Calvin scholars. The nineteenth-century editors of Calvin’s works considered the book to be “meager and weak,” no doubt assuming that Calvin was responsible for composing both the questions and answers. In the twentieth century, scholars have been more inclined to see some evidence of an actual dispute between a Jew and a Christian in the book. Most notably Salo Baron suggested that the work reflects an exchange that Josel of …

Germans In The New World: Essays In The History Of Immigration, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In some respects the new immigration history contrasts strongly with the old. Whereas the traditional was assimilationist and stressed the cultural contributions of the newcomers, the new is more often pluralist and focuses on cultural conflict. The old tended to describe individual accomplishment and, drawing upon readily available sources such as letters, speeches, diaries, and other qualitative sources, was unintentionally elitist; the new analyzes the relationships of the ethnic group (i.e., the masses of ordinary people of limited skills in communication) with elements of the receiving society, including other ethnocultural collectivities. It uses quantitative sources, such as census manuscripts, tax …

Germans In Brazil: A Comparative History Of Cultural Conflict During World War I, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The first three chapters establish the historical context for understanding what happened to the Germans in Brazil during the period of the war in Europe and its immediate aftermath, 1914 to 1920. The large pattern of German settlement in Brazil, offered in Chapter I, is followed by a study of German ethnic institutions--churches, schools, societies--and the German-language press to reveal literacy levels, religious and linguistic characteristics, and the measure of assimilation (or lack thereof) into Brazilian society. Ethnic group relations, perceptions, and images, along with attendant concerns and fears, are analyzed next to show how and why the Brazilian majority …

Gräfin Thunen: Intimes Vom Oesterreichisch-Ungarischen Hochadel, Freiherr Von Baillou

German Language and Literature Papers

Catalog record:

PT2603.A34 G7 1906x

Baillou, Freiherr von

Gräfin Thunen : Intimes vom Oesterreichisch-ungarischen Hochadel / von Freiherr von Baillou

Leipzig : Zeitbilder-Verlag, 1906

viii, 416 p. ; 20 cm

Johanna Ambrosius, Bessie B. Hoxie

Student and Lippitt Prize Essays

A short contemporary (to 1895) biography of German poet Johanna Ambrosius (1854-1939) which includes critiques of selected poems by Ambrosius.

Brief Aus Rom, Friederike Brun

Prose Nonfiction

Complete English translation of this work is available as a supplemental file.