Download or read book Gender and Germanness written by Patricia Herminghouse and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1998-02-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural Studies have been preoccupied with questions of national identity and cultural representations. At the same time, feminist studies have insisted upon the entanglement of gender with issues of nation, class, and ethnicity. Developments in the wake of German unification demand a reassessment of the nexus of gender, Germanness and nationhood. The contributors to this volume pursue these strands of the cultural debate in German history, literature, visual arts, and language over a period of three hundred years in sections devoted to History and the Canon, Visual Culture, Germany and Her "Others," and Language and Power. Contributors: L. Adelson, A. Taylor Allen, K. Bauer, R. Berman, B. Byg, M. Denman, E. Frederiksen, S. Friedrichsmeyer, E. Kaufmann, L. Koepnick, B. Kosta, S. Lefko, A. M.O'Sickey, B. Mennel, H. M. Müller, B. Peterson, L. Pusch, D. Sweet, H. Watt, S. Zantop.
Download or read book Tangible Belonging written by John C. Swanson and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2017-04-19 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tangible Belonging presents a compelling historical and ethnographic study of the German speakers in Hungary, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Through this tumultuous period in European history, the Hungarian-German leadership tried to organize German-speaking villagers, Hungary tried to integrate (and later expel) them, and Germany courted them. The German speakers themselves, however, kept negotiating and renegotiating their own idiosyncratic sense of what it meant to be German. John C. Swanson's work looks deeply into the enduring sense of tangible belonging that characterized Germanness from the perspective of rural dwellers, as well as the broader phenomenon of "minority making" in twentieth-century Europe. The chapters reveal the experiences of Hungarian Germans through the First World War and the subsequent dissolution of Austria-Hungary; the treatment of the German minority in the newly independent Hungarian Kingdom; the rise of the racial Volksdeutsche movement and Nazi influence before and during the Second World War; the immediate aftermath of the war and the expulsions; the suppression of German identity in Hungary during the Cold War; and the fall of Communism and reinstatement of minority rights in 1993. Throughout, Swanson offers colorful oral histories from residents of the rural Swabian villages to supplement his extensive archival research. As he shows, the definition of being a German in Hungary varies over time and according to individual interpretation, and does not delineate a single national identity. What it meant to be German was continually in flux. In Swanson's broader perspective, defining German identity is ultimately a complex act of cognition reinforced by the tangible environment of objects, activities, and beings. As such, it endures in individual and collective mentalities despite the vicissitudes of time, history, language, and politics.
Download or read book The Heimat Abroad written by K. Molly O'Donnell and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-02-22 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Germans have been one of the most mobile and dispersed populations on earth. Communities of German speakers, scattered around the globe, have long believed they could recreate their Heimat (homeland) wherever they moved, and that their enclaves could remain truly German. Furthermore, the history of Germany is inextricably tied to Germans outside the homeland who formed new communities that often retained their Germanness. Emigrants, including political, economic, and religious exiles such as Jewish Germans, fostered a nostalgia for home, which, along with longstanding mutual ties of family, trade, and culture, bound them to Germany. The Heimat Abroad is the first book to examine the problem of Germany's long and complex relationship to ethnic Germans outside its national borders. Beyond defining who is German and what makes them so, the book reconceives German identity and history in global terms and challenges the nation state and its borders as the sole basis of German nationalism. Krista O'Donnell is Associate Professor of History, William Paterson University. Nancy Reagin is Professor of History, Pace University. Renete Bridenthal is Emerita Professor of History, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
Download or read book Sweeping the German Nation written by Nancy R. Reagin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-09 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is cleanliness next to Germanness, as some nineteenth-century nationalists insisted? This book explores the relationship between gender roles, domesticity, and German national identity between 1870–1945. After German unification, approaches to household management that had originally emerged among the bourgeoisie became central to German national identity by 1914. Thrift, order, and extreme cleanliness, along with particular domestic markers (such as the linen cabinet) and holiday customs, were used by many Germans to define the distinctions between themselves and neighboring cultures. What was bourgeois at home became German abroad, as 'German domesticity' also helped to define and underwrite colonial identities in Southwest Africa and elsewhere. After 1933, this idealized notion of domestic Germanness was racialized and incorporated into an array of Nazi social politics. In occupied Eastern Europe during WWII Nazi women's groups used these approaches to household management in their attempts to 'Germanize' Eastern European women who were part of a large-scale project of population resettlement and ethnic cleansing.
Download or read book Spirit and System written by Dominic Boyer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1906 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining ethnography, history, and social theory, Dominic Boyer's Spirit and System exposes how the shifting fortunes and social perceptions of German intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries influenced Germans' conceptions of modernity and national culture. Boyer analyzes the creation and mediation of the social knowledge of "German-ness" from nineteenth-century university culture and its philosophies of history, to the media systems and redemptive public cultures of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, to the present-day experiences of former East German journalists seeking to explain life in post-unification Germany. Throughout this study, Boyer reveals how dialectical knowledge of "German-ness"—that is, knowledge that emphasizes a cultural tension between an inner "spirit" and an external "system" of social life —is modeled unconsciously upon intellectuals' self-knowledge as it tracks their fluctuation between alienation and utopianism in their interpretations of nation and modernity.
Download or read book GERMANNESS written by Gerd Wange and published by novum pro Verlag. This book was released on 2023-10-04 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How far have the Germans distanced themselves from their history? The word 'fatherland' no longer crosses anyone's lips today. Not only because it was perverted and stained with blood during the Nazi era, but also because it is assigned to a world that no longer exists for us." (Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, publicist) Gerd Wange gets to the bottom of these and other questions about Germany, Germans and Germanness, starting with Wilhelm II's empire, continuing through the Weimar Republic, the Roaring Twenties, Hitler's dictatorship, the GDR, neo-Nazism, and ending with the technical achievements of today - passionately, critically, excellently researched, and scientifically well-founded, with numerous quotations from well-known authors and publications.
Download or read book Germanness the Nation and Its Other written by William E. Lehman and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ABSTRACT: Germanness, the Nation, and Its Other explores the ways in which postwar German-identified writers and filmmakers construct competing versions of German national identity, which I refer to as Germanness, through their negotiation of exotic spaces and exotic Others. Following Benedict Anderson's formulation of the Nation as an "imagined community," I argue that it is precisely in these abstracted "other spaces," outside the bounded geography of Germany, where the imagination of Germanness is most powerful, because the landscapes and people who are "othered" in these contexts have no recourse to social and political discourse in Germany through which to contest their reification and fetishization. After an introduction exploring theoretical models of alterity, I start my study by examining the ways in which the quintessentially German Heimatfilm was invoked in the fifties to extend the imaginary borders of Germanness into a culturally colonized Hungary by doing a close reading of Kurt Hoffmann's 1955 film, Ich denke oft an Piroschka. In the following chapter I analyze several films by Werner Herzog and show how his portrayals of radical alterity in the exotic jungles of South America continue to contribute to current debates about the proper relations between Germans, non-Germans, and the environment. In the final chapter I examine the negotiation of space and the role of spatiality in construction of German, Jewish, Mestizo, and Catholic identities in the texts of German Argentinean writers.
Download or read book Turks Jews and Other Germans in Contemporary Art written by Peter Chametzky and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to examine multicultural visual art in Germany, discussing more than thirty contemporary artists and arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness. With Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art, Peter Chametzky presents a view of visual culture in Germany that leaves behind the usual suspects--those artists who dominate discussions of contemporary German art, including Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Rosemarie Trockel--and instead turns to those artists not as well known outside Germany, including Maziar Moradi, Hito Steyerl, and Tanya Ury. In this first book-length examination of Germany's multicultural art scene, Chametzky explores the work of more than thirty German artists who are (among other ethnicities) Turkish, Jewish, Arab, Asian, Iranian, Sinti and Roma, Balkan, and Afro-German. With a title that echoes Peter Gay's 1978 collection of essays, Freud, Jews and Other Germans, this book, like Gay's, rejects the idea of "us" and "them" in German culture. Discussing artworks in a variety of media that both critique and expand notions of identity and community, Chametzky offers a counternarrative to the fiction of an exclusively white, Christian German culture, arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness. He considers works that deploy critical, confrontational, and playful uses of language, especially German and Turkish; that assert the presence of "foreign bodies" among the German body politic; that grapple with food as a cultural marker; that engage with mass media; and that depict and inhabit spaces imbued with the element of time. American discussions of German contemporary art have largely ignored the emergence of non-ethnic Germans as some of Germany's most important visual artists. Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art fills this gap.
Download or read book Soundtracking Germany written by Melanie Schiller and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-06-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for the importance of popular music in negotiations of national identity, and Germanness in particular. By discussing diverse musical genres and commercially and critically successful songs at the heights of their cultural relevance throughout seventy years of post-war German history, Soundtracking Germany describes how popular music can function as a language for “writing” national narratives. Running chronologically, all chapters historically contextualize and critically discuss the cultural relevance of the respective genre before moving into a close reading of one particularly relevant and appellative case study that reveals specific interrelations between popular music and constructions of Germanness. Close readings of these sonic national narratives in different moments of national transformations reveal changes in the narrative rhetoric as this book explores how Germanness is performatively constructed, challenged, and reaffirmed throughout the course of seventy years.
Download or read book Brahms and the German Spirit written by Daniel Beller-McKenna and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beller-McKenna counters music historians's reluctance to address Brahms's Germanness, wary perhaps of fascist implications. He gives an account of the intertwining of nationalism, politics, and religion that underlies major works, and enriches both our understanding of his art and German culture.
Download or read book The Germans and Their Art written by Hans Belting and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study focuses on the attitudes Germans have towards their art from the Romantic period to the present, and discusses the ways they have tried to find their identity as a nation through this art. Belting proposes that German art criticism is divided by opposing ideologies and contradictions.
Download or read book Sweeping the German Nation written by Nancy Ruth Reagin and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How to be German in 50 easy steps written by Adam Fletcher and published by C.H.Beck. This book was released on 2013-07-10 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breakfast lavishly, pre-book all your holidays years in advance, dress sensibly and obey the red man! «How to be German» presents all the little absurdities that make living in Germany such a pleasure. It’s required reading for all Ausländer and for Germans who sometimes have the feeling they don’t understand their own country. We learn why the Germans speak so freely about sex, why they are so obsessed with «Spiegel Online» and why they all dream of being naked in a lake of Apfelsaftschorle. At the end, the only thing left to say to Adam Fletcher’s love letter to Germany is «Alles klar!» This e-book is also available in German: «Wie man Deutscher wird in 50 einfachen Schritten. Eine Anleitung von Apfelsaftschorle bis Tschüss». The printed edition has been published as a bilingual turn-around book.
Download or read book Singing Like Germans written by Kira Thurman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it. Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.
Download or read book Three Way Street written by Jay Howard Geller and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-09-21 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing Germany's significance as an essential crossroads and incubator for modern Jewish culture
Download or read book New Germans New Dutch written by Liesbeth Minnaard and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today’s globalized world, traditions of a national Self and a national Other no longer hold. This timely volume considers the stakes in our changing definitions of national boundaries in light of the unmistakable transformation of German and Dutch societies. Examining how the literature of migration intervenes in public discourses on multiculturality and including detailed analysis of works by the Turkish-German writers Emine Sevgi Özdamer and Feridun Zaimoglu and the Moroccan-Dutch writers Abdelkader Benali and Hafid Bouazza, New Germans, New Dutch offers crucial insights into the ways in which literature negotiates both difference and the national context of its writing.
Download or read book Forging Germans written by Caroline Mezger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forging Germans explores the German nationalization and eventual National Socialist radicalization of ethnic Germans in the Batschka and the Western Banat, two multiethnic, post-Habsburg borderland territories currently in northern Serbia. Deploying a comparative approach, Caroline Mezger investigates the experiences of ethnic German children and youth in interwar Yugoslavia and under Hungarian and German occupation during World War II, as local and Third Reich cultural, religious, political, and military organizations wrestled over young people's national (self-) identification and loyalty. Ethnic German children and youth targeted by these nationalization endeavors moved beyond being the objects of nationalist activism to become agents of nationalization themselves, as they actively negotiated, redefined, proselytized, lived, and died for the "Germanness" ascribed to them. Interweaving original oral history interviews, untapped archival materials from Germany, Hungary, and Serbia, and diverse historical press sources, Forging Germans provides incisive insight into the experiences and memories of one of Europe's most contested wartime demographics, probing the relationship between larger historical circumstances and individual agency and subjectivity.
