Culture In Germany Research Articles

The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm 1760–1830 by Janina Wellmann

Reviewed by: The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm 1760–1830 by Janina Wellmann Jocelyn Holland Janina Wellmann. The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm 1760–1830. Translated by Kate Sturge. New York: Zone, 2017. 424 pp. There is much to learn from Janina Wellmann's book, which is a translation of Die Form des Werdens: eine Kulturgeschichte der Embryologie 1760–1830 (2010). The "cultural history" in question does not just have to do with early embryological theory, but rather—and even more so—with a word absent from the original German title: rhythm. The idea of rhythm is central to the entire project and, in particular, informs the readings of the first six chapters, with their focus on literature (including Klopstock, Hölderlin, Moritz, Novalis, and A. W. Schlegel), late eighteenth-century music theory, Schelling's Naturphilosophie and Philosophie der Kunst, and various aspects of "biological rhythm" (Wolff, Goethe, Reil). As Wellmann points out in her introduction, we lack a history of the concept of rhythm and, with the exception of more etymologically grounded studies, "there has been practically no research on the cultural and scientific history of rhythm before 1900" (19). Rhythm's connection to embryology lies, as Wellmann understands it, in the problem of "developmental thinking" around 1800: how to conceptualize the "form of becoming" in living nature and the activities of human culture. More concretely, it could be formulated as the question of how an organism could "continually change, yet still be ordered": "How could the parts combine into a highly complex formation when they themselves were all changing as incessantly as did the whole?" (16). Wellmann begins with the premise that such questions are equally valid in aesthetic and biological terms. Each of her subsequent arguments centers around the general claim that a new "episteme of rhythm" was established around 1800 whereby, in numerous fields of human inquiry, the idea of change over time was understood as "rhythmical": "Rhythm described the emergence and formation of life not as a mere progression in time, but as an ordering of time" (17). Wellmann identifies her own approach as a kind of expanded "history of concepts" that also [End Page 341] considers methods and questions from various fields, including cultural history, visual studies, and the history of science. Her sense for historical detail will likely also appeal to those who can appreciate how well it resonates with intellectual culture in Germany and Europe around 1800, particularly where the areas of Romanticism and Naturphilosophie are concerned. At the same time, Wellmann's stated agenda, to pursue the "episteme of rhythm," also presents her with her most significant conceptual and methodological challenges, which include: (1) a working understanding of rhythm general enough to be applicable in those fields in which the term itself could have vastly different meanings and, (2) attributing rhythmic structures to the "form of becoming" in various contexts where the word "rhythm" itself is nowhere to be found. Due in part to these challenges, The Form of Becoming is not a particularly easy book to review, and there is a further complication that has to do with the time lapse of seven years between the publication date of the German volume and the English translation. These years have witnessed, among other developments, the rapid growth of "sound studies"—a field to which the concept of rhythm is deeply connected, even if it is not completely congruent with those discourses of greatest interest to Wellman. Although Form of Becoming does contain a few bibliographic references to works published between 2010 and 2017 (mostly in the form of lists and embedded in the notes, because this volume contains neither a bibliography nor a works cited section), it does not engage directly with any of the literature from this time period in any of its chapters. This is unfortunate because many of the arguments in question touch upon very actual debates concerning literature and the life sciences. Another, more challenging, reason is that, by identifying the emergence of an "episteme" of rhythm in contexts where the "word" rhythm is not (yet) foregrounded, The Form of Becoming requires its readers to take a rather extreme...

The Devil's Wheels: Men and Motorcycling in the Weimar Republic by Sasha Disko

Reviewed by: The Devil's Wheels: Men and Motorcycling in the Weimar Republic by Sasha Disko Nathaniel D. Wood (bio) The Devil's Wheels: Men and Motorcycling in the Weimar Republic. By Sasha Disko. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. Pp. 374. Hardcover $120. This book, the second in the series "Explorations in Mobility," edited by Gijs Mom, Mimi Sheller, and Georgine Clarsen, follows Mom's book Atlantic Automobilism (Berghan, 2014) and precedes a forthcoming text on Fascist motorways. It also fits nicely with Peter Fritzsche's A Nation of Flyers (Harvard, 1992), which explores similar sources, as well as the numerous studies of automobiles and culture in Germany, the birthplace of the automobile. What makes The Devil's Wheels innovative and worthwhile is its fresh take on consumption, masculinity, mobility, and modernity in Weimar Germany, using the lens of the less-considered topic of motorcycling, which was much more widespread than aviation or automobilism. By the end of the Weimar Republic, motorcycle ownership had increased eightyfold and Germany produced more motorcycles than any other country in the world. Motorcycles were particularly important harbingers of the economic and social changes of the era, and unlike automobiles, which remained too expensive for ordinary people to afford, functioned as the true vehicles of mass motorization. Disko positions her book as a counter-perspective to the majority of [End Page 635] studies of masculinity in the Weimar Republic that have largely considered the militarization of society, or studies that have tended to associate consumption with femininity. With motorcycling, she argues, consumption is obscured "behind the twin pillars of modern manliness: production and possession," yet she shows how motorcycles were much more than mere machines for those who purchased them (p. 1). In idealized versions of themselves, motorcyclists conquered nature, space, time, and the machine. Using a source base ranging from trade publications and club journals, maps, insurance policies, races and rides, ownership statistics, registration records, legal records, films, drawings, song lyrics, and fiction all the way to Heidegger and a few other cultural theorists, Disko explores ways that Germans articulated their relationship with the noisy and thrilling motorcycle. The book advances the overall argument that "for many Germans during the Weimar Republic, motorcycling became a vehicle for negotiating the modern world," by showing how depictions and discussions about it reflected the thrills and danger of modern mobility, sexuality, and consumerism (p. 16). In seven chapters and an epilogue, the book explores the growth of the motorcycling industry, engineers and advertising, the role of motorcycles for the "everyman," debates about motorcycling as a sport, deviant behaviors on motorcycles, women motorcyclists, sexuality, and motorcycling's gradual decline under the Nazis and after WWII. In her chapter on the first forty years of motorcycle manufacturing in Germany, Disko asserts that WWI had, on balance, a negative impact on motorcycle production. Yet in the years following the war, industrialists sought an outlet for their factories and motorcycles offered an attractive option. Smaller two-stroke engines were louder and messier than four-stroke engines, but cheaper. Rationalization of assembly methods, which many Germans sought to differentiate from Fordism by asserting its "German" twists, made the production of a true volksrad (people's motorcycle) possible. Chapter three offers a deep exploration of "Motorcycles for the 'Everyman,"' noting the shifting demographics of motorcycle owners, before turning to their "habitus" by discussing "ideal types," as defined by motorcyclists themselves in club journals. Here Disko disputes "the concept of a uniform, singular concept of German motorcyclist masculinity," noting the differences between various ideal types (p. 149). Notions of the "new man," who was clean-shaven, slender, strong, mechanically competent, and a consumer of gadgets, predominated, but there was room for differentiation, as marked by consumer choices and behavior. Debates around sportsmanship or deviant behaviors like drunk driving, joyriding, noise pollution, and violence, discussed in the next two chapters, further this point. Letters about how motorcyclists should treat dogs on the road, some of which seem remarkably cruel by today's standards, reflect contested notions of violence, entitlement, and masculinity. [End Page 636] The next two chapters, about women motorcyclists and sexuality, likewise note contestation and differentiation. "[Female] motorists during the Weimar Republic both...

Ochrona środowiska w kulturze Strategicznej Niemiec

<p>Celem artykułu jest analiza roli ochrony środowiska w kulturze strategicznej Niemiec ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem ochrony klimatu. Pośrednim celem jest także włączenie zagadnień ochrony środowiska do nurtu badań uwarunkowań polityki zagranicznej i bezpieczeństwa państwa. Przypadek Niemiec jest w tej sytuacji szczególny. Państwo to nie posiada jasno określonej strategii bezpieczeństwa narodowego, jednak aspiruje do ogrywania znaczącej roli w międzynarodowej polityce bezpieczeństwa i międzynarodowych działaniach na rzecz ochrony środowiska i zmian klimatycznych. W artykule połączono wiedzę ogólną na temat ochrony środowiska i kultury strategicznej z wiedzą szczegółową na temat modeli analizy kultury strategicznej Niemiec, uwarunkowań kultury strategicznej Niemiec z uwzględnieniem ochrony środowiska, oraz poziomów analizy kultury strategicznej tego państwa.</p>

The Interwar Period as a Machine Age: Mechanics, the Machine, Mechanisms, and the Market in Discourse.

ArgumentThis paper examines some of the ways that machines, mechanisms, and the new mechanics were treated in post-World War I discourse. Spengler's 1919 Decline of the West and Hessen's 1931 study of Newton have usually been tied closely to Weimar culture in Germany, and Soviet politics. Linking them also to the writings of Rathenau, Simmel, Chase, Mumford, Hayek, and others, as well as to Dada and film studies of the city will indicate central features of a wide-ranging, international discourse on the machine and mechanization. I argue that machines were so thoroughly integrated into social and economic experience that we can treat this as a distinctive new phase in the cultural history of mechanics, what some contemporaries called the "machine age": a period in which rather than the hand mill or steam engine, the city stands as an appropriate realization (and sometimes symbol) of the significance but also ambiguities and tensions of mechanical life; and concepts of mechanization were extended to encompass the economy and market mechanisms.

Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain by Christine Lehleiter

<i>Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain</i> by Christine Lehleiter

‘It’s not like the Germans to take something that wasn’t theirs’

At the time of its conception, the producers of Stromberg, the German adaptation of the British situation comedy The Office, were accused of copyright infringement. Based on exclusive data from qualitative interviews with the creative personnel, this article contributes to the previously under-theorised field of television comedy production studies in non-Anglophone contexts. Exploring the clash of standardised procedures on the global television market with traditional practices and a distinct production culture in Germany, it challenges established theorisations of television ‘format’ and argues for a more nuanced and case-specific understanding of how adaptation processes facilitate and stimulate creativity across borders.

Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain. Edited by Christine Lehleiter. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2016. xii + 354 pages + 5 b/w illustrations. $75.00 hardcover or e-book.

<b>Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain.</b> <i>Edited by Christine Lehleiter. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2016. xii + 354 pages + 5 b/w illustrations. $75.00 hardcover or e-book.</i>

Discursive practice of Combat Girls: the construction of social reality in contemporary German film

Based on Foucault’s discourse theory, this article deals with the construction of social reality through contemporary German cinema. More precisely, the case study explores the discursive formations of Combat Girls (2012), a film about the teenager milieu in the rural area of East Germany where two girls are moving into and out of a neo-Nazi group. This movie stands for the film production culture in Germany, which largely depends on sponsorships by state promotion bodies and public television, and consequently must be interpreted as the result of power relations and as the outcome of a struggle for legitimate meaning. Combining the Foucauldian discourse analysis with film content analysis tools, the study shows that the text-image relationships of Combat Girls contain three dominant discourses, which push forward the perspectives of ‘self-fulfillment’, ‘re-integration in society’, and ‘identification with the democratic system’. These findings indicate that the filmic construction of social reality in Germany has a clear political purpose. Simultaneously, they give insight into the knowledge regime of contemporary German film and what is possible to be said and shown on national screens – especially when it comes to a socially and politically sensitive topic.

Rhine Cities - Urban Flood Integration (UFI): German and Dutch Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies

Rhine Cities - Urban Flood Integration (UFI): German and Dutch Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies

Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain ed. by Christine Lehleiter

Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain ed. by Christine Lehleiter

독일의 장례문화사 : 죽음에 대한 인식과 장례문화를 중심으로

독일의 장례문화사 : 죽음에 대한 인식과 장례문화를 중심으로

No, Prime Minister: PhD Plagiarism of High Level Public Officials

Based on a public office definition of corruption, this article uses the case studies of doctoral plagiarism of German Minister of Defence Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Hungarian President Pàl Schmitt, Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta, and Russian President Vladimir Putin in order to show that, by shattering citizens’ confidence in and respect for political class, political parties, state institutions and rule of law, academic plagiarism of high-ranking politicians intertwines with and enforces the most serious democratic failures in their respective countries: degeneration of political culture in Germany, nationalist authoritarian trends in Hungary, a culture of corruption in Romania, and outright dictatorship in Russia. As such, this specific type of plagiarism goes far beyond academia. It represents a direct, aggressive, and effective threat against democracy itself.

Cultural Conflicts and Self-identity with Germany-dispatched Korean Nurses in the 1960s and 1970s

The purpose of this study is to explore cultural conflicts, self-identity and maturity of Germany-dispatched korean nurses in the 1960s and 1970s. The data were collected in 2015 through individual in-depth interviews using open-ended questions. A total of 8 nurses participated in the study. Verbatim transcript were analyzed by phenomenological analysis. Five theme clusters emerged ; Choosing the lives and Experience of New world ; Entering the Strange world - Language, Food, Loneliness ; Experience of nursing culture in Germany ; Lives in Germany -Individualism Culture and Familism culture ; Aging, Human Maturation-Horizon Development of Understanding. This study paid attention to the lives of nurses as diaspora. Germany-dispatched korean nurses who still live in Germany got expanded insight and maturation by comparison and analysis on two cultures. Their cultural conflicts and lives in Germany would be meaningful cases in the history of korean nursing and immigration that needs the global competency.

Does gender make a difference in leadership and stress orientations? An empirical study of German and Russian working adults

This paper examines stress, task, and relationship orientations of people in the high-context cultures of Russia and in the low-context cultures of Germany. As a result of the analysis of 462 responses, some significant differences were found between the two samples. Gender is a significant factor in task orientation. However, gender did not demonstrate any differences in the relationship orientations of these respondents. Gender and place of birth together are significant factors in overload stress perceptions. The literature on German and Russian cultures is presented along with practical applications, suggestions, and implications for future studies. This study fills the gap in the management literature and offers a unique analysis of the leadership orientation and stress orientation of German and Russian adults. Organisations will have a significant competitive advantage from the correct adaptation and alignment of the organisation's management practices with the national culture.

A comparison of civil religion and remembrance culture in Germany and Japan

AbstractJapan and Germany were allies during World War II, and both countries committed crimes. Even though the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany was unprecedented in history, Japan has also been found guilty of serious misdemeanours. Today, Germany acknowledges the magnitude of its responsibility and strives to deal with this legacy. However, in Japan, we find no consensus on dealing with the matter. Nonetheless, it would be short-sighted to conclude that Germany did a better job than Japan from the outset. In analysing the different approaches to remembrance culture in the two countries, we use the theoretical framework ofcivil religionto assess the impacts of the respective civil religions on the culture of commemoration. We hereby analyzed the structural factors as well as the influence of individual political behaviour. Immediately after the war, neither Germany nor Japan were interested in coming to terms with their past. Both countries were subject to Western integration, and both countries experienced remarkable economic growth. One of the major differences between both countries concerns civil religion. While Germany no longer relied on strong nationalism-based politics and instead pursued European integration, in Japan. Shintôism has continued to influence feelings of national belonging, making it more difficult to establish a critical dialogue with the past. Further differences are apparent: the Western origin of Japan’s constitution, the conflicting international environment in Japan, the late regime change, differences in education and, most importantly, the impacts of generational change in Germany. The 1968 student generation strongly condemned Nazi aggression and demanded that the older generation face responsibility, which strongly contributed to a reappraisal of the past in the public sphere.

It was horrible, but we live now

Based on an ethnographic field study in a museum and an evening high school in Cologne, this paper discusses experiences of young German adults in everyday encounters with the Holocaust, which are oft en accompanied by feelings of discomfort. Considering the Holocaust as an uncanny, strange matter contributes to understanding that distance and proximity are key factors in creating uncomfortable encounters. Distance from the Holocaust reduces discomfort, but where distance cannot be created, other strategies have to be put to work. This article underlines the significance of experience in an individual’s personal relation to the past for gaining an improved understanding of Holocaust memorial culture in Germany.

The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880-1940 by Paul Lerner

THE CONSUMING TEMPLE: JEWS, DEPARTMENT STORES, AND THE CONSUMER REVOLUTION IN GERMANY, 1880-1940 Paul Lerner. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. xi + 266 pp.The rise of the department store has been intimately linked to the history of modernity in the Atlantic world (United States, France, Britain). In Germany, as many other aspects of modernity, the full-fledged department store arrived relatively late, around 1890, but expanded exceptionally fast, surpassing all but the American stores in both number and sales within only a decade. Around 1900, the German department stores had also the highest percentage of Jewish owners, and nowhere else was the association between department stores and Jews as strong and persistent as in Germany.Paul Lerner's monograph on the department store in Germany between 1890 and 1940 fills sizable gaps in both the history of consumer culture in Germany and Jewish cultural history. It attends, in the words of the author, only to the shaping of discourse by reality, but also to the shaping of reality by discourse. Thus, The Consuming Temple digs happily into an extremely rich and varied body of material and media, both nonfictional and fictional. Key sources include articles in the daily and illustrated press, advertisements, professional treatises on the psychology of kleptomania, and studies of mass consumption, retail, and marketing. The author has combed also through an impressive number of unpublished archival materials from department store firms and other family collections. He does not shy away from using ample antisemitic material (agitation pamphlets, political propaganda, etc.) that-despite its malicious and deceitful rhetoric-drew on images of Jews and anxieties about social change that were shared across the ideological spectrum in the time before and after World War I. Particularly noteworthy are Lerner's abundant references to fiction-I counted over three dozen novels, revues, plays, short stories, and even songs and cartoons-where the plots and characters orbit around the daily functioning of a department store and reflect the public's conflicting attitudes toward this form of consumer revolution. The novels, ranging from Vicky Baum's Der grose Ausverkauf to Emile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise, from Erich Kohrer's Warenhaus Berlin to Manfred Georg's Aufruhr im Warenhaus, and from Maria Gleit's Abteilung Herrenmode to Sigfrid Siwertz's Das grose Warenhaus, offer valuable perspectives on how the department stores were seen, experienced, and represented during their heyday between 1890 and 1933. Within Lerner's own compelling narrative and analysis, references to fiction and nonfiction texts intersect in astonishing ways and form a cohesive discursive field around recurring themes that become the center of the respective chapters in the book.The first chapter situates the spread of the department store within the broader economic, sociological and political picture in the 1880s and 1890s, including developments in France, Britain, and America that served partially as a model for the entrepreneurs in Germany. The author is very precise in outlining the specificity of the German case. It was predominantly Jewish families, newcomers that had migrated between 1824 and 1871 from the East (territories that are now in Poland) into central and western Germany, who were looking for new economic opportunities. Unlike France and Britain, where the department stores emerged in the centers of Paris and London, the early departments stores in Germany started modestly in the provinces, outside of the capital, in medium-sized cities-with the retail of dry goods and textiles-before entering the bigger metropolitan markets; also, they catered mainly to working-class and lower-middle-class customers by offering quality goods at reasonable prices. With the bold move to Berlin and other big cities, however, most German department stores underwent a major shift. They became palatial structures, grandiose temples of consumption. …

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 by Jonathan Skolnik (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 by Jonathan Skolnik Gabriel S. Cooper Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955. By Jonathan Skolnik. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. 280. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 978-0804786072. Jonathan Skolnik’s masterful study reads German Jewish historical fiction as a popular genre of minority culture that sought to inscribe Jews into German culture and society. Skolnik argues that Jewish historical fiction written in German drew on the Sephardic-Jewish past and expressed a dynamic that philosopher Franz Rosenzweig dubbed “dissimilation”: an obverse movement to assimilation that affirmed a distinctive Jewish identity alongside new German identities. By reinventing Sephardic-Jewish history, Jewish writers asserted hope for integration and voiced concerns about assimilation, antisemitism, and persecution. Resonant Sephardic-Jewish themes—the vibrant Jewish culture of Islamic Spain, conversion, Inquisition, and expulsion—provided a rich source of Jewish self-understanding, through which minority cultural memory could be reinterpreted in new historical contexts. Skolnik’s book follows on the heels of recent scholarship on Jewish historical fiction by Maurice Samuels and Jonathan Hess, but it does not retread these authors’ paths. Instead, Skolnik offers valuable insights into a literature that served (among other functions) as a corrective to the project of modern, secular Jewish historiography (Wissenschaft des Judentums). Taking cues from historians Pierre Nora and Yosef Yerushalmi, Skolnik addresses the interplay of history and memory in German Jewish culture, and this exchange’s effects on German Jewish identity construction. One of Skolnik’s significant contributions here is his demonstration of the idea that German Jewish historical fiction remained in dialogue with the majority culture, even as it asserted a unique German Jewish identity. The book’s first chapter examines the “first modern Jewish historical novel,” Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza (1837). Spinoza reacted against the literary figure of Ahasuerus, an enduring representation of “Jewish history” for Europeans. Auerbach has Spinoza dream about a persecuted, unenlightened, dying Ahasuerus, signaling the triumph of secularization and rationalism embodied by the philosopher. However, the [End Page 664] novel also consciously confronts the challenge secularization posed to Judaism and Jewish identity. Auerbach situates his novel between the radical assimilationism of Karl Gutzkow and the Spinoza controversy of the 1780s, in which Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn became embroiled. By identifying Spinoza as the precursor to Mendelssohn’s Enlightenment thought, Auerbach perpetuates an ideology of Jewish emancipation by claiming Spinoza for Jewish history. Spinoza thus strives to insert minority culture, which secularization threatens to marginalize, into the national narrative of German literary history. Historical fiction would serve thereafter as a model for Jewish writers concerned with Jews’ integration as Jews into German culture. In his second chapter, Skolnik interprets Heinrich Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach (1840) both as a text that posits secular literature as a counterweight to the demythologizing tendencies of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, and as a modern type of Jewish cultural memory. Skolnik’s compelling analysis of the “Haggadah” motif illustrates the critical role Heine envisioned for narrative in negotiating the divide between Jewish collective memory and nineteenth-century historicism. In his “secularized Haggadah” modeled on Cervantes and Sir Walter Scott, Heine revives the Sephardic-Jewish thinker, Don Isaac Abarbanel, an ambivalent figure endowed with the cultural integration of that historical epoch, and the knowledge of how fleeting that achievement was. German Jewish writers of historical fiction learned from Heine to appropriate Abarbanel as a vehicle for expressing a range of attitudes toward the projects of (Jewish) integration and modernization. Chapter 3 treats five nineteenth-century historical novels addressed to a German Jewish public sphere, which had arisen from German Jews’ acculturation and their thriving print culture. Skolnik maintains that this minority literature sought to create a normative, stable Jewish identity compatible with the project of integration. Jewish historical fiction achieved this didactic aim through allusions to German “high” culture, often works by Goethe and Lessing. Skolnik also makes a cogent argument here for the inadequacy of existing theories of minority culture in analyzing German Jewish literature; rather than attempting to subvert the project of national identity—a strategy germane to other minority cultures—German Jewish...

The Formation of Future Socionomic Experts’ Conflictological Culture in Germany and Austria

Abstract At the present stage of Ukrainian society development there is a requirement for studying and the analysis of the maintenance of experts’ preparation in social, socially pedagogical sphere in foreign countries. Therefore the great value has research of experience in theoretical and practical preparation of the future socionomic experts in the universities of Germany and Austria. In the article the formation of socionomic future experts’ conflictological culture and teaching features of social-pedagogically directed disciplines in high schools of Germany and Austria have been considered. The analysis of the scientific and pedagogical literature devoted to studying separate aspects of socionomic experts’ conflictological culture formation has been carried out. The standard-legal maintenance of future social teachers’ vocational training in high schools of Germany and Austria, in particular, features of curricula, their substantial filling, and also training specificity have been investigated. Presence of the conflictological component in the frame of future socionomic experts’ preparation has been designated, that allows students to raise efficiency of professional work in the future. Improvement of the programs and subject content able to open peculiarities of future socionomic experts’ psychological pedagogical and conflictological preparation in Germany and Austria will promote formation of the modern competitive expert with a high level of conflictological culture.

An analysis of cultural shifts - the examples of Luxembourg, France, Germany

The purpose of this research is to investigate the cultural shifts in Hofstede's cultural dimensions individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, long–term orientation, indulgence versus restraint, and monumentalism in Luxembourg, France and Germany. The design of the research is the replication of Hofstede's study. Hofstede's original questionnaire was administered to employees in one company in Luxembourg, France, and Germany. A total of 134 filled–in questionnaires were collected: 106 from Luxembourg, including 33 from Lux.Nat. (Luxembourg with Luxembourgish nationality) ten from France and 18 from Germany. The cultural dimensions were calculated and compared to Hofstede's initial data for Luxembourg, France, and Germany. The paper finds that overall there is a cultural shift in Luxembourg and France. Germany's culture did not shift. Potential impact factors are globalisation, knowledge management, innovation, expatriation, mobility, the internet, digitalisation and linguistic specificities. The paper offers practical advice of how to interpret the cultures of Luxembourg, France and Germany. Discussion and implications, limitations and future research opportunities follow.