German-American Research Articles

Introduction: humanitarian memories in German–American relations

Introduction: humanitarian memories in German–American relations

The “bridge character”: Carl Schurz and West German–American rapprochement

In 1952, West Germans and Americans held a joint, year-long observation celebrating the centennial of the arrival of German-born Carl Schurz in the USA. The collaborative, transatlantic celebration served to publicize a historical and cultural relationship between the German and American peoples through the memory of Carl Schurz. State and non-state participants publicly remembered Schurz as the quintessential German–American and a “bridge character” that transcended national borders, occupied an important ideological space, legitimized the Cold War relationship between erstwhile enemies, and perpetuated an on-going process to construct a transnational, cultural identity rooted in Western liberal-democratic political culture. For the US government, the historical character of Carl Schurz also became a means of promoting a liberal heritage in the face of on-going Soviet accusations of American imperialism, warmongering, and poor race relations.

Soft Power in Hard Concrete: the Berlin Congress Hall, the Cold War and the Building of Transatlantic Relations

Summary The opening of the Congress Hall in Berlin-Tiergarten in 1957 took place during the heyday of the Cold War. Designed by American architect Hugh Stubbins, the building became a focal point in East–West confrontations. Against this backdrop, the article explores the role of architecture in national soft power by taking the example of the Berlin Congress Hall. Commencing with a discussion of architecture as a component of soft power along five criteria, it goes on to examine the planning of the Congress Hall and the significance of its unique design vocabulary. The article concludes that the building, strategically located near the sector borders separating East and West, represents a concrete embodiment of US soft power. Although not an official representational building, the Congress Hall has thus served as a political, cultural and ideational ‘embassy’ of the United States and a major building block in German–American relations up to the present.

Repetitive head injuries in German American football players do not change blood-based biomarker candidates for CTE during a single season

BackgroundRepetitive traumatic brain injuries in American football players (AFPs) can lead to the neurodegenerative disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Clinical symptoms of CTE range from mood and behavioral changes to cognitive impairment, depression, and suicidality. So far, CTE cannot be diagnosed in vivo and thus specific diagnostic parameters for CTE need to be found, to observe and treat exposed athletes as early as possible. Promising blood-based biomarkers for CTE include total tau (tTau), hyperphosphorylated tau (pTau), neurofilament light protein (NF-L), glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), amyloid-β40 (Aβ40), amyloid-β42 (Aβ42) and calcium-binding protein B (S100-B). Previous studies have found elevated levels of these biomarkers in subjects exposed to TBIs, whereas cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) levels of Aβ40 and Aβ42 were decreased in CTE subjects. Here, we investigated whether young AFPs already exhibit changes of these biomarker candidates during the course of a single active season.MethodsBlood samples were drawn from n = 18 American Football Players before and after a full season and n = 18 male age-matched control subjects. The plasma titers of tTau, pTau, NF-L, GFAP, Aβ40, Aβ42 and S100-B were determined. Additionally, Apathy, Depression, and Health status as well as the concussion history and medical care were assessed and analyzed for correlations.ResultsHere we show, that the selected biomarker candidates for CTE do not change significantly during the seven-month period of a single active season of American Football in blood samples of AFPs compared to healthy controls. But interestingly, they exhibit generally elevated pTau titers. Furthermore, we found correlations of depression, quality-of-life, career length, training participation and training continuation with headache after concussion with various titers.ConclusionOur data indicates, that changes of CTE marker candidates either occur slowly over several active seasons of American Football or are exclusively found in CSF. Nevertheless, our results underline the importance of a long-term assessment of these biomarker candidates, which might be possible through repeated blood biomarker monitoring in exposed athletes in the future.

Hashtags and heritage: the use of #italianamerican on Instagram

Abstract Purpose Using both framing theory and Collier’s cultural identity theory, this paper seeks to study the use of #italianamerican on Instagram by first attempting to determine if it is used exclusively by Italian Americans as a way to demonstrate their own cultural identity. The paper will then examine whether the message valence of posts using #italianamerican demonstrates users’ personal perceptions of Italian American culture. Finally, the paper will examine if there is a relationship between #italianamerican posters’ ethnicity and the message valence of their posts. This paper does not argue that Italian Americans are the only Americans of European ancestry taking part in the hashtag phenomenon; rather, this paper is meant to examine how one ethnic group attempts to define itself by its use of digital and social media. Design/methodology This simple exploratory study examined the 50 most recent Instagram posts using #italianamerican as they appeared on November 1, 2022. The posts were sent to two independent coders who analyzed their visual content. Findings This study provides insight into how ethnicity and cultural familiarity are associated. Results show that message valence and ethnicity are not linked, as anyone can admire and respect a culture and post a positive message about it on social media, even if it is not their culture of origin. Members of a specific ethnic group tend to have a stronger familiarity with their culture of origin, as demonstrated by the posts selected for this study. Implications This study showed that Italian Americans use social media to educate others about their heritage, as well as to celebrate their culture of origin. Value The methods used in this study could be applied to other European American ethnic groups and their social media usage, including Irish Americans, Polish Americans, and German Americans, among others.

The History of DeWitt County (1899) by C. H. Waltersdorf, Publisher and Editor of the Lavaca County News

The History of DeWitt County (1899) by C. H. Waltersdorf, Publisher and Editor of the Lavaca County News Translated by James C. Kearney (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution C. H. Waltersdorf's Geschichte von DeWitt County (1899). Courtesy of DeWitt County Historical Museum. [End Page 518] As the 175th anniversary of DeWitt County approached in 2020, members of the DeWitt County Historical Commission began preparing for a grand celebration commensurate with the county's rich history. One of the commission members, Beverly Bruns of Yorktown, discovered C. H. Waltersdorf's history among her family papers. It is the only known extant copy of his published study, which he wrote in German and published in 1899. Beyond the fact that Waltersdorf had briefly published a German language newspaper in neighboring Lavaca County, the Lavaca County Nachrichten, almost nothing was known about him. Both he and his history, it would seem, had slipped into oblivion. However, Peggy Ledbetter, president of the commission, quickly recognized the value of the forgotten narrative and agreed that a translation would be a valuable addition to the planned celebration. Mary Brindley, another commission member, approached me about doing the translation. After a quick perusal of the scans, which were all legible, I agreed to undertake the project. In addition to the translation itself, I was able to put together a short biography of Waltersdorf and to provide extensive endnotes to his narrative. Carl Herman Waltersdorf was born in Germany in 1872 and died in Cuero, Texas, in 1937.1 He lived an extraordinary, restless life marked by [End Page 519] many abrupt twists and turns. In 1889, at the age of seventeen, he came to the United States with a brother to join his parents, who had emigrated to Texas twelve years previously. Upon arriving in Texas, his father had purchased a small farm near Runge, just across the DeWitt County line in neighboring Karnes County, where he set up a homestead in an area with a strong and growing German presence. The town of Runge, in fact, had coalesced around a mercantile store and post office established by business associates of Henry Runge (1816–73), a successful and farsighted Texas German businessman.2 When Waltersdorf arrived in Texas, not only was he reunited with his parents, whom he had not seen in twelve years, but he also met for the first time his new brothers and sisters, who had been born in Texas. One can only imagine the story behind this unusual arrangement. Once settled, the teenager soon found employment as a typesetter with the Deutsche Rundschau, a German language newspaper published in Cuero, where he learned the newspaper trade at an early age. At the age of twenty, he married the daughter of a German American family in Cuero by the name of Ziehahn; they were a family of some means, apparently, because they helped him establish his own German language newspaper, the Lavaca County Nachrichten, in neighboring Hallettsville in 1895.3 An episode from the period suggests that he might have offended some readers on occasion: Editor Waltersdorf of the Nachrichten and Dr. Schiersman of Shiner had a little difficulty here at the post office last Saturday during which the editor knocked the doctor down. We have not been able to get fully into the merits of the affair, but what we have learned would go to show that Mr. Waltersdorf had considerable provocation for what he did. Mr. Waltersdorf went immediately before Mayor Eschenburg and paid his fine. Scrapping is rather an expensive luxury for newspaper men to be indulging in.4 In 1899, Waltersdorf penned his History of DeWitt County, which he advertised in his newspaper and sold as a supplement for twenty-five cents. According to the Hallettsville Herald, he also traveled around the county to give talks and promote his history.5 For reasons that are unclear, Waltersdorf apparently became disenchanted with the newspaper business after a scant five years. In May 1900, he sold the paper to his younger brother, Richard (Dick) Waltersdorf, who had worked for him as a typesetter and under whose stewardship the paper continued for many...

An Interview with David Roediger

An Interview with David Roediger Jon K. Lauck JL: Where were you born? DR: The hospital in which I was born was in East St. Louis, Illinois. I have long been tempted to claim I'm "from" there, given how central that city has been to African American creative genius and to the tragedy of race in the Midwest. But in truth the life and livelihood of both my parents was in Columbia, Illinois, a dozen miles south. It was a village of two to three thousand, deeply German American, all-white, and built around grain milling and limestone quarrying. JL: How did your parents and grandparents come to be in this part of the country? DR: My family on both sides came to southern Illinois before the generation of my grandparents, overwhelmingly from what's now Germany but with one branch from Ireland. JL: A fairly large group of Germans immigrated to St. Louis in the early nineteenth century. Would you say your ancestors were part of that urban migration stream or were they more oriented toward farming and rural/small town living in southern Illinois? DR: My family connected to St. Louis much later, with some moving from Cairo, Illinois, and Columbia to the city for work in my parents' generation. The most lastingly German part of the family, my father's side, described itself as coming for religious reasons and to avoid conflicts during German unification. I think they sought rural life, but not a farm. Their religious bent, Missouri Synod Lutheranism, became the main arena for continued identification with one way of being German American. My paternal grandmother was a German speaker, though mostly without anyone to speak to. My mother's family was more [End Page 239] German than Irish in "blood" but just the opposite in identity. They lived near and centered life around an Irish American Catholic church in Cairo. JL: What was your parents' line of work? DR: My mother and her twin brothers became orphans before she was five, her mom dying as a result of childbirth and her dad in a railway work accident. She lived her first seventeen years in Cairo. Her aunts and grandmother sacrificed greatly to send her to two years of normal school for teacher training at Southern Illinois Normal College, now Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She taught in Columbia for forty-nine years, mostly fourth grade. My dad followed his dad into work at the limestone quarry just outside Columbia. While his father worked as a mechanic, my father, back from the Navy and World War II, moved into the office as a bookkeeper. JL: What was your mother's maiden name and what did her family do for an occupation in Cairo? DR: She was born Mary Ann Lind. As noted, her dad was a railroad worker. Her mom was a housewife until dying very young. The aunts who worked to support the household in which she grew up had white-collar, or pink-collar, jobs. One kept books for a coal company and the other was a union phone operator, a job that required considerable skill and an absence of much accent. Opening those jobs to Black women was a demand of the Black United Front in Cairo, one that eventually succeeded but just before the positions were largely mechanized out of existence. When he served as lieutenant governor in the late 60s, Paul Simon sent Dick Durbin to fact find in Cairo. Durbin, now a U.S. senator from Illinois, was an aspiring Democratic politician then. The man taking him to his Cairo hotel room—we know this story because Durbin told it later to Barack Obama who made it public—warned that any use of the phone in the hotel would lead to phone operators relaying what was said to local white supremacists.1 JL: How did your parents meet and where and what year were you born? DR: My mother moved to Columbia to accept the first teaching job she was offered, just as the world war began. My father courted her as he was busily eating bananas in an attempt, ultimately successful, to meet the [End Page 240...

(Re‐)Discoveries in a time of disruption

(Re‐)Discoveries in a time of disruption

The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930: Cityscapes Photographs Debates

The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930: Cityscapes Photographs Debates

Hereford: Prigionieri italiani non cooperatori in Texas

Hereford: Prigionieri italiani non cooperatori in Texas

Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment & Repatriation of German, Italian & Japanese Americans during the Second World War by John E. Schmitz

Reviewed by: Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment & Repatriation of German, Italian & Japanese Americans during the Second World War by John E. Schmitz Steph Hinnershitz Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment & Repatriation of German, Italian & Japanese Americans during the Second World War. By John E. Schmitz. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. 386. Notes, bibliography, index.) John E. Schmitz’s Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment & Repatriation of German, Italian & Japanese Americans during the Second World War is an ambitious work that sets out to expand and complicate the story of wartime detention in the United States. Using a variety of records on the forced removal of Japanese Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans, Schmitz “examines the causes, conditions, and consequences of America’s selective relocation and internment of its own citizens and enemy aliens” (2). Schmitz argues that historians have largely focused on the “relocation and internment” of Japanese Americans and suggests that broadening this approach to include German and Italian Americans also globalizes this moment by connecting it to the repatriation of enemy aliens in exchange for American civilian internees abroad. Enemies Among Us also posits that scholars should question the argument that race fueled Japanese American internment. Schmitz provides the first full-length monograph on the policies behind and experiences of detention for all three groups while also highlighting challenges in comparing their internment. Schmitz organizes the book into nine chapters. Chapter 1 provides a useful discussion of the precedent World War I set for World War II internment, while chapters 2 through 4 explain how fears of fifth-column threats from Germans, Italians, and Japanese Americans from the late 1930s through 1940 set the stage for another round of wartime internment. Long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as Immigration and Naturalization Services, conducted investigations on potentially subversive Germans, Italians, and Japanese Americans. But, as Schmitz explains in chapter 5, Pearl Harbor appeared to validate the fears of political leaders and military officials that fifth columnists were responsible for the attack. Chapters 6 and 7 detail [End Page 408] how rumors and propaganda contributed to relocation and internment policies nationwide and on both the East and West Coasts. Chapter 8 provides a fascinating discussion of the connections between the internment and repatriation of enemy aliens in exchange for American civilian internees abroad, and chapter 9 concludes the book with a disappointingly short yet useful description of internment experiences, particularly the psychological impact of detention in the Crystal City family internment camp in Texas. Schmitz’s in-depth study is a useful and much-needed beginning for a new direction in this period of America’s wartime history: taking a broad view of detention across ethnic and racial groups. His linkage to repatriation and internment policies in the Western Hemisphere will be valuable to many scholars, but his decision to include Japanese American incarceration in his study detracts from his overall goals and undermines his argument in key places. His introduction could provide a more thorough discussion of his choice of terminology for the forced removal and imprisonment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans (most of them second-generation, American-born Nisei) to clarify for the reader when he is discussing foreign-born Issei and Nisei. This muddies his argument that including Japanese American incarceration within the study of enemy alien internment is useful. Schmitz explains that key figures found it difficult to differentiate between loyal and disloyal Japanese Americans regardless of their citizenship status, which supports other historians’ claims that racism—while perhaps not as key for the internment of enemy aliens—was in fact a crucial factor in the unique set of circumstances faced by Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Schmitz does, however, provide food for thought in interrogating how detention and surveillance across ethnic and racial minority groups created a policy with broad implications. His work will be important for shaping future studies about wartime internment. Steph Hinnershitz National WWII Museum Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Working-Class Germans in the Salt City: Syracuse, New York, 1860–1916

Working-Class Germans in the Salt CitySyracuse, New York, 1860–1916 Daniel Koch (bio) The central city of the Empire State was once the home of thousands of Germans, the largest contingent in a multicultural, multilingual urban melting pot. Syracuse was one of the key industrial cities of the United States during the Civil War era and into the twentieth century. Like other American cities, its industrial might was built on immigrant labor, much of which was German. Yet, there has not been a historical study of German Syracuse since the editors of the German-language Syracuse Union newspaper produced a book called Geschichte der Deutschen in Syracuse und Onondaga County (The history of the Germans in Syracuse and Onondaga County) in 1897. Like the tomes of county history produced around the same time, the Geschichte focuses on the great and the good. Its subtitle gives its intention away—Nebst Kurzen Biographien von Beamten and Hervorragenden Buergern (With short biographies of officials and prominent citizens). The book is handsomely illustrated with portraits of eminent German Americans who achieved great success in their careers, and who also gave back to their communities by supporting churches, schools, and charities. These leaders were a source of pride at a time when "great man" status was the aim to which young men were taught to aspire. But the men (and they are all men) whose portraits adorn the Geschichte were exceptions. Most German immigrants worked in industrial jobs, living in what urban accommodation they could afford. They clustered in immigrant neighborhoods with other Germans but also often in mixed communities with other groups of immigrants—Irish, particularly in the early decades, and Italian and Polish in the later part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article seeks to expose a little-studied German community, going beyond the limited great-man focused nineteenth-century sources that exist. Both the Geschichte and Dwight H. Bruce's Memorial History of Syracuse (1891), the two most detailed views of the city in the late nineteenth century, portray a highly positive view of a flourishing German [End Page 361] American community that exemplified civic virtue.1 Historians have maintained that Germans were widely accepted, even celebrated, in American society between the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I.2 The purpose here is not to try to undermine this view; indeed, the records from Syracuse in this period clearly bear it out. Nor is it to write a labor history of Germans in Syracuse. It is rather to bring back to life some of what was left out or swept under the carpet in building this narrative of German success in America. This article seeks to answer why these omissions occurred and argues that it was at least partially related to pervasive racialist discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Furthermore, studying Syracuse's German community enables us to reconstruct the urban geography of a nineteenth-century industrial center and take a new look at a lost German neighborhood in a key American city. Syracuse was a relatively late city to emerge in New York State. The land upon which it is built was part of the Onondaga Reservation, a 64,000-acre tract that was exempt from white settlement by the terms of the 1788 treaty between the State of New York and the Onondaga Nation.3 Syracuse is still known as the salt city due to the briny waters that flow into Onondaga Lake, from which salt can be made using a boiling process. Water from Syracuse's salt springs, an 1834 map boasted, produced nearly seven times as much salt as the same quantity of sea water. "Solar salt" was also produced by allowing the water to evaporate in the sun and raking in the remaining salt. Subsequent exploitative treaties with the state chipped away at the Onondaga Reservation (other Haudenosaunee people in New York experienced the same in the so-called treaty period between the 1790s and 1820s). The land upon which Syracuse was built was transferred first to the state and then sold off to private buyers. Settlers poured in, mainly from New England, in the early decades...

Review: Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War, by John E. Schmitz

As we watch in horror the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are again faced with the question of how much responsibility individual citizens should bear for the atrocities their political leaders inflict upon other nations. We also are forced to think what should be done with the expatriates supportive of their aggressive homeland, and how the people connected to the adversarial nations through ethnic ties should be treated when they may or may not be sympathetic to their ancestral nations.John E. Schmitz’s Enemies among Us illuminates the complications posed by these questions by presenting how the U.S. government treated enemy aliens and U.S. citizens with ethnic ties with the enemies during World War II. Schmitz uses historical sources as well as personal episodes, including those of his grandparents who were incarcerated in POW camps as naturalized German Americans, to show that warring nations tend to prioritize national security concerns at the expense of individual human rights.The forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans (which Schmitz calls “relocation and evacuation”) is a prime example of the governmental abuse of its war powers. To this tragic episode of human rights violation, Schmitz adds the “internment” of German, Italian, and Japanese aliens and a smaller number of German and Italian Americans, and he tells a larger story of involuntary—and mostly wrongful—confinement of individuals whose loyalty was rendered suspicious. Schmitz’s research on the executive records, the FBI records, and the War, State, and Justice Departments’ archives reveals the comprehensive scheme of the Roosevelt Administration aiming at protecting the nation from fifth-column activities not only within the United States but in the Western Hemisphere. The earlier chapters elucidate how J. Edgar Hoover took advantage of FDR’s fear of the fifth column to transform the FBI into a formidable secret police agency. The book also offers much information on the U.S. government’s intervention into Latin American policies regarding the arrests and deportation of alleged Axis sympathizers and alien enemies.By connecting the “internment” schemes on the East and the West Coasts, this book illuminates the “internment” of Japanese nationals (Issei) in detention centers—an understudied aspect of the wartime Japanese American experiences—as a part of the larger anti-espionage federal policy. The hostage exchange scheme explains the abduction and shipment of Japanese Latin Americans along with German Axis sympathizers to the United States. Schmitz describes how the federal enemy alien policies were confusing and often shifted clumsily. In the case of the hostage exchange policy, the government had to abandon the scheme because it turned out to be more dangerous to deport subversive internees to the enemy nations than to keep them in the United States. The book illustrates the overall injustice that befell those who were labeled potentially adversarial, and the primary sources show how the U.S. enemy alien policies were poorly managed.The major problem of this book lies in its handling of the story of 110,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in the War Relocations Centers. The book would have worked better if it had focused on the treatment of Japanese, German, and Italian enemy aliens. Schmitz carefully distinguishes the terms “internment” (detention of enemy aliens) and “relocation/evacuation” (involuntary removal of American citizens), but often his arguments become muddled throughout the book. On the latter issue, scholars in Asian American studies—such as Eiichiro Azuma (2005, 2019), Brian Masaru Hayashi (2004), Masumi Izumi (2019), and Erik K. Yamamoto, Lorraine J. Bannai, and Margaret Chon (2020)—have produced many works that explain the complex and significant roles Japanese Americans played in West Coast agriculture and in the debates related to national security and civil liberties. The book’s bibliography and many of the simplistic and faulty descriptions of the state of Japanese America before and during World War II reveal that the author was ill-prepared to explain how issues of national security, loyalty, and race intersected with one another when Japanese Americans were locked up in the inland concentration camps.

Eyes on the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. To What Extent was Germany Involved in the NATO Diplomacy Surrounding Finland and Sweden in the Early 1990s?

After the breakup of the Eastern Bloc, NATO started transforming from a military alliance of the West to a cooperative security organisation of Europe as a whole. When strengthening liaison with the former Warsaw Pact countries, an important German–American initiative was the establishment of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC). From the perspective of Germany, the NACC widened the scope for the European security dimension, whose core element was the Western European Union (WEU). In Finland and Sweden, changes in security thinking resulted in adjustments in the policy of neutrality. The chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl was an active spokesperson for Finnish and Swedish memberships in the European Community (EC) and Nordic participation in the WEU, but for the first time, this article examines to what extent Germany was involved when Finland and Sweden started building their relations with the NACC.

A Well-Outfitted Militia: German–American Translations of the Second Amendment and Original Public Meaning

Abstract This article seeks to uncover the original public meaning of the Second Amendment by scrutinizing unusual and previously unexamined sources: German–American translations of the Bill of Rights during the Founding Era. Translations offer a unique perspective of political culture, because they served as thoughtful analysis and contextual commentary on the source text. Using six German–American translations in the Founding Era, this article argues that the public understanding of the Second Amendment during the Founding Era was one that recognized the individual right to own firearms for individual use unconnected to militia service as well as a constitutional endorsement of an armed population as the best bulwark to preserve the liberty of the national people. Though the exact text of the translations differ across publishers and states, they retain thematic and syntactic similarities that suggest a public consensus over the meaning of the text. The notion that the Second Amendment protects an individual right rather than a collective one is borne out by additional translations well into the mid-nineteenth century. Printers adjusted their translations of the amendment after the militia as a military institution had fallen into disuse but preserved or strengthened the clause protecting the individual right to arms rather than letting it ‘fall silent’.

The Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, Nazi Germany and German Americans

The Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, Nazi Germany and German Americans

A person and the world in a Mordovian folk tale (in comparison with folktales of other ethnic cultures)

Introduction. The effectiveness of the research of folklore for the cognition of the cosmo-psycho-logos of the ethnos determines the relevance of this work. The research novelty of this study is studying Erzya and Moksha folk tales with the application of deixis analysis of folk tales with similar plots circulating in various ethnic groups. The object of the study is the texts of the Erzya and Moksha fairy tales with the plot motif “Tom Thumb” in comparison with Russian, German, English, Spanish and Latin American fairy tales with a similar plot. The subject of the research is the features of ontology, axiology, anthropology of Erzya and Moksha in a fairy tale. The purpose of the work is to identify the ontological, axiological and anthropological features of the Mordovian fairy tale. The objectives of the study are to perform a deixis analysis of the texts of several variants of the Mordovian fairy tale and its foreign-ethnic counterparts; identify their similarities and differences; to formulate the ontological, axiological and anthropological features of the Mordovian fairy tale. Materials and Methods. To achieve the purpose of the study, the author carried out a comparative content analysis of the deixis of seven fairy tales with the leading plot motif “Tom Thumb”. The author applies the method of critical selection of sources choosing the authentic versions of folk tales. General research methods allow the author to analyze and systematize the information obtained and synthesize the conclusions. Results and Discussion. All the considered folk tales record the tragedy of the absence of children in an ethnic family, the desirability of procreation as children are the happiness and the meaning of human life. The Erzya folk tale demonstrates the local-common solidarity, the fight against aggressive authorities, and armed restorative justice. In the Moksha fairy tale, there is a motif of deception by a deceiver as a form of restorative justice to improve the financial situation of the family. Both in the Erzya and Moksha fairy tales, the intention of returning home in an indirect way and living in labor in one’s place of development is realized. Conclusion. A comparative analysis of the deixis of fairy tales of different ethnic groups with a similar plot makes it possible to identify the general and special in the content of fairy tales, to determine the features of the ontology, axiology, and anthropology of the ethnic group. The study showed that the ontological, axiological and anthropological features of the Erzya and Moksha fairy tales are close, but not identical; it revealed similarities and differences with the fairy tales of other ethnic cultures.

Rhotics, /uː/, and diphthongization in New Braunfels German

Abstract This paper investigates the status of rhotics, /uː/, and the diphthongization of /eː/ and /oː/ in New Braunfels German, a variety of Texas German, a set of moribund dialects spoken in Texas. Boas, Hans C. (2009a. The life and death of Texas German. Durham: Duke University Press: 158) notes that “retroflex /ɻ/ appears … [mainly] in borrowed words.” He further assumes that New Braunfels German “differs from other German American dialects such as Pennsylvania German and Wisconsin German in that English sounds almost never appear in native German words” (160). The results discussed here indicate that this statement no longer holds true. Today, perceptual analysis and phonological measurements of Texas German Dialect Project data reveal that both American English retroflex approximants and diphthongs [eɪ] and [oʊ] appear frequently. Moreover, /uː/ is sometimes centralized/fronted with short/mid-long quality. Language attrition and language death, two mutually reinforcing variables, appear as the driving forces for these phenomena.

História da histeria: o legado de Ilza Veith

The 1965 book Hysteria: The History of a Disease, by the German American historian Ilza Veith, certainly represented a milestone in the historiography of hysteria. Praised at first as an innovative work, unprecedented in its comprehensiveness and scholarship, it became, over time, object of multiple criticisms regarding its omissions, its psychoanalytic bias, and the teleological character of its approach. This article aims at pondering these contrasting assessments and discussing the historical significance of Veith’s work from a contemporary perspective. To this end, a brief overview of historical studies on hysteria before Veith is outlined. This overview is followed by a descriptive and critical presentation of her work, a discussion of certain aspects of its reception and, as conclusion, an evaluation of her contribution and legacy to this research field.