German Book Research Articles

The Role of Book Covers in Shaping Visual Discourse

Book covers as visual materials convey what reading audiences can expect from texts. A quick glance at covers of translated Turkish books, translations from other languages and also German books (fiction and nonfiction) in the German-speaking book market shows that covers of works containing the word “Istanbul” in their title are typically decorated with mosques and minarets. Taking this observation as a starting point, this paper aims to question the underlying motivations of this special case focusing on selected literary translations, non-literary works on Istanbul, and local literary productions written in German. The analysis indicates that Istanbul holds a predefined, fixed, and clear-cut image in the minds of professional and nonprofessional German-speaking readers.

John Henry Newman on Latin Prose Style: A Critical Edition of His Hints on Latin Composition

John Henry Newman on Latin Prose Style:A Critical Edition of His Hints on Latin Composition Vincent Ferrer Blehl (bio) Good style, whether latin or english, remained a life-long concern for John Henry Newman. According to an article written for the Catholic University Gazette and reprinted in the latter part of the Idea of a University,1 Newman wished, from his earliest years, to write good Latin, but he was unable at first to grasp what was meant by a good Latin style. He read Cicero without learning what it was, but shortly before coming up to Oxford for his first full term, he came upon an article in the Quarterly Review,2 written, though Newman did not know it at the time, by Edward Copleston, Provost of Oriel. Studying this work, Newman began to note down idiomatic phrases and expressions, which lead him further into the mistake of thinking "that Latinity consisted in using good phrases." Consequently, despite repeated attempts to learn Latin, "when I was twenty I knew no more of Latin composition than I had known at fifteen."3 It was preparing for the Oriel fellowship in 1821–1822 that Newman came to realize that he should have started with the whole rather than the parts, and that "good Latinity lies in structure; that every word of sentence may be Latin, yet the whole sentence remain English; and that dictionaries do not teach composition."4 The occasion of this discovery, curiously enough, was another work of Copleston, Praelectiones Academicae, a series of lectures delivered terminally while he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a post held from 1802 until 1812. Of these lectures Newman later remarked: "As coming from a person of his high reputation for Latinity, they were displays of art: and, as addressed to persons who had to follow ex tempore the course of a discussion delivered in a foreign tongue, [End Page 37] they need a style as neat, pointed, lucid, and perspicuous as it was ornamental."5 Though the style of these lectures was less simple than Cicero's—more studied, more sparkling, still they were fitted to impress on a student what Latinity was. Newman began to write Latin in earnest as a preparation for the Oriel fellowship examination. He would set himself a subject and time himself in the execution of the composition. He also tried for the Latin essay prize, writing on the assigned topic: "An, re vera, praevaluerit apud eruditiores antiquorum poltheismus." Though Newman did not succeed in winning the prize, he succeeded in the very process of writing this essay, as he explained in a note appended to one of the two extant manuscripts of the essay, to grasp "the idea of Latin composition." When Newman had become a fellow of Oriel, Copleston very kindly corrected a copy of his essay. Perhaps encouraged by this assistance, Newman tried again for the Latin prize, in 1823, writing on the subject "Conditio servorum apud antiquos," but he was again unsuccessful. Having gained the idea of composition, Newman set himself to form from it rules and remarks for himself. "I could now turn Cicero to account, and I proceeded to make his writings the material of an induction, from which I drew out and threw into form what I have called a science of Latinity . . . or at least considerable specimens of such a science, the like of which I have not happened to see in print."6 Some of the examples used to illustrate the general rules were taken from Cicero and some from Copleston's Praelectiones. This work entitled in the first draft "Hints on Composition" and in the second, "Hints on Latin Composition," is printed here for the first time. Elementary and incomplete as it may seem to us now, accustomed to over a hundred years of scientific work on Latin composition, it seemed no less so to Newman in 1854, for he says: "considering, however, how much has been done for scholarship since the time I speak of, and especially how many German books have been translated, I doubt not I should now find my own poor investigations and discoveries anticipated and superseded by works which...

ДРВО У КУЛТУРНОМ ПАМЋЕЊУ НЕМАЧКОГ НАРОДА НА ПРИМЕРУ ПРИКАЗА КЊИГЕ ПЕТЕРА ВОЛЕБЕНА ТАЈНИ ЖИВОТ ДРВЕЋА

After the 2015 release of Peter Wohlleben’s book The Secret Life of Trees, which soon became a best-seller, books on nature and trees swamped the German book market. This paper is an attempt to answer the question why a forester’s book met such positive reactions from the readership. This paper focuses on the symbolic and semantic traits of the tree, as well as its meaning in the cultural memory of the German people that Wohlleben relies on in his way of depicting trees. Taking into consideration the aim of the paper, the semiotic and cultural-historical methods have been implemented.

The 1927 Soviet Manual on Social Hygiene: The Transfer of Ideas and a New Methodology

The article analyzes the first original Soviet (Marxist) textbook of social hygiene, “Social Hygiene: Manual for Medical Students and Doctors”, edited by A. V. Molkov and published in 1927. This textbook is compared on with the German books on social hygiene, whose translations into Russian were published in the 1920s. The examination of the evolution of Soviet social hygiene in regard to the curriculum structure and the content of textbooks in the context of the history of social health in Europe and North America leads to a conclusion that, in the early 1920s, the Soviet agenda of social hygiene was brought into line with the European agenda. The textbook edited by Molkov can be regarded as the culmination of this process of Soviet social hygiene modernization modeled after the German social hygiene: the content of Molkov’s textbook is almost fully consistent with B. Chajes’ “Kompendium der sozialen Hygiene” (1923). It had finalized the departure from the prerevolutionary tradition of “public medicine” and adoption of the agenda of society health problems and their solutions that was then widespread in Europe and America. The most significant difference between the Soviet manual and German books is scientific methods. One of the ideologists of German social hygiene, A. Grotjahn, described this discipline as a fusion of hygiene and social sciences (economics, law, political science, sociology, etc.). In the Soviet version of social hygiene, the methodology of social sciences was substituted with the dogmata of communist ideology and Soviet regulatory legal acts. However, the attempt to substitute social scientific methodology in the study of social hygiene with the Marxist approach failed and, while in the 1920s it appeared like an innovation in the spirit of the time, as years went by, the inherent contradictions between the two approaches only got deeper.

Chrononyms in Stratagema Oeconomicum by S.Gubert and in Lifliandskaia Ekonomiia by M.V.Lomonosov (a comparative study)

Stratagema Oeconomicum by S.Gubert (first ed. 1645) is a German-language manual on farming in the historical region of Livonia. This German text, as well as its Russian translation Lifljandskaia Ekonomiia (“Economy of Livonia”) signed by M.Lomonosov (1747), contains numerous calendar dates in the form of proper names (chrononyms). Most of these names refer to religious holidays and Christian saints’ days of remembrance. A comparative study of chrononyms from the two texts approaches issues that were not fully resolved in previous works, namely, revealing the strategies used by the Russian author and identifying the reasons for deviations from the original text. An analysis of the linguistic material shows that in the selection of equivalents for German chrononyms, the Russian translator used both the Orthodox Church calendar and the traditional Slavic almanac. Many significant Christian figure are not represented in the Slavic folk calendar, and this led to cases in which names from the German book were replaced with names indicating different, albeit close, calendar dates. In addition, the days of remembrance of some Christian saints differ in the Western and Eastern traditions, which also caused a number of replacements with shifts in dates. Other factors, e. g. climate of Russia and the use of the Julian calendar, did not have a significant impact on the translation of chrononyms. The main aim of the adaptation carried out by the Russian translator, most likely, was the desire to present calendar milestones and intervals in a form familiar to the Russian reader.

«КОДЕКС РИЗНИЧЕГО КОНРАДА» И ОБРАЗЫ ВЛАСТИ В НЕМЕЦКОЙ КНИЖНОЙ МИНИАТЮРЕ ВТОРОЙ ПОЛОВИНЫ XII В.

The article is devoted to a unique monument of German book illumination of the second half of the 12th century – illuminated cartulary or “Traditionscodex”. The manuscript, written by the sacristan Conrad, goes beyond the book of copies of documents relating to donations of property and becomes a kind of historical chronicle of the Freising diocese. The unique character of this monument is revealed by comparing with typologically similar manuscripts created in the 9th–12th centuries. The images of representatives of the highest religious (bishops of Freising) and secular authorities (kings of Germany and emperors) are of particular importance in the codex. In the article the author defines the various functions of these images in the “Codex the Conrad Sacristan”, emphasizing the importance of the representative func- tion, and makes a comparison with similar images found in German illuminated manuscripts of the second half of the 12th century.

Vilne, Vilne undzer Meka: A City on the Border between Old and New, East and West

One of the key features of the image of Vilnius is its position on a symbolic spatial and chronological border. Depending on the ideological agenda of a particular imperial or national discourse, Vilnius can be located on the western or the eastern frontier of the imaginary imperial realm (Russian or German respectively), or as a historic national capital (for Poles, Lithuanians and Belarusians). Correspondingly, different national and imperial narratives evaluated particular historical periods differently, usually portraying the more remote past positively, as opposed to the most recent past. The Russian city guide by Flavian Dobrianskii and the German books by Paul Weber and Paul Monty, published respectively before and during the First World War, described the city from two opposite perspectives using the same conceptual opposition of East versus West. Unlike these dichotomous representations, Jewish Modernist poetry, exemplified by two poems entitled ‘Vilna’, by the Hebrew poet Zalman Shneour and the Yiddish poet Moyshe Kulbak, as well as the Yiddish city guide by Zalmen Szyk, sought to restore the imaginary unity of time and space, celebrating the complexity and diversity of the city.

The Style of the 18th Century German Poetry Book

The article considers a question mainly unexplored — the history of German book art of the 18th century. There are outlined the main trends in the evolution of German books and highlighted their stylistic varieties. The “archaic” style, inherited from the 17th century, has its characteristic disharmony, rough types, and eclectic ornamenting. It remains relevant until the 1770s. From the 1730s, a style called here the “Leipzig classic” strives to overcome the limitations of the archaic. Its development is related to the partnership of the poet J.C. Gottsched and the publisher B.K. Breitkopf, and to the short period in German literature when classical standards prevailed. Probably, the Leipzig publishers’ practice directly affected the Russian book style of the third quarter of 18th century. In the 1750s, the literary program of the writer J.J. Bodmer and the circle of Zurich writers, opponents of J.C. Gottsched, fused with the publishing program associated with an attempt of some fundamental reforms. Bodmer himself, and later the poet Salomon Gessner, were co-owners of the largest Zurich publishing company. Through that, the original “Zurich” style appeared, heralding the future book “empire” style. Its most characteristic features are the Roman-faced type instead of the Gothic type and the lack of ornamentation. The end of the century typography is marked by some further evolution of the “Leipzig classic” style, the Gothic type standardization, and later the Roman-faced type standardization as well (“Walbaum” type). Consequently, German books of the 18th century represent a complex and uneven evolution, with huge regional differences and directly or indirectly related to the development of national literature, which is a phenomenon that cannot be observed in other European countries.

Body text

Body text: Typography and the corporeality of literature In one of his fragments, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg explains that German books printed with roman type, instead of the then default gothic type, always give him a feeling that he needs to translate them – evidence, he says, of “the degree to which our concepts are dependent on these signs”. The article elaborates on this thought. It explores the relation between literature, text (abstract and material), and typography, and argues – by means of bibliographical theory, Goethe’s mother, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roman Ingarden, and a diagnostic comparison between hand writing and digital fonts – that the longstanding, idealistic view, within literary criticism and history, of texts’ ‘content’ as independent of books’ and texts’ materiality and form, obstructs scholars’ striving for understand-ing. Text is not only representation; it is also presentation. Text has form, and the form produces meaning.

Translating in a constrained environment

Abstract Translating children’s literature has been an object of interest researched from a number of vantage points, including the question of constraining factors. Scholars have highlighted mainly the question of dual readership or cultural adaptation, frequently without a global and systemic analysis of all impediments. This article examines the Polish translation of the German book for children, Katharina von der Gathen’s Klär mich auf, from a constraint-based framework. This article focuses on the reconstruction of the constraints in the translation process: the point of departure is the framework with three basic factors that constrain translation, i.e., the intention of the author/translator, text type, and the profile of the audience. The presented argumentation incorporates other formal impediments, such as the visual layer of the book and the semiotic make-up of the source text, language taboo and censorship or the literary polysystems. The analysis of the constraint framework helps to comprehend the translation in terms of the ST-TT relationship regarding their intended audiences, genre-related features, and the child-adult duality.

Drivers of Organizational Agility in German Book Publishing Houses

Drivers of Organizational Agility in German Book Publishing Houses

Greek History

I commence this review with a major contribution to the social history of classical Athens. Athenian social history is traditionally focused on polarities of class, status, and gender; while these polarities were obviously important, it is equally significant to adopt an interactionist approach and explore the shape of encounters between people belonging to the same or different groups. Rafał Matuszewski has chosen to focus on the interactions and communication between male Athenian citizens: in particular, the various spaces in which those interactions took place, as well as the means of communication. As regards the spaces, he explores in detail the noisy streets, the Agora, the various shops, workshops, and places of commensality and entertainment, the baths, the gymnasia, and the palaestrae. This is an excellent synthesis of a large number of social spaces in classical Athens, which have never been explored in the same detail as, for example, sanctuaries and cemeteries. Equally fascinating is the second part of the work and its detailed exploration of the body as a means of communication, alongside elements of material culture like clothes, houses, and graves. The wealth of material that is collected and examined and the interactionist framework employed have the potential to revolutionize how we study Greek social and cultural history; it is to be hoped that Anglophone readers will make the effort to engage seriously with this important German book.

Seeing the Woods for the Trees Again: Analyzing Evolutionary Diagrams in German and US University-Level Textbooks

Phylogenetic trees are important tools for teaching and understanding evolution, yet students struggle to read and interpret them correctly. In this study, we extend a study conducted by Catley and Novick (2008) by investigating depictions of evolutionary trees in US textbooks. We investigated 1197 diagrams from 11 German and 11 United States university textbooks, conducting a cross-country comparison and comparing the results with data from the 2008 study. A coding manual was developed based on the 2008 study, with extensions focused on additional important aspects of evolutionary trees. The US and German books showed only a low number of significant differences, typically with very small impacts. In both samples, some characteristics that can render reading trees more difficult or foster misconceptions were found to be prevalent in various portions of the diagrams. Furthermore, US textbooks showed fewer problematic properties in our sample than in the 2008 sample. We conclude that evolutionary trees in US and German textbooks are represented comparably and that depictions in US textbooks have improved over the past 12 years. As students are confronted with comparable depictions of evolutionary relatedness, we argue that findings and materials from one country should easily be transferable to the other.

The book industry in Germany

The article analyzes book publishing, book distribution in Germany. Some features and tendencies of development of the German book industry in the modern period are covered. The article analyzes the geography of large publishing centers, shows German publishing houses that have their own history, traditions, market segment, publish books in the relevant field of knowledge, and finally have their own philosophy.
 Export markets of German books, problems of distribution of editions abroad are considered.
 Book market segments are highlighted.
 The role and place of e-book publishing, audiobook sector, e-book are clarified in the general system of the book industry.
 The features of book distribution, sales volumes of the largest publishers of Germany, specifics of activity of book trade networks are shown.

”Perinteinen” käsitys diakoniasta – saksalaisen esimerkin analyysi

In the discussion about the ministry of a deacon, a “traditional” view of diaconia has been mentioned but not described. This makes it different from knowing, what is the topic of the discussion. This article presents a German book from 1960, presenting a clear view of diaconia. It could be count as the “traditional” view of diaconia. This view seems to base on New testament and texts from the early Church. An analysis showed that there is a particular view which leads the presentation. To understand the “traditional” view of diaconia based on a special view – not on the New Testament directly – would help the discussion about the ministry in the Church.

The Atomic Spy Who Never Was: “Perseus” and KGB/SVR Atomic Espionage Disinformation

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the KGB and its successor SVR began a campaign to claim a large share of credit for the USSR’s development of an atomic bomb. Memoirs by KGB officers celebrated their service’s success in penetrating the American “Manhattan” project. As part of this campaign, in 1991, Vladimir Chikov, a serving KGB (later SVR) officer, published an article in Russian and English, followed by a full-length book in French (1996), German (1996), and Russian (1997) on the exploits of an atomic superspy code named “Perseus,” said to still be alive and unknown to American security. “Perseus” was described as a senior physicist who was part of the Manhattan project from its origins, working first at the Chicago “Med” lab with Enrico Fermi and later at Los Alamos with Robert Oppenheimer. Veteran KGB officer Anatoly Yatskov, who had supervised several spies in the Manhattan project, added his endorsement of the “Perseus” story. For years, amateur and professional researchers used the clues in Chikov’s writings to search for the identity of “Perseus,” but no strong candidate emerged. With the opening of the Venona decryptions in 1995, most professional historians became convinced that “Perseus” was a KGB/SVR fiction, but “Perseus” lingers still with the wider public as a yet unidentified Soviet atomic spy. This article points to the internal contradictions and impossible assertions in Chikov’s “Perseus” story, as well as how Venona shows that Chikov took elements of the story of a real Soviet spy, Theodor Hall, to construct the “Perseus” myth. Hall was a junior scientist without an advanced degree who worked at Los Alamos in 1944 and 1945 (never at Chicago), but Chikov moved Hall’s story back to 1942 and elevated him from a junior figure to a senior scientist and associate of Fermi and Oppenheimer who, in Chikov’s words, gave Stalin “the Manhattan project on a serving plate.” Further, Chikov gave “Perseus” numerous attributes that precluded the still living Hall from ever being a candidate for the atomic spy “Perseus.”

M\xf6ssbauer study of iron gall inks on historical documents

Iron gall ink was used in the Western world as a permanent writing material already in late Roman times and throughout the Middle Ages, until it became obsolete in the twentieth century. There is much interest in experimental methods to determine the state of the ink and its degradation products on historical documents. Mössbauer spectroscopy with 57Fe is such a method, and it has the particular advantage to be sensitive to the chemical bonding of iron, but this method has only rarely been applied to historical documents. In this paper we present Mössbauer data for two damaged documents from a Library in Granada and a handwritten German book from the eighteenth century. In addition to the inked parts of the manuscripts, ink-free parts were studied to determine the amount and chemical state of the iron in the papers. These new results are discussed in the context of previously published Mössbauer data. In one of the investigated documents Fe(II)-oxalate, FeC2O4·2H2O, was observed. The assignment of the various Fe3+ sites in the different documents is rather difficult and often there is a superposition of various species. Known forms of iron gallate are definitely not present on the inked papers. The observed ferric species can be remains of Fe3+ polyphenol complexes of the ink, complexes of Fe3+ with degradation products of the cellulose of the paper or gum arabic, or very small iron oxide or hydroxide nanoparticles.

\u201cPay to Play\u201d in the German Book Trade?

This paper considers the success of the thriller Der neunte Arm des Oktopus (transl.: The Ninth Arm of the Octopus, Cologne: Bastei Lübbe, November 2020) by German drugstore magnate Dirk Rossmann. Certain elements of brand-name authorship are applicable here, but the market power of Rossmann goes far beyond name recognition. Beyond the typical marketing for a ‘big book’ in the sense of contemporary trade publishing, Rossmann flooded the campaign with his own funds. This contribution approaches an unlikely case study through a trilateral interdisciplinary perspective (book studies, economics, law), underlining the unequal footing on which books enter the market.

Bibliology in Germany — origins, developments and current state

From its origins in the early modern period up until today, German bibliology has undergone a huge transformation both in terms of its relationship to other subjects and its research areas. The article describes the development of bibliology in Germany from its beginnings in bibliographic and librarian contexts, over its evolvement as a field of study in its own rights in the late 18th century, until its current situation as a university subject. Today, German book science is a relatively small discipline which might profit from integration in broader media studies already proposed a decade ago. It has links to many other humanities subjects, especially librarian, literary, linguistic and cultural studies, and sees its task in integrating interdisciplinary research on the book instead of monopolising it. Due to the lack of an overall book theory or model, this also means making use of the research approaches of these adjoining disciplines whenever they seem promising. The bibliological studies on all aspects of books, implicitly oriented on the steps of production, distribution and reception of books and conducted by the few professorial chairs of book science, are complemented by several non-university institutions and research groups.

Reflections on the Visibility of Freelance Editors in the German Book Publishing Business

During the last twenty years the situation of editors in the German publishing industry has changed a lot: from permanently employed to freelance editors. This paper shows how their work has to be made visible in the credits as it is the case for translators, printers, and other service providers in the field. This article describes good practices for publishers and editors to lift especially freelance editors into visibility.