German Culture Research Articles

«Children’s» Jokes as a Means and a Way to Maintain the Collective
 Identity of NativeLanguage Speakers within a Culture

The article is devoted to the description of the functional potential of one of the ways of socialization of native language speakers within a culture, namely «children’s» jokes in the German culture. These types of text are characterized by obvious
 cultural specifics, objectified not so much through the environment of functioning and the implementation of the corresponding functions by various means and methods,
 but through their main characters. The focus of the analysis is on Fritzchen, who, due to his obvious cultural specificity, is interpreted as a cultural hero (in Geert Hofstede’s terms). Therefore, the situations in which Fritzchen’s actions are narrated in official and unofficial communication and his reactions to the environment and his actions are analyzed as a way of communicating social norms to a collective subject,
 as a way of reproducing social standards in a culture which functions «on the contrary», as a means of maintaining cultural continuity and cultural identity in synchrony and diachrony. For this reason, the character qualities attributed to Fritzchen
 in the “children’s” jokes are interpreted as components of the collective identity of a collective subject, relating to the nuclear part of the collective identity of both individual and collective subjects who speak the German language and exist within the
 German culture.

«Children’s» Jokes as a Means and a Way to Maintain the Collective Identity of NativeLanguage Speakers within a Culture

The article is devoted to the description of the functional potential of one of the ways of socialization of native language speakers within a culture, namely «children’s» jokes in the German culture. These types of text are characterized
 by obvious cultural specifics, objectified not so much through the environment of functioning and the implementation of the corresponding functions by various means and methods, but through their main characters. The focus of the analysis
 is on Fritzchen, who, due to his obvious cultural specificity, is interpreted as a cultural hero (in Geert Hofstede’s terms). Therefore, the situations in which Fritzchen’s actions are narrated in official and unofficial communication and his reactions to the environment and his actions are analyzed as a way of communicating social norms to a collective subject, as a way of reproducing social standards in a culture which functions «on the contrary», as a means of maintaining cultural continuity and cultural identity in synchrony and diachrony. For this reason, the character qualities attributed to Fritzchen in the “children’s” jokes are interpreted as components of the collective identity of a collective subject, relating to the nuclear part of the collective identity of both individual and collective subjects who speak the German language and exist within the German culture.

Risk management behaviour in digital factories: the influence of technology and task uncertainty on managerial risk responses

PurposeThis study aims to advance a behavioural approach towards understanding how managerial perception impacts the enactment of responses to risk management during the implementation of digital technologies in industrial operations and supply chains. The purpose is to investigate the influence of (digital) technology and task uncertainty on the risk perception of managers and how this impacts risk responses adopted by managers.Design/methodology/approachFollowing an exploratory theory elaboration approach, the authors collected more than 80 h of interview material from 53 expert interviews. These interviews were conducted with representatives of 46 German companies that have adopted digital technologies for different industrial applications within manufacturing, assembly and logistics processes.FindingsThe findings provide nuanced insights on how individual and combined sources of uncertainty (technology and task uncertainty) impact the perception of decision makers and the resulting managerial responses adopted. The authors uncover the important role played by the interaction between digital technology and human being in the context of industrial operations. The exploratory study shows that the joint collaboration between humans and technologies has negative implications for managerial risk responses regardless of positive or negative perception, and therefore, requires significant attention in future studies.Research limitations/implicationsThe empirical base for this study is limited to German companies (mainly small and medium size). Moreover, German culture can be characterised by a high uncertainty avoidance and this may also limit the generalizability of the findings.Practical implicationsManagers should critically revise their perception of different types of digital technologies and be aware of the impact of human-machine interaction. Thereby, they should investigate more systematic approaches of risk identification and assessment.Originality/valueThis paper focuses on the managerial risk responses in the context of digitalisation projects with practical insights of 53 expert interviews.

Corrigendum to “Charlemagne’s Legacy: A Consensus Analysis of Affective Meanings in French and German Culture”

Corrigendum to “Charlemagne’s Legacy: A Consensus Analysis of Affective Meanings in French and German Culture”

Of Boiled Eggs and Rocket Science: Textual Experiments in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin

Abstract Told from the perspective of a soft-boiled egg, Sharon Dodua Otoo’s German-language story Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin serves up a portrait of a retired Nazi rocket scientist at his breakfast table. The text came to public attention in 2016 when Otoo was awarded the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for the story’s experimental pastiche of German culture. This article draws on a posthuman framework to consider the story’s central challenge to a society in which whiteness is presented as the norm. By exploring the story's anthropomorphizing play with narrative perspective, I demonstrate how Otoo moves beyond bourgeois satire to unmask racist categories which ensure that privilege goes unnoticed. Decolonial perspectives, as well as concepts from the materialist thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, will be employed to illuminate the materialist politics of Otoo’s decentring of the white masculine subject, revealing how instead the text foregrounds material forces that act on bodies, both human and nonhuman.

Otto Friedrich Bolnow: between philosophy and pedagogy: monograph

The monograph highlights the creative heritage of the German 20th century thinker Otto Friedrich Bolnow (1903–1991): for the first time in Russian literature, an attempt has been made to reconstruct his creative heritage, and a systematic analysis of his philosophical and pedagogical views is given. Along with this, the publication contains a translation of an essay by O.F. Bolnova on a similar topic - “Self-Representation”. The book is intended for specialists in the field of philosophy and pedagogy, as well as the history of German culture.

Decolonial Gazing and Hermeneutic Resistance: Black German Challenges to White German Cultural Hegemony in the Museum

Abstract In this article, I highlight the ways that Black Europeans challenge universalizing notions of cultural heritage to emphasize decolonial possibilities. Focusing on the German context, I show how Black artists, intellectuals and activists interrogate the collection, display and spectatorship of museum objects in majority-white contexts using the strategies of decolonial gazing and hermeneutic resistance. I use the Berlin Ethnological Museum in its former and current iterations as a representative example of debates about collecting and looking at museums, showing how scholars like Fatima El-Tayeb and initiatives like No Humboldt21! challenge universalizing discourses and reflect the gaze back on whiteness. Finally, I offer a reading of a literary challenge to white hegemony within and beyond the museum in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s 2021 novel Adas Raum [Ada’s Realm].

On Beowulf's Elegiac Mood: from the Perspective of Cognitive Poetics

Beowulf is the longest narrative poem in ancient England and the most complete and outstanding epic in the early Middle Ages of Europe. It holds an important position in the history of British literature and even European literature. Beowulf mainly tells the great deeds of the hero Beowulf, who is half human and half divine, in subduing monsters and killing poisonous dragons. It has a mythological colour and can be regarded as a heroic mythological epic. It mainly praises Beowulf's heroic spirit, promotes Christian consciousness, and showcases England's unique cultural style during the Anglo-Saxon period. Most studies of Beowulf focus on Germanic culture, literary form, historical background, themes, and symbolic significance portrayed in the poem. By adopting theories in Cognitive Linguistics like prototype, iconicity, perspectives, metaphor, naming in cognitive poetics, this article peruses the elegiac language of Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, illustrating that Beowulf is an elegy of the deaths of heroes, the inconstant fate, the vicissitudes of the world and age, the collapse of tribal society, and ultimately—the elegiac world, and results in that Beowulf is more like an elegy than an epic.

New Perspectives in German Studies: A View from the Margins

This article calls for studying German history and culture from the margins, an approach that highlights unexpected mutual influences and entanglements between German and non-German cultures in Europe and beyond and that challenges essentialist understandings of German identity. Moreover, by looking at peripheries of German culture, scholars can break out of the straitjacket of national narratives and rediscover the transnational dimensions inherent in German history. Bukovina, a multiethnic former province of the Habsburg Empire that now spans the border between Ukraine and Romania, is one such place. The article sketches how the German concept of Kultur was first used to legitimize the Habsburg Empire in Bukovina and was later absorbed into a new language of rights in a postimperial age.

Charlemagne’s Legacy: A Consensus Analysis of Affective Meanings in French and German Culture

We investigate between- and within-country consensus about affective meanings of social identities along the evaluation, potency, and activity dimensions from the affect control theory research tradition. Ratings for 387 (194 male and 193 female) identities were collected from two samples representative of the French (N = 700) and German (N = 700) populations for age, gender, and region. Guided by two preregistered hypotheses based on previous cross-cultural research, our analysis points to considerable cultural consensus between French and Germans who seem to share a common “Carolingian” affective culture; yet some culture-specific patterns concerning the evaluation dimension and evaluation-potency interactions were found to be statistically significant. We interpret these results in terms of known cross-cultural features such as power distance and conceptions of power.

Emancipation of the National Identity in Augusts Deglavs’ Novel “Riga”

The article studies the formation of the Latvian national identity as depicted in the cultural and historical novel Riga by the writer Augusts Deglavs. The plot is set in the second half of the 19th century when more and more Latvians from the country started to move to Riga. By applying the context-oriented approach and practices of cultural studies, the New historicism, post-colonialism, separate aspects of the dynamics and context of the relationship between Latvians and Baltic Germans in multicultural Riga have been analysed. In addition, the points where social and national identities contact and cross under the conditions of hermetic and hegemonic German culture, like relations with the German language, acquisition of social practices, emergence of the sense of Latvianness, have also been examined. The article also performs a concise evaluation of the historical importance of the Young Latvians’ movement depicted in the novel as the awakener of the national identity. Based on John Austin’s concept of performative language, in studying the emancipation of national identity, attention was paid to the ability of language “to do things”, which proves that words expressed in certain situations can possibly affect and change the run of historical processes.

Motywy faustyczne w twórczości Czesława Miłosza

The article discusses the references to Faust by Johann Wolfgang Goethe present in the works of Czesław Miłosz. They appear in his poems, as well as in essays and non-literary texts, e.g. interviews. The references to Goethe in Miłosz’s work are also of interest, especially included in autobiographical statements. The article attempts to indicate certain regularities concerning the occurrence of intertextual references to Goethe’s tragedy, related to the poet’s worldview, his aesthetic choices and biographical context. The considerations included in the article lead to the conclusion that the hero of the tragedy symbolises the content which, after World War II, made it possible to name and understand the processes that led to the catastrophe of war and the rejection of humanity. Faust can be a tool for self-characterisation or an accusation against German culture and the cult of science and progress, leading to the alienation of the individual.

The semiotics of Kosovo’s streetscapes

Abstract Post-war Kosovo is characterised by strong transition processes, including in the car and service vehicle sector, and Germany, German culture, and the German language play a central role in these processes. The popularity of used vehicles imported from German-speaking countries has led to a change in the appearance of Kosovo’s streetscapes. These cars often carry signage or texts written in German and are very common in Kosovo. The spread of these cars is due both to the lower cost and to the high prestige of the German language and culture in Kosovo. Often the owners also keep the German number plates, as the registration of cars in Kosovo is not handled very strictly, or they retain the sticker that designates the country of origin of the vehicle, ‘D’ for Germany, ‘A’ for Austria and ‘CH’ for Switzerland. As a result, there is a strong German influence to be found across Kosovo’s streetscapes. Our article is dedicated to these particular semiotic landscapes on the basis of empirically collected photographic material. Data was collected outside the transmigrant season, i.e. outside the months around the turn of the year and the summer vacations, and the period of the lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic to avoid as far as possible non-residential German signs.

Cultural representation in German as a foreign language textbooks used in Indonesia: A critical social semiotic analysis

AbstractInformed by an integrated critical social semiotic approach, the present critical discourse study investigates the semiotic relations of image–text and the cultural meanings encapsulated in two German language textbooks: Studio d A1 and Netzwerk A1 widely used in Indonesia. Adopting Xiong and Peng's semiotic relation model, the findings demonstrate that Netzwerk A1 provides learners with opportunities to learn, think, and reflect critically on German culture through pedagogical questions regarding image–text‐pedagogy discussion. However, the image–text in Studio d A1 emphasizes the acquisition of linguistic knowledge and does not engage learners in exploring and negotiating their cultural repertoire. This empirical evidence suggests that language textbook writers should consider designing culturally responsive language learning tasks to engage learners in the active construction of cultural knowledge in practice.

BÜCHNER, BORDERS AND THE CONVERGING OF ‘CROWDS’: JACK THORNE'S WOYZECK (2017)

ABSTRACTAs an important site of cross‐cultural exchange, theatre translations performed in Britain form key routes for international writers to be introduced to, and to influence, British audiences and theatre‐makers. This article introduces Jack Thorne's 2017 adaptation of Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, performed at the Old Vic Theatre in London, as a case study to trace how British theatre practitioners and institutions frame and utilise German texts and playwrights to construct an image of German (theatrical) culture in Britain. I will focus on institutional practice in the first instance, tracing how the Old Vic Theatre framed this production as appealing to two different ‘crowds’ and how Woyzeck relates to the Old Vic's stated institutional aims. This will be combined with performance and textual analysis that draws out the ways in which the production thematises borders and cultural difference. While theatre in translation can be seen as a bridge between different national cultures, I ultimately argue that this Woyzeck adaptation highlights, and indeed propagates, divisions between British and German (theatrical) cultures.

The Semantics of the Absurd: On German ‘Hermetic’ Poetry and Political Commitment after 1945

German culture experienced an enormous rupture after 1945. Not only was the country in ruins and an outcast of the international community because of the recent regime and its devastating effects, its entire cultural tradition was under suspicion: had German culture always been steering towards this catastrophe? Was everything within it corrupt? While the frenetic economic activity of the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ side-stepped a mainstream confrontation with the horrors of the recent past, intellectuals and artists radically interrogated the reasons for the disaster. As always, language and the meaning-making procedures in language prepare the mind to open up and to prepare for action. Language is at the root of action and this insight fuelled reflections on language, for instance by philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. But it was particularly in lyric poetry that a lucid and politically aware examination of the recent past took place and an expression of such considerations could be found.
 This paper demonstrates how poets made a unique and highly significant contribution to the development of a new political awareness in Germanlanguage culture. By integrating silence and the absurd (that is, the unheardof and the unspeakable) into literary language, this so-called hermetic poetry did not entail a withdrawal from society but, on the contrary, devoted itself to a particular form of political commitment. This procedure represents a rupture with what Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno called the ‘culture industry’ (1947), opposing conventional and habituated approaches to art in terms of its production and reception and advocating instead a stringent and critical concept of arresting aesthetic form that was to distinguish the work of art from products of that culture industry. Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ilse Aichinger, Günter Eich and Nelly Sachs are the household names associated with this poetics. While it was never necessarily mainstream, it was arguably the most innovative poetic strand of its time and in the long run a key factor in shaping a modern German culture that could come to terms with its past and overcome authoritarian structures.

Early English Translations of Grimm's "Children and Household Tales" as Children's Literature

The Children and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen, KHM) by the Brothers Grimm are not only an integral part of German culture but have also become a global success over the last two centuries. Currently, the collections of the Grimm brothers include translations into over 100 languages, some of which were written during the lifetime of the Brothers Grimm. English editions in particular carry a considerable influence on the global reception of the tales, since most of the tales are received in a translation instead of the original language. However, many readers of the Grimms’ tales are not aware of this. It is often disregarded that a translation can rarely be described as identical to the original and is subject to different factors such as the translation tradition, the target culture, or the translator’s own ideas. The following essay investigates how and why the tales were edited in English translation to be modified as children’s literature.

Kulturelles Erbe und Arbeit im Exil: Die deutschsprachige Literatur und der internationale Film (1933–1945)

Considering the devastating impact of Fascism and National Socialism on exiles and their literary heritage through the lens of adaptation history, this essay focuses on German-language literature in international cinema from 1933–45 and, by implication, on the role of refugees in major film industries abroad. When Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, most notable authors and filmmakers were forced to leave their homes in Germany and soon Austria. Many of them went to Paris and quite a few eventually made it to Hollywood. Several exile filmmakers sought to claim German-language literature for that ‘other Germany’ in foreign language films, but — especially after Hitler’s troops had invaded Poland — the literary canon of Germany and Austria was considered a liability by most international film producers. In desperate need of income, many exile authors actively pursued adaptations of their own works, but only rarely did their plans materialize, even for bestselling writers; Remarque, Seghers, and Werfel were among the lucky few. Max Ophuls’ effort to preserve at least a fragment of the German literary canon and ensure the survival of German culture abroad, by filming Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), was an exception. For the most part neither international film studios nor audiences were interested in German literary culture during the Hitler era unless an exile writers’ works provided useful and entertaining insights into current challenges and/or had established a wide-ranging readership.

How Icelandic Is French Law? A Few Remarks about the Discovery and Usage of Icelandic Antiquities in French Legal Historiography during the Nineteenth Century

How Icelandic Is French Law? A Few Remarks about the Discovery and Usage of Icelandic Antiquities in French Legal Historiography during the Nineteenth Century

PECULIARITIES OF THAT FLEXIBILITY OF THE GERMAN-UKRAINIAN TRANSLATION OF RELIGIOUS VOCABULARY

Objective. The objective of the article is to investigate the main translation strategies of structurally distant languages, namely the religious vocabulary of the German language, as well as to analyze the peculiarities and complexities of its German-Ukrainian translation. Methods. Solving the set tasks is carried out using such methods as analysis and generalization of scientific literature on the problems of translation studies; system and comparative analysis, and the continuous sampling technique is applied to collect language facts. Results. Studying the peculiarities and difficulties that arise in the process of translation from German to Ukrainian, and especially when working with religious vocabulary, it should be noted that a literal translation will often be incomprehensible due to the absence or lack of knowledge of one or another feature of German culture. Therefore, in order to avoid questions and misunderstandings, the translator must find an equivalent word, metaphor, proverb or saying, or a story that will evoke the same feelings and thoughts that the recipient receives when reading the original text. Issues of the importance of context and the peculiarities of German grammar also affect the quality of the translation. Therefore, the difference between German and Ukrainian culture, as well as religions, requires special skills of the translator and mastery of various translation tools. Phrases with a religious component, religious terms create additional difficulties in the process of translation, because sometimes it is very difficult to find an equivalent in the Ukrainian language, so a comprehensive translation is the best choice in this case. Having analyzed a number of religious terms from Duden explanatory dictionary, it can be concluded that the influence of the Latin language over the centuries on other languages caused a high number of equivalents of religious concepts in the Ukrainian and German languages. Therefore, in most cases, the selection of a direct analogue and adaptive transcoding is used in the process of translating religious vocabulary.