German Fashion Research Articles

German Children's Literature

German Children's Literature Ruth B. Bottigheimer (bio) Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Vom Beginn des Buchdrucks bis 1570, edited by Theodor Brüggemann and Otto Brunken. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1987. Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Von 1750 bis 1800, edited by Theodor Brüggemann and Hans-Heino Ewers. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1982. Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Romantik, edited by Hans-Heino Ewers. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Aufklärung, edited by Hans-Heino Ewers. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980. Moore, Cornelia Niekus . The Maiden's Mirror: Reading Material for German Girls in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 36). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987. These books, as a group, exemplify new developments in the scholarship of children's literature—developments applicable to analyses in all areas of the subject, not merely those defined by the political and linguistic boundaries of Germany from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Taken together, they cover German children's literature from Humanism and the Reformation through the Enlightenment to Romanticism. One of them, Metzler's handsome Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Vom Beginn des Buchdrucks bis 1570, has both founded and facilitated a new area of study, early modern German children's literature. Both the handbook and Cornelia Niekus Moore's more specifically focused volume on girls' literature offer intensive discussions of German children's literature before 1570, a subject which, until recently, nearly everyone agreed did not exist. Taken together, the Metzler handbooks represent an extraordinary set of research tools. The format of each of the Metzler volumes is similar: introductory remarks are followed, in the "Historical Section," by discussion [End Page 176] of individual books and then by a bibliography that describes each of the works in bibliophilic terms, the bookbinder's craft keeping company with the illustrator's art. Each volume also includes several other listings that offer alternative means of locating, identifying, or assessing any given book: by chronology, genre, printer or publisher, and present library or archival location. All these listings are united by a clear system of numerical cross-referencing which is wonderfully error-free. Finally, an extensive bibliography of secondary literature is divided into two indexes in standard German fashion, one for people (Personenregister) and one for places and things (Sachregister). In both Metzler volumes the editors have adopted a relatively unified approach to diverse literary forms by including in their discussions categories that reflect a variety of critical and scholarly concerns: reader-response; readership (age, sex, social class, educational prerequisites); means of mediating (reading aloud, reading alone, being read to); intentions of the author/editor/publisher (amusement, instruction, circumstances of use); content and structure; and subsequent influence. Though these questions are not uniformly applicable, simply setting up the categories and trying to provide information within them introduces a wealth of new socio-historically based data and immeasurably enriches the study of children's literature. The historical section of the first volume (circa 1470 to 1570) is divided into four areas: religion, grammar and rhetoric, moral education, and didactic entertainment. The editors' inclusion of these categories clearly expresses an expansion of the genre. Comportment books and religious guides, until now considered only marginally a part of children's literature, join those literary forms which correspond to children's literature as it came to be known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for the editors perceive an affinity and continuity between genres with behavioristically utilitarian intentions and modern literary forms. Otto Brunken's informed remarks, supplemented by those of Cornelia Niekus Moore on literature for girls and Wilfried Dörstel's on illustrations, constitute an enlightening outline and definition of children's literature in this early period. Brunken's discussion begins with an excursus into the earliest work known in the German language for children, Bishop Arbeo's 760 A.D. German-Latin dictionary. Its inclusion demonstrates Brunken's cautious attempt [End Page 177] to expand the boundaries of children's literature. If the genre is to encompass everything written for children's use, then instructional and catechetical books must join those produced for children's amusement; this is especially important to the Humanist period, when some of the greatest minds of the day—Erasmus...

German Fashion

German Fashion

Diabetes Mellitus: III. Kongress der International Diabetes Federation. Düsseldorf, 21-25 Juli 1958: Proceedings.

The International Diabetes Federation is an organization composed of national diabetes societies from many countries, some lay, some professional, and some mixed. The American Diabetes Association is this country's representative. Congresses attended by delegates from component societies have been held periodically in recent years. The last one (the third) was in Dusseldorf in July, 1958. It was attended by visitors from forty-two nations. Prof. Dr. Oberdisse was chairman and Priv.-Doz. Dr. K. Jahnke was secretary of the program committee. In characteristic thorough and systematic German fashion they have now assembled more than two hundred scientific reports to the Congress in this single bound volume of excellent mechanical quality. As might be expected, a majority of the reports are written in German. Many are in English, however, and some are in French. Titles of the main subdivisions are given in the table of contents in all three languages. The collection is

On the Pronunciation of "Either" and "Neither"

INCE AMERICAN SPEECH, now in its seventh volume, was established, many contributors have suggested to me, in private letters or in contributions submitted for print, that the pronunciations eyether and nyether, alongside the older eether and neether and the Irish ayther and nayther, were introduced by British royalty, i.e., by the Georges, who were Hanoverians and pronounced English in the German fashion. The last article reaching me that suggested this origin had: Whereas we in America pronounce either and neither as if the first syllable were spelled with long e's as did the London literati in 1777 (see William Perry's Royal Standard English Dictionary of that date), the English at the present day say eyether and nyether. Is it not possible that in changing the pronunciation of these words they were simply following the German usage in pronouncing ei? The early Georges were very German.

Berkeley and Spiritual Realism.

In 1908 Fraser contributed to Constable's series of Philosophers Ancient and Modern, a volume on Berkeley and Spiritual Realism. In the preface, he once again uses the term, Spiritual Realism - a realism that is fundamentally Spiritual, although after a native rather than a German fashion.

GEOGRAPHICAL NOTES

THE Berlin Geographical Society celebrated in characteristic German fashion the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation last week. Berlin, as our readers know, is not the only German city possessing a geographical society; indeed it has two. In Hamburg and Bremen are two excellent societies of this class, while the Continent, generally, is overrun with them. Russia has about a dozen, Belgium has at least two, Brussels and Antwerp, Holland one if not more, France at least half a dozen, Italy two or three, and the Scandinavian countries their own share. We do not consider it a disadvantage that in maritime countries there should be more than one geographical society, and we think it might be beneficial if even in our own country associations corresponding to the French societies of commercial geography were established in our chief ports, Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol, Leith, Dundee. These might be branches of or affiliated to the London society, and might catch much that never reaches the latter. They might, moreover, do considerable service in encouraging the merchant service to obtain and bring home information that would be useful to science, and might, by means of lectures and otherwise, foster a scientific spirit among our commercial population. Much good is done in this way, we believe, by the societies of Marseilles, Bordeaux, and Lyons. Two new geographical societies have, we learn, been established in France, at Metz and Montpellier. The French are evidently doing their best to remove the reproach so frequently cast at them, of being more ignorant of geography than even the English.

The Meeting of German Naturalists and Physicians at Innsbruck, Tyrol

FROM the 18th to the 24th of September last the little town of Innsbruck wore an air of unwonted bustle and excitement. Its population, already augmented by the usual throng of summer tourists, was swelled by the advent of somewhere about 800 additional visitors—professors, doctors, directors, men of all sciences, often with their wives and daughters, who had come from all parts of Germany to attend the forty-third Meeting of the German Naturalists and Physicians. These meetings resemble those of our own British Association, though they differ in several very characteristic respects. One of the first contrasts to strike an Englishman is the entire absence of private hospitality. Everybody, so far as we can learn, is in private lodgings or in a hotel; and there are no such things as dinner-parties. Although our own customs in these respects are certainly very pleasant, there can be no doubt that the German fashion leaves the visitors more freedom, and allows them much more opportunity of seeing and talking with the friends they most wish to meet. With us it is no easy matter to get together a party of chemists, or geologists, or physiologists, to hold a social gathering after the labours of the sections are over. We are all either staying with friends, or invited to dinner, or engaged in some way. But at the German meetings such social reunions are one of the distinguishing features. One o'clock in the day brings with it the necessity for dining, and numerous dinner parties are improvised there and then; friends of like tastes, who have not met perhaps for a year before, adjourn to a restauration or kaffee-haus, and while eating the meal have a pleasant opportunity of comparing notes, and discussing questions which have in the interval arisen.