German Mother Research Articles

The Image of the Ideal German Mother in Nazi Era Posters

The Image of the Ideal German Mother in Nazi Era Posters

“Half of myself is—feels German”: Storying Migrationshintergrund teachers’ hybrid identities

Romeo Garavaglia (a pseudonym), whose East German mother married his Italian father and later his Bosnian Muslim stepfather, did not look un-German; and, in fact he was German—or a perpetual foreigner—depending on the circumstances of his daily interactions. In this article, the authors story a suite of in-depth interviews to theorize how Garavaglia’s Migrationshintergrund [immigrant background] identity played out in his professional trajectory into teaching. Our analysis suggests that foreignness in a German context does not only entail the color of one’s skin. Rather, the construct of Migrationshintergrund also implies the hereditary impossibility of entering the educated middle class. Leveraging Garavaglia’s story as a synecdoche for the complex experiences of other transnational professionals in and outside Germany, we argue the role of schools and schooling in perpetuating economic marginalization and social imaginaries of difference in “post-racial” contemporary societies.

Visual-Textual Encounters with a German Grandfather: The Work of Angela Findlay

ABSTRACT: In this article, I consider the artistic and literary work of Angela Findlay, the daughter of a German mother and English father, and the granddaughter of a highly decorated Wehrmacht soldier. Working as a visual artist, public speaker and writer, Findlay moves between representational forms in order to express the complexities associated with her dual heritage and the "legacy of shame" that she carries with her. I take Findlay's In My Grandfather's Shadow as a case study that foregrounds new forms of visual-textual witnessing in the descendants of the war generation. I conclude that, by moving between different artistic practices, Findlay is able to encapsulate the complex and transnational experience of being a descendant of both Germany and the Allied nations; in so doing, she challenges the reader to question the conceptual boundaries of testimony, straightforward perceptions of perpetration, and the diluted, but nevertheless affected and affective, experiences of subsequent generations.

Untold Stories of Polish Heroes from World War II

Untold Stories of Polish Heroes from World War II

Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon

Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon

“Black is beautiful” Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi’s proverbial autobiography destined to witness (1999)

Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi’s (1926-2013) autobiography Destined to Witness. Growing up Black in Nazi Germany (1999) appeared simultaneously in German translation as Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger. Meine Kindheit in Deutschland (1999, 2006 as a film). The bestseller recounts Massaquoi’s birth in 1926 at Hamburg as a biracial child of a German mother and a black father from Liberia who returns to Africa leaving his wife and Afro-German son to fend for themselves in a working-class neighborhood. Their struggle to survive Nazi Germany is described in numerous small chapters that are informed by the journalistic as well as literary style that Massaquoi became accustomed to once he became established in the United States as managing editor of the African American magazine Ebony. The book is replete with proverbs and proverbial expressions that add metaphorical expressiveness to this emotional and informative account of survival among prejudice, stereotypes, and racism. Many of the proverbs, often quoted by Massaquoi’s mother, are cited in German with English translations or only in English. Thus the book is a telling example of how proverbs function in a family and beyond as social strategies to carve out a marginalized existence between 1926 and the early 1950s in Germany, Liberia, and the United States. Numerous contextualized references are cited, and there is also a large index of 509 (645 counting 136 duplicates) proverbial texts

I VERBI SINTAGMATICI IN PARLANTI DI ITALIANO L1, L2 E BILINGUI: UN’INDAGINE SPERIMENTALE

The article investigates the use of Particle Verbs (PV) by different types of speakers: Italian L1 speakers, Italian L2 speakers with German mother tongue (L2ers) and bilingual speakers of Italian and Trentino dialects. After outlining the state of the art in the research on PV and the theoretical framework (section 1), the main differences, among PV in Italian, its dia- lects and Germanic languages, are highlighted (section 2). The differences are, as follows: the extension of the phenomenon, the semantic meanings, and the syntax of the construction. These three categories have been taken into account while performing the quantitative and qualitative analysis. The third section describes the experimental research, introduced by a paragraph outlining the research carried out on PVs and L2ers so far. The current study used a story-telling task to elicit semi-spontaneous data to analyze (methodology 3.1). The quantita- tive analysis pointed out a statistically significant difference of the use of PVs among the three groups (section 3.2), while, through the qualitative analysis, the emphasis has been put on the use of PVs according to their semantics and syntax (section 3.3). In the discussion (section 4), the findings are connected to the theoretical framework, confirming the hypothesis that multilingual competence plays a role in the frequency of use of these constructions.

German Mother, the Mother of Germany: Visions of Patriotism, Modernity, and Motherhood in Ina Seidel’s Das Wunschkind (1930)

German Mother, the Mother of Germany: Visions of Patriotism, Modernity, and Motherhood in Ina Seidel’s Das Wunschkind (1930)

City Profile: Vienna's Summer Lit-up

city profile Vienna’s Summer Lit-up by Sylvia Petter Notebook AFTER A HIATUS since my student days in the early 1970s, I’ve been living in Vienna again since 2006. That year I became immersed in a Vienna Poetry School workshop run by singer/songwriter/novelist Ernst Molden in a brothel (Puff) on five different occasions, each dedicated to one of the senses. Ernst’s texts and renderings of songs by Bob Dylan, among others, have that Viennese tang of dark humor, melancholy , and blatant honesty. This summer will see him and his bands in open-air concerts in the city again. Indeed, during lockdown, he and his son, Karl, sang, not for their supper, but for their neighbors—from their Vienna balcony. I remember another summer when he took his class outside to the Prater and we experimented with good red wine from the Burgenland, searching for that sweet spot in writing between drunk and sober. For me this encapsulates the Vienna to which I’m drawn, which is not just about yummy cake in the Viennese cafés. The Viennese coffee house culture has become part of unesco’s inventory of intangible cultural heritage. In the 1890s young writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, and Arthur Schnitzler would meet at Café Griensteidl, and this gave birth to coffee house literature. There is a certain amount of cross-pollination of the arts in this city; for example, there is currently an exhibition of Higher Powers at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, under the motto of Seeing across Cultures, running into August and including artifacts and texts sent in by the public and exhibited alongside items beyond the reach of mere mortals. Due to its history and geography, Vienna has always been on the edge, on edge, edgy, with relief sought through words and music, cabaret, and satire. Thomas Bernhard, playwright and novelist—reviled by some Austrians as having sullied his nest yet lauded by others and honored with literary prizes— was very outspoken and critical of Austria, and his works are as apt today as they were when he wrote them in the last century. For example, a quote from The Loser, a meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame, says it in a nutshell: “Whoever can’t laugh doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously . . .” Every year there are literary prizes run by the publisher Edition Exil and also open to work by writers not of the German mother tongue. In 2003 Julya Rabinowich was awarded the prize for Writing between Cultures and has since gone on to receive several awards for her writing. Her novel Splithead was published in English by Portobello Books in 2011. Summer is also the time of open-air readings such as Ö-Töne in the MQ, where in 2021 well-known writers like Friederike Mayröcker and Josef Haslinger are programmed to share the stage with newcomers like Sandra Gugić, who also began her career via the Edition Exil Prize in 2008 and attended the legendary 2006 “Puff” workshop. Having come full circle, let me now take you through Vienna’s Bermuda Triangle, where one might disappear in one of the many small bars, up past the Synagogue to St. Rupert’s, the oldest church in Vienna, to my favorite bookshop, Shakespeare & Company Booksellers, with its exclusively English-language stock and its special section on books about and set in Vienna. Not only can books be found here, but as the shop’s bookmark says, “Let yourself be found by a book.” It will help you explore hidden corners of the city, be it through Graham Greene’s The Third Man or Lewis Crofts’s The Pornographer of Vienna, relating the life of that misunderstood painter, Egon Schiele. What to Read & Listen to in a Viennese Café Lewis Crofts The Pornographer of Vienna Old Street Publishing Ernst Molden “Bubenlied” Bubenlieder (2006 album) Sylvia Petter All the Beautiful Liars Lightning Books Julya Rabinowich Splithead Trans. Tess Lewis Portobello Books Robert Seethaler The Tobacconist Trans. Charlotte Collins Anansi International Sylvia Petter, an Australian now based in Vienna, writes short, long, serious, sexy, and fun. Her debut novel, All the Beautiful Liars (2020), was...

Performance-approach goals: the operationalization makes the difference

The operationalization of performance-approach goals (PAGs) was found to be an important moderator of the associations between different PAGs and several educational outcomes. To explore this aspect in more detail, we conducted two studies with school students (N1 = 425, mean age = 16.6 years, SD = 0.61; N2 = 310, mean age = 14.91, SD = 1.72). In study 1, we mainly focused on the associations between achievement goals and school grades. In study 2, we additionally assessed several motivational variables (academic self-concept, school values), as well as test anxiety and school well-being. All variables were assessed for school in general, mathematics, and German (mother tongue). The results of confirmatory factor analyses replicated and extended the finding on the different facets of PAGs. Besides a normative-based PAG component (the aim is to perform better than others) and an appearance-based PAG component (the aim is to demonstrate one’s ability), an additional proving PAG component (the aim is to demonstrate one’s ability toward significant others) was found. Contrary to earlier findings, both normative and appearance-based PAGs were positively correlated with school grades, whereas the proving component showed smaller associations. Moreover, differential associations with self-concept, school values, and school well-being emerged regarding the different facets of PAGs. The results are discussed with regard to the operationalization of PAGs.

Aural philology: Herder hears Homer singing

AbstractIn 1769, Johann Gottfried Herder describes a private reading experience of a remarkably paradoxical nature. He tells us that he can only read ‘his’ Homer properly when he hears Homer singing Greek, while silently reading and translating by means of his German thoughts and mother tongue. Herder’s performative reading is anchored in what I call aural philology, a method innovative in its emphasis on the aural dimension in reconstructively imagining historical epochs. It is one which demarcates cultural difference through practices of listening and their remediation into reading. The problem, for Herder, is how to constitute the particularity of the German people even in affective acts of reading that, however momentarily, suspend cultural differentiation through effects of presence. I distinguish Herder’s philology from Vico and others who emphasized the oral origins of the Homeric epic, along with recent theories of philology as an affective, aurally mediated process. The article is an alternative view on the role of media in enlightenment theories of literature and culture separate from Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Herder’s aural philology identifies a moment in the history of aurality and cultural difference, one that does not move fixedly towards modernity.

Features of speech in German and US-American mother-toddler dyads during toy play and book-reading.

Previous research indicates that features of speech during mother-toddler interactions are dependent on the situational context. In this study, we explored language samples of 69 mother-toddler dyads collected during standardized toy play and book-reading situations across two countries, Germany and the United States (US). The results showed that features of speech differed across situational contexts. However, situational differences were mostly found among the sample from the US but not from Germany. Few significant associations between mothers' and toddlers' language variables were found. Findings are discussed with regard to variations in language across situations and countries.

Early nutrition in combination with polymorphisms in fatty acid desaturase gene cluster modulate fatty acid composition of cheek cells' glycerophospholipids in school-age children.

Variants in the human genes of fatty acid (FA) desaturase 1 (FADS1), 2 (FADS2) and 3 (FADS3) are associated with PUFA blood levels. We explored if maternal prenatal supplementation and children's genetic variation in seventeen SNP of the FADS1, FADS2 and FADS3 gene cluster influence twenty-one of the most relevant cheek cells' derived FA in glycerophospholipids (GPL-FA). The study was conducted in 147 Spanish and German mother-children pairs participating in the Nutraceuticals for a Healthier Life (NUHEAL) study at 8, 9 and 9·5 years. Linear and mixed model longitudinal regression analyses were performed. Maternal fish-oil (FO) or FO+5-methyltetrahydrofolate (5-MTHF) supplementation during pregnancy was associated with a significant decrease of arachidonic acid (AA) concentrations in cheek cell GPL in the offspring, from 8 to 9·5 years; furthermore, maternal FO+5-MTHF supplementation was associated with higher n-6 docosapentaenoic acid concentrations in their children at age 8 years. FADS1 rs174556 polymorphism and different FADS2 genotypes were associated with higher concentrations of linoleic and α-linolenic acids in children; moreover, some FADS2 genotypes determined lower AA concentrations in children's cheek cells. It is suggested an interaction between type of prenatal supplementation and the offspring genetic background driving GPL-FA levels at school age. Prenatal FO supplementation, and/or with 5-MTHF, seems to stimulate n-3 and n-6 FA desaturation in the offspring, increasing long-chain PUFA concentrations at school age, but depending on children's FADS1 and FADS2 genotypes. These findings suggest potential early nutrition programming of FA metabolic pathways, but interacting with children's FADS polymorphisms.

A magyarországi német nemzetiség nyelvelsajátítási szokásai

A tanulmány bemutatja a magyarországi német nyelvoktatás jelenlegi helyzetét, a magyarországi németeket, a nyelvi szempontból előrehaladt asszimilációjukat, a rájuk jellemző kétnyelvűséget és diglossziát, valamint jellemző nyelvelsajátítási szokásaikat. Képet kapunk arról, hogy a német anyanyelv elsajátítása túlnyomórészt intézményes keretek között, nemzetiségi óvodában és a nemzetiségi iskolák alsó tagozatán történik. A szerzők kiemelik a korai kezdés fontosságát a nyelvelsajátítás sikeressége szempontjából. A cikk ismerteti továbbá a magyarországi nemzetiségi köznevelési, -oktatási rendszer jogszabályi hátterét, a nemzetiségi pedagógusképzést és azokat a modern pedagógiai módszereket, melyekkel a gyermekkori nyelvelsajátítás az életkornak megfelelően történik.

A Changeling in Disguise: Liminal Identity in Hugo Hamilton's Novel

A Changeling in Disguise:Liminal Identity in Hugo Hamilton's Novel Audrey Robitaillié Hugo Hamilton is best known for his masterful memoir The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half Irish Childhood (2003), in which he tells of his nationalist Irish father and his German mother, and of the inevitable quest for belonging that marked his youth. He develops similar themes in his 2008 novel, Disguise. The novel centers on the character of Gregor Liedmann, a German musician estranged from his wife Mara and their son Daniel. He meets up with them and the rest of the family on her farm south of Berlin for a fruit gathering in an orchard. Gregor's story is at the heart of the novel; the narration alternates between the happenings at the farm and flashbacks to his childhood and earlier married life. He "replaced" a German boy lost in a bombing during World War II, when his mother Maria adopted him shortly after the death of her son during the mass exodus before the end of the war. Her husband, however, was away to the Russian front at the time, and had no inkling of this exchange. But this narrative is not the story Maria tells Gregor or, later, Mara. Throughout the novel, Gregor's mother denies ever having "replaced" her child. Obsessed with the idea that he may not be who he has been told he is, Gregor leaves his Nuremberg home at seventeen, never to return. At the core of the narration, then, is the central question, "Who am I?" as Gregor, Mara, and the reader try to make sense of the conflicting stories told by the various protagonists. Gregor is convinced that he is "a changeling, an impostor living a surrogate life inside the persona of a deceased German."1 The novel explores themes of liminality, identity, and belonging in a context of tumultuous change for Germany. Hamilton's novel tells the story of a man in search of his own history and identity, and it negotiates the topic of divided identity by using the trope of the changeling, a folk figure prominent in Irish and German folklores. Like [End Page 96] Hamilton himself in The Speckled People, Gregor is a rootless character, continually straddling geographic and other sorts of borders. To employ the terms coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Capitalism and Schizophrenia) (1972), Hamilton "deterritorializes" the figure of the changeling out of folk narratives, and "reterritorializes" it in his fiction.2 Gregor solves his search for identity through the reterritorializing power of narratives and memory. The concepts of de- and re-territorialization are especially helpful in examining Hamilton's writings: Disguise is concerned with a liminal character moving from one territory to another and grappling with the idea of home. Although the term "changeling" appears only once in the novel, the folk figure is the cornerstone on which the narrative of Disguise rests. The belief in changelings is common in Irish, Germanic, and other traditions. The folk accounts typically depict a human being, often a child or a young woman, abducted by the fairies to the Otherworld, while an ugly fairy substitute, the changeling, is left in their place in the human world. In 1980, Séamas Mac Philib listed some 430 changeling narratives in the archives of the Irish National Folklore Collection.3 German beliefs in changelings, known as Wechselbälge, date even further back.4 In both traditions, the creature is often represented as an intruder in the home, despite its similarity to the person who has been taken away. The people feared fairy abductions, and the lore includes numerous measures to ward off the evil doings of the fairies, such as a well-lit room, a fire, a sprinkle of salt, or keeping metal tools near the bed.5 This probably explains the violent banishment methods used in the folk narratives: changelings are thrown in the fire or burnt with red-hot shovels in many cases.6 The folkloric accounts clearly record the ambivalent feelings of the family. Typically, the parents are at first worried about their ill-tempered but precocious infant who is wasting away, but at...

Mad Mädchen: Feminism and Generational Conflict in Recent German Literature and Film by Margaret McCarthy

Reviewed by: Mad Mädchen: Feminism and Generational Conflict in Recent German Literature and Film by Margaret McCarthy Alexandra M. Hill Margaret McCarthy. Mad Mädchen: Feminism and Generational Conflict in Recent German Literature and Film. Berghahn, 2017. 270 pp. Cloth, $120.00. Margaret McCarthy's Mad Mädchen uses the mother-daughter conflict as a framing trope for examining intergenerational tensions within feminism. As each generation of daughters rebels against its mothers, feminism is often presented as a teleological process of evolution, when in fact multiple [End Page 170] iterations of feminism coexist and shape each other. McCarthy's complex and nuanced analysis of literature, film, magazines (EMMA and Missy Magazine), and Internet-based media shows that the mother-daughter conflict—while still relevant—oversimplifies the complex processes by which feminist thought and politics in Germany evolve. Chapter 1, "German Feminism in the 2000s," is a broad survey of media and pop-culture discussions of feminism and women in contemporary Germany, including Katja Kullman's Generation Ally (2002), the books Wir Alphamädchen (2008; We alpha girls) by Meredith Haaf, Susanne Klingner, and Barbara Streidl and Neue deutsche Mädchen (2008; New German girls) by Jana Hensel and Elisabeth Raether, and the founding of Missy Magazine (2008). Although often taken together as evidence of third-wave feminism in Germany, these pop-cultural moments (and the responses they evoke) instead give voice to a variety of political agendas and neoliberal attitudes, and varying degrees of knowledge of and respect for second-wave feminism. McCarthy's careful readings of the texts' intent—and especially of the media's tendency to reduce them to binary relationships—illuminate the multiple layers of today's feminist landscape. Chapter 2 centers on three examples of women writing Popliteratur (an anomaly in itself): Zoë Jenny's Das Blütenstaubzimmer (1997; The Pollen Room, 1999), Alexa Hennig von Lange's Relax (1997; Relax, 1999), and Elke Naters's Lügen (1999; Lies). McCarthy reads these novels for their complicated and uninformed attitudes toward feminism and even ambivalence toward relationships with other women. The close readings of the texts are excellent, for example of the opening paragraph of Lügen (88–89). This thorough and nuanced approach continues in chapter 3, which focuses on Charlotte Roche's infamous Feuchtgebiete (2008; Wetlands, 2009) and the subsequent Schoßgebete (2011; Wrecked, 2013). McCarthy contends that in these novels (and in Roche's own media appearances) is "a manifest rejection of feminist mothers" but at the same time "a tacit embrace of some of their tactics" (103). In this way, Roche's texts exemplify the messy, tangled, and ambivalent attitudes of new feminists toward their feminist foremothers (most often symbolized by Alice Schwarzer, who appears both in Roche's novels and throughout McCarthy's book). The next two chapters shift the focus from literature to film. Chapter 4 looks at Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008) and Das wilde Leben (2007; Eight Miles High, 2007) with an eye to the portrayal of Ulrike Meinhof [End Page 171] in the former and Uschi Obermaier in the latter. While McCarthy is interested specifically in how mainstream film represents these wild women through the lens of today's pop-cultural understanding of feminism, this chapter seems the least connected to the concerns of the book. Perhaps because the directors of both films are men, the idea of the mother-daughter dialogue inherent in feminism's evolution is missing here. The films discussed in chapter 5, Die innere Sicherheit (2000; The state I am in) and Auf der anderen Seite (2007; The Edge of Heaven, 2007), are also directed by men but thematically feature intergenerational conflict among women. Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite is perhaps the best example for McCarthy's analysis of multigenerational feminisms. Her beautiful reading of the character Susanne, a white German mother, leads her to conclude that the film posits "women, bolstered by humanist and revolutionary ideals as well as psychic mother-daughter bonds that extend beyond a German frame, as the contemporary agents of '68" (196). In chapter 6, after an analysis of the conversations between EMMA and Missy magazines—roughly representing two different but not oppositional generations—McCarthy...

Atrocity Speech Law: Addressing Hate that Does Grave Harm

Atrocity Speech Law:Addressing Hate that Does Grave Harm Carol Pauli (bio) Gregory S. Gordon, Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition (Oxford Univ. Press 2017), ISBN 9780190612689, 464 pages. I. INTRODUCTION Gregory Gordon's book, Atrocity Speech Law, is a groundbreaking work that has arrived when it is urgently needed, in the midst of rising hateful rhetoric.1 Meticulously researched and thoughtfully written, the book exposes maddening gaps in international law regarding dangerous speech. It then proposes a bold remedy: an innovative, holistic framework that streamlines, coordinates, and expands the existing laws. Against the current backdrop of hostility—with its angry assertions of racial and national supremacy, terrorist recruitment videos, shouts of rage at refugees, and dizzying shift in the tone of political discourse—this book is a crucial response to speech that can trigger atrocity. In it, Gordon lays out the legal boundaries needed for effective deterrence, and he modestly urges other scholars to build on his framework. This essay takes up his invitation. Gordon writes from his frustration as a prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the African nation where alarming media messages stirred thousands of ordinary people to take up machetes and slaughter their neighbors, some 800,000 innocent people, while the world stood by as though [End Page 718] powerless.2 More than twenty years later, Gordon shows that international law still lacks the clarity and strength to deter such incendiary speech. Gaps in the "unshapely and disjointed"3 laws leave areas of impunity. Even where the law sets out crimes, the definitions and elements of the offenses may be too fragmented to alert would-be inciters, persecutors, and instigators to their own criminal liability. These inconsistent laws also threaten free expression because they fail to stake out protected areas for legitimate protest. Some international court decisions have even emboldened dictators to crack down on dissent, perversely turning international law into a weapon against their own vulnerable citizens.4 To fix these defects, Gordon first establishes a new, unifying conceptual category, "atrocity speech law."5 This term brilliantly captures the essence of the challenge. He identifies four speech crimes from different areas of international law: inciting others to commit genocide, instigating an international crime, ordering a military—or even non-military—subordinate to commit an international crime, and persecuting members of a group on discriminatory grounds.6 Gordon rethinks the relationships among these offenses and draws a new, comprehensive architecture, a "Unified Liability Theory," culminating in a proposed treaty and a draft revision to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. This essay takes a next step, making suggestions and posing questions aimed at applying the deep and bitter lessons from the past century to the mounting challenges of the new one. Part II briefly describes some of the international law troubles that Gordon documents in detail. Part III sketches Gordon's Unified Liability Theory in order to highlight several of its important contributions. Part IV considers today's fast-changing technology and political rhetoric. It urges adopting Gordon's well-founded work and extending his rigorous method of analysis. II. GAPS AND CONTRADICTIONS IN ATROCITY SPEECH LAW In his first chapter, Gordon tells the story of a German mother in 1943 who comes upon a ragtag group of terrified Jewish children and brings them home to feed, comfort—and shoot in the head one by one.7 She later explained, "As was told to me, I had to destroy the Jews."8 The incident illustrates the bewildering horror of Gordon's subject: the capacity of speech—"as was told to me"—to excite monstrous acts. How can international law be confused about speech that leads to grave crimes—even genocide, "the crime of crimes"?9 In Atrocity Speech Law, Gordon shows how, tragically, the very enormity of the wrong is at the heart of [End Page 719] the legal defects. In the ashes of World War II, Allied nations realized that the Holocaust had outstripped the criminal laws that then existed. Although a new word, genocide, was spoken during oral arguments in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the crime was not yet on the books.10 Gordon traces the way diverse...

No Document Is Alike

No Document Is Alike Eric Wilson (bio) The Soviets' surprise launch of Sputnik in 1957 came as a wake-up call for the United States. In response, the Eisenhower administration created the National Defense Education Act Title IV fellowships. While the main purpose of these NDEA fellowships was to provide the US with engineering and mathematics experts, it also paid for students to pursue foreign languages. The idea was that if our nation knew languages it would be safe. I thought that if I knew languages, I would be safe. The NDEA paid for my entire—entire—graduate study at Stanford, including an allowance for books. I had classes in Middle High German, Old High German, Old Icelandic, and Old English, and the price of textbooks was steep. I had no doubt that a career in languages would be perfect for me. Along with his genes, I had inherited from my grandfather a love of words. At the university in Lincoln, Nebraska, his Latin Club performed Seneca in togas and in the original language. His Roman self permeated his everyday self, and when he was flummoxed by practical things (which was often), he would throw up his hands and cry out "Hui! Hui! Hui!" By the time I was sixteen, my fascination with languages landed me in Germany as a summer exchange student. It turned out that my host family didn't speak English, as promised; they just wanted an American. My German mother wouldn't feed me until I could identify all the dishes. Erich, das ist Eisbein. Eisbein mit Erbsenpüree!—Na, Erich, was ist denn das? I came home with a dodgy fluency. As I pursued a PhD in German, my main love remained the words themselves. I could always remember when I first "met" a word. When we were sitting in a Kneipe—which is slang and yet the standard colloquial word for pub—Andreas had cried out Alle Achtung! the first time I downed a potent Schnapps in one gulp. Literally the phrase meant "All attention!" but through context and common sense I knew it had to be "Nice going!" or "Congratulations." I'm not sure when I met Andreas, but I will always remember when he first used words or phrases that were new to me. It was stipulated that NDEA Fellows pursue an academic career of teaching in institutions of higher education after acquiring their degrees. Accordingly, I went on to teach at UCLA and then Pomona College—happily debt-free. But by 1973 America's urgent priorities shifted completely. The foreign language requirement was abolished by colleges almost everywhere—after all, doesn't everyone speak English?—and after eight years in the field, my position was [End Page 73] eliminated. It was the only thing I had been trained for. What else could I do? I bought a hulking copy of the Sunday Los Angeles Times, which had entire sections of want ads. Under "tr" there were countless entries for "tree trimmers," but nothing for translators. So I turned to the phone book and started typing up résumés. I sent them to every agency in the book. One evening, after taking a walk through Westwood—spending time in Tower Records and a few of the crowded bookstores that remained open until 11:00 pm—I came back to find a message on my Phone Mate. It was one of those brand-new gadgets the Broadway department store had just started selling: "Introducing the home appliance that answers your phone!" The tinny voice on the tape played at slightly the wrong speed and had a French accent. The man asked that I call him immediately, regardless how late. Hervé Bellocq—he had spelled the name for me carefully—answered on the first ring. He owned an agency in Beverly Hills called Panlingua Translations and had an important assignment due at nine o'clock the following morning. He had gone through all the résumés he had on file and just discovered I could do Swedish. "It's urrrgent," Bellocq told me, making the word sound more French than English. It would be a wonderful opportunity for me...

Urban Mobility and Race: Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and Teju Cole's Open City

Urban Mobility and Race:Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and Teju Cole's Open City Aliki Varvogli (bio) In his 2000 study, Race and Urban Space in Contemporary American Culture, Liam Kennedy argues that "race commonly functions to frame ways of seeing and reading the city."1 This claim still holds true today, but recent American fiction has helped to highlight the extent to which race, and more specifically blackness, continues to be transformed, making it necessary for us to alter and extend the ways in which we understand what Liam Kennedy has termed "the transparent presence and the signifying absence of race in the production of urban space."2 Kennedy's analysis of fiction and film was "consciously skewed towards a white (WASP and ethnic) and black (African-American) axis of urban relations,"3 but novels such as Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) and Teju Cole's Open City (2011) remind us that there are ways of being black in the United States that do not fit into the (admittedly broad) category of "African-American." Like Kennedy, most critics of race and urban space in American fiction have understandably focused on the study of African-Americans as the main representatives of blackness in the United States. However, as Giles Foden has noted, a number of books written by authors with recent or current (rather than historical) African roots have focused "partly on how U.S. race issues subsume a variety of identity questions arising from an African-exile or postcolonial context."4 This article aims to update the discourse on race in urban studies and the novel by examining how the immigrant, exilic and postcolonial contexts shape and influence ways of seeing and representing American cities. American fiction has made an important contribution to [End Page 235] our understanding of city life, and for a century or more, American authors have written about what it is like to be an African-American living in a city, and what it is like to be an immigrant in the city. The novels under discussion here combine these two themes by filtering immigration through the lens of blackness: they engage with the ways in which their immigrant subjects experience urban life as black African males who are not African-American. Furthermore, though I use the term "immigrant" here as a kind of shorthand, the two protagonists understand and experience their lives in the United States, and their reasons for moving there, in complex ways that defy easy categorization. Mengestu and Cole extend the enquiry into urban life as experienced by a city's various "others" by concentrating on a poor and marginalized man and a well-educated and privileged one: two contrasting figures united by the experience of belonging and not belonging—being American, but newly and reluctantly American; being black and African, but not African-American. Louis Chude-Sokei calls such characters "the newly black Americans," and notes that the tensions between African-American and African diasporic communities are a major feature of "this new literature by Africans."5 The Beautiful Things and Open City were published within four years of each other, and received great critical acclaim and a host of literary prizes. Though very different in style, plot, character and setting, they both deal with young African males who live in major American cities and search not only for an identity but also for a wider context or web of connections. Mengestu's novel tells the story of Sepha Stephanos, a young man who comes to the United States from Ethiopia to run away from political strife, and who ends up staying as a reluctant immigrant. Cole's narrator is Julius, a New York–based psychiatrist who grew up in Nigeria with an African father and a German mother; he travels not back to Africa but to Europe—more specifically, to Brussels—to find out more about his past. These two characters are black and come from Africa, but they are not African-American as the term is customarily understood. A study of the novels themselves can be aided by African-American literary scholarship, but only with limited success. For...

Meeting Poets

Meeting Poets Phoebe Taplin (bio) The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski, eds. Penguin www.penguin.co.uk/books 572 Pages; Print, $18.00 The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry includes work by 70 writers, including the nineteenth century poet (and friend of Leo Tolstoy), Afanasy Fet. In one of his condensed and lyrical poems, Fet imagines a young woman, after his death, reading his verses; the poem ends, in Robert Chandler’s translation: We two shall breathe a life outside of time; and we shall meet—here—as you read. This thoughtful, new anthology keeps at its heart the sense of poetry’s ability to transcend time and to make emotional connections between writer, translator and reader. Biographical details and historical background precede each set of poems. (Fet’s German mother eloped with a Russian nobleman; his girlfriend set fire to herself—probably on purpose—and died). These shifting contexts, and Chandler’s powerful introduction stressing the enduring importance of poetry in Russia, are always interesting, but the volume’s glory lies—as it should—in the poetry itself. Chandler’s acclaimed translations of Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman helped introduce these previously-neglected, Soviet writers to western audiences. Chandler has spent years collaborating on the new anthology, which includes one of his own poems in a brief final chapter of works by non-Russians. Co-editors, Boris Drayluk and Irina Mashinski, are also both poets and translators and have tackled authors from Tolstoy to Nikolay Zabolotsky. The impossibly difficult task of selecting 500 pages of poetry from an entire literary heritage has been guided as much by aesthetic criteria as by academic or historical ones: “…our aim,” writes Chandler, “has been to include only translations that work as poems in English.” This painstaking process has made the volume a monument to the translator’s art. Many Russian poets were themselves also translators. Fet translated Schopenhauer, Virgil, Goethe; Boris Pasternak’s versions of Shakespeare are still well known in Russia. Marina Boroditskaya compares a poem in translation to “an alien spaceman” trying to “breathe the harsh local air.” The power of her metaphor, translated by Ruth Fainlight, shows that some poems can indeed “live” in a foreign language, even if, in other cases “the sacred honey” refuses “to be poured into strange vessels.” Poet and translator Willis Barnstone wrote in his treatise The Poetics of Translation (1995): “A translation dwells in imperfection, using equivalents and shunning mechanical replicas.” Much of Barnstone’s wisdom is made flesh in the new Penguin anthology; he wrote about “moving between tongues,” inevitably acquiring “difference” because “the words and grammar of each language differ from every other language.” But the Penguin Book’s editors also recognise that sometimes meter is part of meaning and rhyme, although much harder to achieve with the less inflected endings of English words, often cannot be ignored altogether. “Form, I believe, matters,” writes Chandler. The questing, necessarily-approximate nature of translation is underlined in the anthology by including two very different versions of Fyodor Tyutchev’s famous lines about the baffling enigma that is Russia. Chandler’s version of Tyutchev’s much-translated “Silentium” is, appropriately, a model of lyrical economy; the refrain “—and be still” that closes each verse resonates more than verbose, earlier translations. The scale of the editors’ work is impressive: 50 translators of nearly 400 poems, ranged in chronological order, celebrate 230 years of verse. The selection starts in the eighteenth century, moving swiftly to Pushkin and contemporaries, followed by an almost unprecedented focus on the twentieth century and a taste of more recent poetry. The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry addresses huge and perennial themes: love and death, poetry itself, what it means to be Russian. Some poems are so fraught with significance in the Russian national consciousness they take on a monumental quality. Antony Wood’s translation of Pushkin’s Exegi Monumentum (itself a version of a poem by Horace) captures this: Long will there be a place for me in people’s hearts,because in my harsh age I sang of Liberty… The Russian lines are inscribed on the base of...