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This is a comnpendium volume of three Battle Summaries or Naval Staff Histories produced soon after the war by the Naval Historical Branch of the Admiralty. Originally classified and designed for internal use only, these histories are published here for the first time. The documents in this book cover the actions during the period 1939-1941 that resulted in the sinking or immobilising of the German Warships Birsmark and Graf Spee, and record the struggle to rid the seas of the menace of the armed merchants raiders.

Over the past decade and a half, Germany has experienced a period of political and cultural turbulence which many have attributed to the combined challenges of unification and globalisation. In response to growing exposure to global markets, politics and migration debates about identity have increasingly been renationalised. At the same time, there has been a notable reappraisal in Germany (and in German Studies) of the regional and global as spaces for the construction of identity. This volume sets out to explore these complex and at times contradictory trends, focusing in particular on developments in Germany since the 1970s, although chapters treating earlier periods are also included. The volume brings together British, Irish, German, Canadian and American scholars working in the field, and resulted from a conference organised by Women in German Studies at the University of Bath. The first section is primarily concerned with the specifically German concept of locality known as Heimat and its changing relationship with the global. Included are explorations of the writings of Kafka, Bachmann, Johnson, Sell, Wolf, Brinkmann and Jelinek amongst others as well as films by Schlöndorff and Steyerl. The second section focuses on the impact of the global on institutions and rituals such as commemoration, memorialisation, and architecture, which have traditionally been influential in shaping national self-images. Overall, this volume concludes that the nature of the relationship to the local has fundamentally changed under the impact of globalisation.

In her 2007 poem cycle Niemands Frau, Barbara Köhler returns to Homer’s Odyssey, not to retell it, but to take up some of the threads it has woven into the cultural tradition of the West – and to unravel them, just as Penelope, the wife of the hero who called himself Nobody, unravelled each night the web she re-wove by day. Köhler’s return to the Odyssey takes place under the sign of a grammatical shift, from ‘er’ to ‘sie’, from the singular hero to a plurality of female voices – Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso, Ino Leucothea, Helen and Penelope herself – with implications for thinking about identity, power and knowledge, about gender and relationality, but also about the corporeality and multivocality which underlies the ‘virtual reality’ of the printed text. The eight essays in this volume explore Köhler’s iridescent poem cycle from a variety of different angles: its context in contemporary German refigurations of the classical; its engagement with Homer and the classical tradition; its contribution to feminist philosophy of the subject and a female ‘dialectic of enlightenment’; its incorporation of the voices of poetic predecessors; and the surprising alliance it uncovers between poetry and quantum theory.

Emanating from the tradition of the Italian hermit communities the Franciscans developed organisational structures already early in their history, allowing them to offer pastoral care on a wide scale. This process of transition led firstly to constitutional structures as defined in the order's early legislation but it also occurred within relationship networks at different levels, in the context of Church and papacy, within the different European regions and before the background of the emerging Canon Law. The term "organisation" has been given a wide definition in the articles published in this volume. They offer a survey of general issues related to the structuring and running of religious orders as well as a number of case studies. Comparisons with other mendicant orders offer an analysis of the issues in a wider context.

Durs Grünbein is the most significant poet and essayist in German today. No other modern German poet has written from such an emphatically European and global perspective, and this volume seeks to present the poet and his work to the English-speaking world in all their significance and breadth. Written by a line-up of international scholars and critics, the volume offers highly readable and wide-ranging essays on Grünbein’s substantial œuvre, complemented by specially commissioned material and an interview with the poet. It covers the German and European traditions, and engages with Grünbein’s works in the context of a number of relevant topics, such as ‘memory’, ‘urban life’, ‘mortality’, ‘love’, and ‘presence’; it also probes Grünbein’s sustained dialogue with the natural sciences and the visual arts.