Shadows And Joys Of A Life In Bavaria

Growing up in rural Bavaria, Gerlinde didn’t know about Hitler’s regime in the way Americans learn about it in school. All she knew was the beauty and tragedy of daily life on the farm where she lived with her brother and sister, her mother, and her stepfather—she never knew her father, who was killed in the Siege of Leningrad. Experience country life in Germany in the 1940s and 1950s, through the eyes of an observant, imaginative child who watched as defeated German soldiers and their families tried to reinvent their lives after the war. From elaborate childhood games to the sobering reality of exhausting daily work, from the love and care of friends and neighbors to the heartbreak of a traumatized family, this compelling memoir is a testimony to the courage and grit of a girl who eventually came to America, fulfilling her own great-grandmother’s dream.

A comprehensive cultural history of the language sciences in nineteenth-century Germany. In contrast to fields like anthropology, the history of linguistics has received remarkably little attention outside of its own discipline despite the undeniable impact language study has had on the modern period. In Babel's Shadow situates German language scholarship in relation to European nationalism, nineteenth-century notions of race and ethnicity, the methodologies of humanistic inquiry, and debates over the interpretation of scripture. Author Tuska Benes investigates how the German nation came to be defined as a linguistic community and argues that the "linguistic turn" in today's social sciences and humanities can be traced to the late eighteenth century, emerging within a German tradition of using language to critique the production of knowledge. In this volume, Benes suggests that nineteenth-century philologists interpreted language as evidence of ethnic descent and created influential myths of cultural origin around the perceived starting points of their mother tongue. She argues that the origin paradigm so prevalent in German linguistic thought reinforced the historical and ethnic focus of German nationhood, with important implications for German theologians, cultural critics, philosophers, and racial theorists. In Babel's Shadow also contextualizes the importance of linguistics to modern cultural studies by arguing that the cultural significance attributed to language in twentieth-century French philosophy dates to the late eighteenth century and has clear precedents in theology. Benes links the German tradition of reflecting on the autonomous powers of language to the work of the fathers of structuralist and poststructuralist thought, Ferdinand de Saussure and Friedrich Nietzsche. In Babel's Shadow makes clear that comparative philology helped make language an important model and informing metaphor for other modes of thinking in the modern human sciences. Cultural and intellectual historians, scholars of German language and literature, and linguists will enjoy this illuminating volume.

This is a delightful and light-hearted account of how a stray dog became the companion of a young English lady. Whilst at first glance a seemingly simple and lovely story, this is actually a riveting account of late 19th century European high society, as we follow 'Ugly' and his mistress on a grand tour of Europe, including scrapes with the police in Germany, disastrous hotels in Vienna and opera in Dubrovnik, all while remaining a touching story that could make anybody want the love of a dog in their life. First published in 1871. This text has been republished here for its historical and cultural significance. Including a specially commissioned introduction on dogs in fiction.

French naturalist and medical doctor Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858) was one of the most important scientific explorers of South America in the early nineteenth century. From 1799 to 1804, he worked alongside Alexander von Humboldt as the latter carried out his celebrated research in northern South America, but he later returned to conduct his own research farther south. A Life in Shadow accounts for the entire span of Bonpland's remarkable and diverse career in South America—in Argentina, Paraguay (where he was imprisoned for nearly a decade), Uruguay, and southernmost Brazil—based on extensive archival material. The study reconnects Bonpland's divided records in Europe and South America and delves into his studies of rural resources in interior regions of South America, including experimental cultivation techniques. This is a fascinating account of a man—a doctor, farmer, rancher, scientific explorer, and political conspirator—who interacted in many revealing ways with the evolving societies and institutions of South America.

A family's recently discovered correspondence provides the inspiration for this fascinating and deeply moving account of Jewish family life before, during and after the Holocaust. Rebecca Boehling and Uta Larkey reveal how the Kaufmann-Steinberg family was pulled apart under the Nazi regime and dispersed over three continents. The family's unique eight-way correspondence across two generations brings into sharp focus the dilemma of Jews in Nazi Germany facing the painful decisions of when, if and to where they should emigrate. The authors capture the family members' fluctuating emotions of hope, optimism, resignation and despair as well as the day-to-day concerns, experiences and dynamics of family life despite increasing persecution and impending deportation. Headed by two sisters who were among the first female business owners in Essen, the family was far from conventional and their story contributes new dimensions to our understanding of Jewish life in Germany and in exile during these dark years.

THE MAELSTROM THAT IS EUROPE, COMPLICATED BY IRON, LOVE AND 20TH CENTURY AMERICANS The Thirty Years War continues to ravage 17th century Europe, but a new force is gathering power and influence: the United States of Europe, forged from an alliance between Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, and the West Virginians from the 20th century, led by Mike Stearns, who were hurled centuries into the past by a mysterious cosmic accident. This troubled century was full of revolutions and plans for more revolutions before the Americans arrived, and gave every would-be revolutionary an example of a revolution that succeeded. Europe is a pot coming to a boil, and Mike Stearns finds himself walking the fine line between keeping the pot boiling while keeping it from boiling over and destroying the USE in the process. The USE has the know-how of 20th century technology, but needs iron and steel to make the machines. The iron mines of the upper Palatinate were rendered inoperable by wartime damage, and American ingenuity is needed on the spot to pump them out and get the metal flowing again¾a mission that will prove more complicated than anyone expects. First, because the expedition sent to revitalize the mining industry in the upper Palatinate walks into the middle of a ferocious battle between the USE and the Duke of Bavaria. Second, because in the maelstrom that is Europe, even a 20th century copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica can precipitate a crisis from the most unexpected quarters. The young and beautiful daughter of the Austrian emperor, sent to marry the Duke of Bavaria for reasons of state, comes to an unforeseen conclusion based on her study of up-time history. The decision she makes as a result transforms the Bavarian war into a crisis for all of Europe. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

In recent years the study of medieval courts has become a flourishing field. The courts of kings and popes, or of the Burgundian dukes, have usually attracted most attention. This book offers by contrast a wide-ranging study of a little-known, medium-sized court - that of Guelders in the Low Countries. Guelders offers an excellent vantage point for the study of European late medieval court culture. It was surrounded by the vast territories of the dukes of Burgundy, and it felt the growing power of the Valois dukes, yet the duchy managed to remain independent until 1473. Rich archival sources - including a long and virtually unbroken series of ducal accounts - reveal much about the rise of territorial or 'proto-national' awareness and about the role of the court in this process. The book also conveys the striking cultural and political richness of the court, poised between French and German spheres of influence.

Scholars of modernism have long addressed how literature, painting, and music reflected the radical reconceptualization of space and time in the early twentieth century—a veritable revolution in both physics and philosophy that has been characterized as precipitating an “epistemic trauma” around the world. In this wide-ranging study, Benjamin Paloff contends that writers in Central and Eastern Europe felt this impact quite distinctly from their counterparts in Western Europe. For the latter, the destabilization of traditional notions of space and time inspired works that saw in it a new kind of freedom. However, for many Central and Eastern European authors, who were writing from within public discourses about how to construct new social realities, the need for escape met the realization that there was both nowhere to escape to and no stable delineation of what to escape from. In reading the prose and poetry of Czech, Polish, and Russian writers, Paloff imbues the term “Kafkaesque” with a complexity so far missing from our understanding of this moment in literary history.