Author: Christine R. Johnson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813927121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
Current historiography suggests that European nations regarded the New World as an inassimilable "other" that posed fundamental challenges to the accepted ideas of Renaissance culture. The German Discovery of the World presents a new interpretation that emphasizes the ways in which the new lands and peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas were imagined as comprehensible and familiar. In chapters dedicated to travel narratives, cosmography, commerce, and medical botany, Johnson examines how existing ideas and methods were deployed to make German commentators experts in the overseas world, and how this incorporation established the discoveries as new and important intellectual, commercial, and scientific developments. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book brings to light the dynamic world of the German Renaissance, in which humanists, cartographers, reformers, politicians, botanists, and merchants appropriated the Portuguese and Spanish expeditions to the East and West Indies for their own purposes and, in so doing, reshaped their world. Studies in Early Modern German History
Author: Fritz Stern
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691214069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once observed that the twentieth century "could have been Germany's century." In 1900, the country was Europe's preeminent power, its material strength and strident militaristic ethos apparently balanced by a vital culture and extraordinary scientific achievement. It was poised to achieve greatness. In Einstein's German World, the eminent historian Fritz Stern explores the ambiguous promise of Germany before Hitler, as well as its horrifying decline into moral nihilism under Nazi rule, and aspects of its remarkable recovery since World War II. He does so by gracefully blending history and biography in a sequence of finely drawn studies of Germany's great scientists and of German-Jewish relations before and during Hitler's regime. Stern's central chapter traces the complex friendship of Albert Einstein and the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Fritz Haber, contrasting their responses to German life and to their Jewish heritage. Haber, a convert to Christianity and a firm German patriot until the rise of the Nazis; Einstein, a committed internationalist and pacifist, and a proud though secular Jew. Other chapters, also based on new archival sources, consider the turbulent and interrelated careers of the physicist Max Planck, an austere and powerful figure who helped to make Berlin a happy, productive place for Einstein and other legendary scientists; of Paul Ehrlich, the founder of chemotherapy; of Walther Rathenau, the German-Jewish industrialist and statesman tragically assassinated in 1922; and of Chaim Weizmann, chemist, Zionist, and first president of Israel, whose close relations with his German colleagues is here for the first time recounted. Stern examines the still controversial way that historians have dealt with World War I and Germans have dealt with their nation's defeat, and he analyzes the conflicts over the interpretations of Germany's past that persist to this day. He also writes movingly about the psychic cost of Germany's reunification in 1990, the reconciliation between Germany and Poland, and the challenges and prospects facing Germany today. At once historical and personal, provocative and accessible, Einstein's German World illuminates the issues that made Germany's and Europe's past and present so important in a tumultuous century of creativity and violence.
Author: Ulrich Ammon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351654896
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 684
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Book Description
The Position of the German Language in the World focuses on the global position of German and the factors which work towards sustaining its use and utility for international communication. From the perspective of the global language constellation, the detailed data analysis of this substantial research project depicts German as an example of a second-rank language. The book also provides a model for analysis and description of international languages other than English. It offers a framework for strengthening the position of languages such as Arabic, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Spanish and others and for countering exaggerated claims about the global monopoly position of English. This comprehensive handbook of the state of the German language in the world was originally published in 2015 by Walter de Gruyter in German and has been critically acclaimed. Suitable for scholars and researchers of the German language, the handbook shows in detail how intricately and thoroughly German and other second-rank languages are tied up with a great number of societies and how these statistics support or weaken the languages’ functions and maintenance.
Author: Raymond Hickey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108488099
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 437
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Book Description
A collection of studies on the role of English in German-speaking countries, covering a broad range of topics.
Author: Patrick Stevenson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134792859
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
This accessible textbook offers students the opportunity to explore for themselves a wide range of sociolinguistic issues relating to the German language and its role in societies around the world. It is written for undergraduate students who have a sound practical knowledge of German but who have little or no knowledge of linguistics or sociolinguistics. It combines text with practical exercises and discussion questions to stimulate readers to think for themselves and to tackle specific problems. In Part One Patrick Stevenson invites readers to investigate and reflect on issues about the status and function of the German language in relation to its speakers and to speakers of other languages with which it comes into contact. In Part Two the focus shifts to the forms and functions of individual features of the language. This involves, for example, identifying features of regional speech forms, analysing similarities and differences between written and spoken German, or looking at the 'social meaning' underlying different forms of address. Part Three explores the relationship between the German language and the nature of 'Germanness'. It concentrates on people's attitudes towards the language, the ways in which it is changing, and their views on what it represents for them.
Author: Heidi J. S. Tworek
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674240731
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Winner of the Barclay Book Prize, German Studies Association Winner of the Gomory Prize in Business History, American Historical Association and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Winner of the Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide Honorable Mention, European Studies Book Award, Council for European Studies To control information is to control the world. This innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire—and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. Information warfare may seem like a new feature of our contemporary digital world. But it was just as crucial a century ago, when the great powers competed to control and expand their empires. In News from Germany, Heidi Tworek uncovers how Germans fought to regulate information at home and used the innovation of wireless technology to magnify their power abroad. Tworek reveals how for nearly fifty years, across three different political regimes, Germany tried to control world communications—and nearly succeeded. From the turn of the twentieth century, German political and business elites worried that their British and French rivals dominated global news networks. Many Germans even blamed foreign media for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The key to the British and French advantage was their news agencies—companies whose power over the content and distribution of news was arguably greater than that wielded by Google or Facebook today. Communications networks became a crucial battleground for interwar domestic democracy and international influence everywhere from Latin America to East Asia. Imperial leaders, and their Weimar and Nazi successors, nurtured wireless technology to make news from Germany a major source of information across the globe. The Nazi mastery of global propaganda by the 1930s was built on decades of Germany’s obsession with the news. News from Germany is not a story about Germany alone. It reveals how news became a form of international power and how communications changed the course of history.
Author: David Thomas Murphy
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803232051
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
German Exploration of the Polar World is the exciting story of the generations of German polar explorers who braved the perils of the Arctic and Antarctic for themselves and their country. Such intrepid adventurers as Wilhelm Filchner, Erich von Drygalski, and Alfred Wegener are not as well known today as Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton, Robert E. Peary, or Richard E. Byrd, but their bravery and the hardships they faced were equal to those of the more famous polar explorers. In the half-century prior to World War II, the poles were the last blank spaces on the global map, and they exerted a tremendous pull on national imaginations. Under successive political regimes, the Germans threw themselves into the race for polar glory with an ardor that matched their better-known counterparts bearing English, American, and Norwegian flags. German polar explorers were driven, like their rivals, by a complex web of interlocking motivations. Personal fame, the romance of the unknown, and the advancement of science were important considerations, but public pressure, political and military concerns, and visions of immense, untapped wealth at the poles also spurred the explorers. As historian David Thomas Murphy shows, Germany's repeated encounters with the polar world left an indelible impression upon the German public, government, and scientific community. Reports on the polar landscape, flora, and fauna enhanced Germany's appreciation of the global environment. Accounts of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, accurate or fantastic, permanently shaped German notions of culture and civilization. The final, failed attempt by the Nazis to extend German political power to the earth's ends revealed the limits of any country's ability to reshape the globe politically or militarily.
Author: James Hodkinson
Publisher: Studies in German Literature L
ISBN: 1640140336
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Weighs the value of Germanophone culture, and its study, in an age of globalization, transnationalism, and academic change.
Author: Andrew G. Bonnell
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004300635
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
The German Social Democratic Party was the world’s first million-strong political party. This book examines key themes around which the party organized its mainly working-class membership, with a focus on the experiences and outlook of rank-and-file party members.
Author: Michele Gillespie
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845453398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Essays re members of the Moravian Church; although many of these Protestant immigrants spoke German, they originated in various countries.
