German Studies Colloquium

Abstract: As part of a project that explores the roles of literate women in the production and circulation of devotional literature in late medieval Germany, this paper focuses on the book production of one female scribe who, unlike many male and female scribes of her day, signs her name repeatedly in the books she made. Anna Eybin, provost of the Augustinian convent Pillenreuth near Nuremberg from 1461-1476, was according to her sisters the author/producer of "countless" books, though only four of them have survived.

Stefan Willer is Associate Director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) Berlin and Director of the research project "Prognostik und Literatur" since 2010 and a lecturer at the Institute for Philosophy and the History of Literature, Science, and Technology at the Technical University Berlin since 2010.

Poems and songs survive as texts and sometimes even with musical notation, but we as highly literate readers find it difficult to consider the huge difference between listening and reading, between the reception of melodic song and its text form. Maria Dobozy will present a few examples of texts created for performance.  A great many poet-singers worked outside the love lyric in this genre covering a huge number of topics and themes.

This presentation compares two war-related texts, one penned by a German mercenary, Paul Speltacher, and the other by a Hungarian poet, Sebastian Tinodi, who narrate events surrounding the same military battle: the offensive engaged in to capture the town and fortress of Lippa (Lipova, Romania) in Transylvania during November of 1551. The German and the Hungarian eye-witness accounts selectively color and embellish the facts as they see them in order to convey their own evaluation.

German Jews felt at home in Germany before 1933. When Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, a rapid process of exclusion of the Jews began. Their immediate reactions ranged from attempts at cooperation with the Nazis or resisting them on various levels, while others simply left Germany altogether. This lecture explores the range of German-Jewish responses and attitudes in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi regime.