The main interest of this thesis lies in the analysis of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as it is represented in movies. The times before and after the Cold War period in Germany have often been discussed in both literature as well as movies. However, most academic essays which focus on how this time is remembered by current societies are analyzing literature rather than movies. Most analyses of film neglect the exploration of cultural memory, even though there are a variety of different film genres that deal with this topic. This paper will fill this gap in film research by showing that movies set in the GDR can help to convey a cultural memory just as much as literature. The diversity of movies set in the GDR is great: many movies tell sad and serious stories about families under government surveillance, or of people who were killed by trying to escape to West-Germany. This thesis however, focuses on films with humorous aspects. Although most film reviewers criticise comedies about the GDR as being purely nostalgic, this thesis shows that the humour used in specific movies is able to collect a memory and therefore, can be seen as a vehicle of cultural memory. The movies Sonnenallee directed by Leander Haußmann and Good Bye Lenin! directed by Wolfgang Becker are analyzed in this paper because they are comparable insofar that they both show the GDR from a youthful point of view from different time periods. Sonnenallee takes place in the 70ies and therefore, 20 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Good Bye Lenin?, in contrast, covers both the time before and after the fall of the wall. Another reason for selecting these movies is the fact that they are criticized for only portraying the clichés and stereotypes of East-German-figures, which should be reproved. The first part of the thesis explains the theory and main arguments of Aleida and Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory. In order to reconstruct their train of thought, it is necessary to summarize the work of their predecessors Maurice Halbwachs, Aby Warburg, and Pierre Nora. The second part moves on to discuss the term ‘Erinnerungs-film’, coined by Astrid Erll, whose main research interest lies in understanding the dif-ferent kinds of memories occurring in movies. The following chapter focuses on the use of comedy in the selected films, as it is important to understand how humorous scenes are created in those movies. The main part of the thesis is the analysis of Sonnenallee and Good Bye Lenin! found in chapter five. Two different types of approaches are chosen: first, a comparison between Haußmann’s movie Sonnenallee and Thomas Brussig’s book Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, and then a picture-sound-analysis of selected scenes from Becker’s movie Good bye Lenin!. The comparison shows the advantages that the movie has over the book in terms of displaying humour as a means to convey cultural memory. The inter-pretation part of the thesis shows how funny scenes can be critically interpreted and found to be useful in creating cultural memory rather than putting them down as purely nostalgic.

We often encounter mental illness in our daily lives. People who are diagnosed with a mental disorder are marked as different and thereby stigmatized and confined to spacial isolation. This thesis analyzes the function of mental illness by examining the protagonist of Irena Vrkljan's Buch über Dora. I argue that in Buch über Dora stigmatization and isolation of otherness becomes visible in how the book's protagonist is excluded from certain spaces. My main question is which role is ascribed to Dora by society. Othering – and therefore excluding – mentally ill persons such as Dora is necessary to establish the order of society. Another important issue are the similarities between Dora and other female characters in the novel.The symptoms of the pressure to succumb to societal norms are shared by the first person narrator, among others. It is my aim to show that and how all woman can easily be pushed into Dora's role. This leads to the central question or my thesis: Are we not all a bit like Dora? To date, Irena Vrkljan's works have been largely neglected by the germanic academic community. Germanistik has not yet found a way to accommodate her bilingual and bicultural oeuvre. The first part of my thesis addresses this issue. The second part develops a constructivist theoretical framework for my analysis of space. First, I draw on the work of Michel Foucault "Of Other Spaces", "Discipline And Punish", and "Madness And Cilvilization", in which he describes space as a construct that reproduces societal norms. Second, Sigmund Freud's "Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" helps to grasp how mental illness is pathologized. While Foucault focuses on the function of norms, Freud analyses the consequences of aberrant behaviour for women. The third part focuses on the fragmentary structure of the novel and continues with an detailed analysis of heterotopias such as the cemetery, Dora's room, the market and the untended park. By identifying with Dora, Buch über Dora questions the norms and shows her otherness as something that we all share. She may be stigmatized as mentally ill but she is by no means fundamentally different to other women.

In this dissertation, I examine discourses on disability and the body in three German Expressionist dramas written directly after WWI both for the discursive work they do in this context and for their relevance today: Ernst Toller’s Die Wandlung: Das Ringen eines Menschen (1918) and Der deutsche Hinkemann (1923) as well as Karl August Wittfogel’s Der Krüppel (1920). I analyze how these plays draw on ideas about disability in post-WWI Germany in the midst of a broad-ranging critique of the violence inherent in nationalistic, militaristic, economic, and rehabilitationist discourses. The analysis contributes to the current discussion on how to dismantle what are referred to in disability studies as “disabling discourses,” that is, those discourses that lend support to discrimination against bodies marked as disabled. I contend that the use of representation to subvert bodily norms and resist “the medical model of disability” did not begin only after the emergence of the disability rights movement. I demonstrate how these three Expressionist plays indeed resist disabling discourses in ways that were both feasible and intelligible in their context. I argue that not only was the discourse on disability in this time and place multiple, but also that the primary texts use of a variety of (literary) strategies to resist normative paradigms that privilege able-bodied, aesthetically-pleasing, and economically-productive bodies. The analysis shows how these representations pose a challenge the medical mode of understanding the body, critically engage the social stigma that often accompanies the presence of disability, and offer alternative ways of reading and valuing the body. I argue that literary representations of disability can serve to de-naturalize ideas about ability and other ideals of embodiment, and that even the hyperbolic bodies one encounters in these Expressionist dramas can help readers to better understand processes of disablement. This project will also demonstrate that literary representations of disability are of importance for disabled and non-disabled persons alike because they reveal and critically engage various techniques that are used to categorize and assign value to all bodies in a society in which ideals of ability, beauty, and utility are used to assess the value of life.

In this sociolinguistic study, qualitative interviews were used in examining discursive identity construction among Russian Germans. The interview group was composed of Russian German university students attending different universities in Germany. Based on the sociocultural perspective on language and identity, content analysis, turn-internal pragmatic and semantic as well as interactional approaches are used in the thesis. This thesis covers two major questions: What attitudes toward food Russian Germans construct during conversational interaction and what are the major linguistic resources and discursive strategies that these participants use to construct their cultural identities and how the attitudes towards the linguistic and social practices reflect German Russian identity and a particular Russian German space in German cities. The special situation of Russian Germans, that being the initial alienation in Russia due to their ethnic origin, followed by the attitude of local Germans towards Russian Germans after they relocated back to Germany, led to the situation where many of them feel to be in the position of ‘in-between’ (Kaiser 2006: 34). Due to the complexity of this special cultural position of Russian Germans, observations of how individuals negotiate Russian and German cultural spaces and construct their own space in everyday life provide insight to the research of cultural identity. At the same time, the creation of the Russian-German space by means of positioning also reveals the constructed identity of Russian Germans, which they create in discourse. The focus of the thesis lies on one particular practice, namely eating habits as a cultural practice. The analysis of food attitudes with the help of linguistic methods will contribute to the culture identity and the construction of a particular cultural space of Russian Germans. The interviews show how the attitudes towards food preferences and cooking habits serve as a basis for identity construction. By positioning themselves with the help of their attitudes towards eating habits, the participants create certain cultural spaces in German cities. Several domains of life such as private and public spheres, where the participants positioned themselves slightly differently from one another by drawing on different indexical meanings are covered in the interview. The work begins with the history of the Russian German migratory and studies made in relation to Russian Germans and their identity. It is followed by theoretical and methodological approaches. Content analysis, turn-internal pragmatic and semantic as well as interactional approaches are used in the thesis. The main body is devoted to the analysis of the qualitative interview data with the help of the theory and methodology described in the preceding section. In the end of the thesis the summary of the findings and the suggestions for the further research are presented.

This thesis explores the usage of the new spelling rules in the complex area of separate and compound spelling. This area was a main topic in the reform of German orthography 1996/98. The old rules can be characterized as a complex and incoherent system. The primary ambition in defining new rules for separate and compound spelling was to simplify the writing process in order to facilitate an easier usage of written language for the German speaking community. <br ><br /> The basic concept of the new rules is the declaration of separate spelling as the default, making compound spelling the exception. As a consequence, most words of the German vocabulary, which were spelled as compounds before, are now to be spelled separately. The publication of the new rules for this orthographic area in the year 1996 caused a lot of criticism amongst linguists, the main point of criticism being that words, which grew together on the basis of grammatical processes, had been robbed of their status as words. They are now word-groups in which the two parts do not belong together and have their own individual status and meaning in the sentence. These rules are in opposition to the productive tendency of ?Univerbierung? in the German written language. This means a process whereby words, which stand next to each other in a written text, grow together under special conditions. <br ><br /> This thesis has two main aims: The first aim is to define the system of separate and compound spelling as a combination of grammatical and orthographic aspects. It will be shown how grammatical categories are influencing the orthography of these words. Additionally, it will be shown how the new rules produce spellings which are grammatically incorrect. The second is to verify the prognosis that the new rules were not accepted by the German language community. This thesis presents the results of a corpus analysis drawn from the text corpora of contemporary German language which is available on the website of the <em>Institut f??r deutsche Sprache</em>. Articles from six different newspapers were analyzed to see if and how the new rules for the groups verb and verb, adjective and verb and noun and verb were used in these texts. The results of this research have been compiled for the period of time from August 1999 to December 2000 (Corpus 1) and August 1999 to June 2003 (Corpus 2). It was uncovered that for more than half of the analyzed verbs the new rules were not used consistently. The divergence from the spelling norms ranged from 10 to 50 percent. In particular the group adjective and verb showed a high deviation from the new rules for compound and separate spelling. These results can be explained both with semantic and syntactic reasoning.

The following thesis examines the topos of "things" in literature. Herein we discuss concrete objects and how they are used and presented in contemporary prose. The primary works analyzed are both by Wilhelm Genazino, namely <i>Ein Regenschirm f??r diesen Tag</i> and <i>Eine Frau, eine Wohnung, ein Roman</i>, published in 2001 and 2003 respectively. The analysis of different "things" in the two novels by Genanzino affords one the opportunity of pursuing three different objectives. First, the topos is by its very nature an interdisciplinary one, and therefore the theoretical concepts from different disciplines are applied to the scholarly examination of "things" in literature. This theoretical framework is based on different aspects of the work of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the sociologist Norbert Elias, and the philosophical economist Karl Marx. Some specific characteristics of the presentation of "things" in literature such as "T&uuml;cke des Objektes" ("flaw of the object") and the fetishization of objects are also discussed. As a result, a new constellation of ideas is developed that has practical applications for the analysis of literature. The second goal of this thesis is to interpret the works of Wilhelm Genazino, a highly regarded author who has been largely ignored by literary scholars, by applying this new conglomeration of ideas. This interpretation concentrates on single concrete "things" that appear in the novels to establish their connotations for the narratives. "Things" become cultural or personal symbols, and the interpretation of them reveals another dimension to Genazino's prose. Last but not least it is shown that even small "things" (can) have a major impact in every form of media. This might well influence traditional interpretations of well known works in the literary canon. Four examples from world literature introduce the topic in order to give an overview of the different representations of the topos "thing". It becomes apparent that the symbolic meaning of things may change during epochs. Nevertheless these four examples introduce topoi, such as "transitorisches Objekt" ("transitional object"), which can also be found in the primary works of this thesis. The examples are taken from different epochs as well as from different cultural backgrounds to emphasize the intercultural premise of the theme. After introducing Genazino??s approach to the thing-discourse and defining his major ideas, a close reading that makes use of the analytical framework is employed to discuss and interpret the primary texts. It becomes apparent that "things", rather than plot or character, provide the major impetus to the narratives. The interdisciplinary approach of this thesis underscores the important contributions that an analysis of "thing discourse" can make to the study of literary texts and their importance to human existence. As the topic of discussion has been of intereset to scholars in several different scientific areas, it becomes clear that the interdisciplinary approach of analyzing texts may spread ideas concerning not only the works in question, but all disciplines involved as well.

The following thesis examines the poetic oeuvre of George Grosz in relation to selected drawings from the same period of time. A survey of the research on George Grosz shows that the scholarly focus has so far mainly been on his work as a visual artist, whereas his published poems have not been treated with as much attention. Furthermore, there exists no in-depth analysis of possible intermedial relations between his poetic and visual works, although titles of poems and drawings, editorial characteristics of the publication of poems and drawings respectively, and the themes of both suggest a relation between the medially different artefacts of Grosz?s work. <br ><br /> The goal of this thesis is to analyse and interpret intermedial relations between Grosz?s poems and drawings and thus affirm their existence as a constituent element of his work. Following Jan Mukarovsk???s suggestion of the dual character of content/theme and structure in every artefact, the thesis is subdivided into two separate analyses of content and structure of poems and drawings and their respective intermedial relations. The methodology used to analyse Grosz? work as an intermedial phenomenon draws from the theoretical background of both semiotics and intermediality. Of eminent importance for the methodology are thus Umberto Eco?s works on semiotics and Roland Barthes? works on semiotics in general and on the semantics of visual language in particular. Fernande Saint-Martin?s <em>Semiotics of Visual Language</em> (1990) serves as reference work for the analyses of the structural characteristics of Grosz? drawings and Roman Jakobson?s and Jir?? Veltrusk???s works on semiotics shed light on the structural differences between verbal and visual language. Furthermore, Irina O. Rajewsky?s systematic introduction to the field of intermedial research, <em>Intermedialit??t</em> (2002), provides an apparatus with which to categorize structural relations between poems and paintings. <br ><br /> The content analysis of poems and drawings focuses on certain recurrent topoi. These are the topoi of the big city, America and (circus) artists. The analyses show intermedial relations and are valuable for the (re-)interpretation of certain topoi, especially when it comes to the evaluation of the Americatopos. The most prominent and dominant topos in both media proves to be the big city. Overall, the analysis of thematic relations mirrors semiotic theory: poems as verbal artefacts are able to provide more content-information than the visual language of the drawings. <br ><br /> The structural analysis focuses on certain modes of visual representation as employed by the drawings, and sets out to show intermedial reverberations of the visual structures in the poems and how the verbal structures succeed in evoking certain structural characteristics of visual language in general of and Grosz?s drawings in particular. Whereas there is a semantic advantage of verbal language in the intermedial relations of the contents of the artefacts, the structural analyses show that it is visual structures that govern the relations between poems and drawings. Again, this can be put down to semiotic characteristics: visual language is less strucurally regulated than its verbal counterpart. <br ><br /> The conclusion tries to merge the results of the separate analyses by stating that intermedial relations exist and encompass the dualism of content and structure that makes up the artefacts. The specific character of the intermedial relations mirrors the characteristics of the two semiotic systems employed by drawings and poems, i. e. visual and verbal language. Finally, it is suggested that thematic and structural relations are mainly governed by the topos of the big city, which hence can be seen as the thematic and structural paradigm of the analysed poems and drawings by George Grosz and of their intermedial relations.

The focus of this master?s thesis is on determining whether Judith Hermann?s book of collected short stories, <em>Nichts als Gespenster</em> (2003) can be assigned to the so-called category <em>Popliteratur</em> which had its climax in the 1990?s, or whether it advances this genre by focusing on new perspectives. To show this, Hermann?s short stories are compared with Christian Kracht?s <em>Faserland</em> (1995), which is a prime example of a pop-novel at the end of the last century. Thomas Jung?s criteria for <em>Popliteratur</em> serve as a methodology for the textual analysis. <br /><br /> In the first part of this thesis <em>Popliteratur</em> as literary phenomenon is introduced. In addition to a definition and its history from the 1960?s till nowadays, the focus is on <em>Popliteratur</em> of the 1990?s and its authors who do not just write but stage themselves in the media and in public. Furthermore from this, the existence of <em>Popliteratur</em> in the 21st century is discussed and categories of how it appears in new literary forms, e. g. ?Generation Golf? and ?Zweite Generation Pop?. This is followed by a consideration of how Popliteratur is assessed in literary studies and literary criticism. <br ><br /> In the second part of this thesis, Christian Kracht and Judith Hermann are introduced, followed by a comparison of <em>Faserland</em> and <em>Nichts als Gespenster</em> from the point of view of Jung?s criteria for <em>Popliteratur</em>, namely its topics, its language, narrative technique, construction of identity and its target group of readers. After the textual analysis, the question whether Judith Hermann?s work can be assigned to <em>Popliteratur</em> or whether she transforms this genre will be answered. <br ><br /> My conclusions are that Hermann advances <em>Popliteratur</em> in the 21st century by focusing on melancholia and self-reflexion more than on the provocation that was more typical of earlier <em>Popliteratur</em>.

This thesis demonstrates how two literary works ? Arnold Stadler's <em>Ein hinreissender Schrotth??ndler</em> (1999) and Andreas Maier's <em>Klausen</em> (2002) ? can be read as part of the globalization discourse. As a theoretical basis for the textual analysis the thesis first develops an understanding of the concept of globalization which forms a background against which the two literary works can be read. By embedding literature into the sociological theories of globalization it is possible to examine to what extent the two novels reflect and/or generate particular aspects of globalization. <br /><br /> Both texts are set largely in provincial towns, and the regions themselves play commanding roles in the stories being told. This focus on the provincial takes on an ironic appearance in the era of globalization where one would assume that localities have lost meaning. It is therefore useful to look at theories that broach the issue of the tense relation between globality and locality. Since no universally accepted definition of globalization exists, it is necessary to establish the crucial aspects of the phenomenon to be applied in the analysis of the novels by examining the work of various theorists on the topic. <br /><br /> The prominent model of 'glocalization,' originated by the sociologist Roland Robertson to refer to 'global localization,' offers useful categories for the analysis of the provincial in the era of globalization. In this model the simultaneity of global and local processes is assumed and with it the alleged antagonism of the 'global' and the 'local' is overcome. Claiming those dynamics Robertson's model can serve as a confirmation of the arguments put forward in this thesis which looks at literature about the 'local' through the prism of globalization. Other theories relating to explicit local dynamics are presented to round out the model of 'glocalization. ' In addition, the thesis takes into account normative ideas regarding the province in the global era. <br /><br /> The textual analysis that follows the delineation of the model of 'glocalization' demonstrates how the novels illustrate the global and local processes postulated by the model. The investigation also explains how the literary texts themselves evaluate the provinces portrayed. The results of the examination show that selected aspects of the globalization discourse have found their way into two contemporary German-language novels and therefore into German literary discourse. Even though the two novels deal with different ideas from the discourse, and even reject to a certain extent some of these concepts, they each reveal a particular literary manner of echoing the processes of globalization. Finally, the thesis demonstrates that the globalization discourse is of use for the interpretation of literary texts.

In 2004, the Institut f??r Deutsche Sprache published the neologism dictionary "Neuer Wortschatz: Neologismen der 90er Jahre im Deutschen", which contains new words that entered the German language during the 1990s (for example "Elchtest" and "Handy"). Based on this dictionary this master's thesis examines to what extent those new words have reached the vocabulary of German speakers in the German language island of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. Moreover, it describes the attitudes of the local speakers of German towards these new words. <br /><br /> First, the term <em>neologism</em> is defined, different types of neologisms are presented and a review of research on German neologisms in general is given. Second, the historical background of the German speakers in Kitchener-Waterloo is described. The focal point of this thesis, however, is on the methodology of the study and on the results of the actual research coming from a data collection amongst German speakers of Kitchener-Waterloo. On the one hand, the focus of the analysis is on the question to what extent this language change in the German language in Europe has reached them. Hence knowledge and usage of the neologisms are examined. On the other hand, the focus is on the attitudes the interviewees have towards these new words. Both aspects are compared to the result of the same study administered to German speakers, who lived during the 1990s in Germany. Hence knowledge and attitudes of the Canadian German speakers can be compared to those of speakers in Germany. <br /><br /> The results show that the participants from Germany knew more neologisms than those from Kitchener Waterloo. Concerning attitudes, both groups showed a slightly positive attitude towards the neologisms with interesting differences regarding certain types of neologisms.