Scharnhorst and Showalter: A tale of two enlightened scholars

Gerhard von Scharnhorst was the intellectual father of the Prussian and later German armies. Professor Dennis E. Showalter was a noted scholar of German, American, and military history. Both mentored countless students and authored a number of seminal works in military history. Both demonstrated the enduring importance of military history in the minds of policy makers, military personnel, and the public. Both were truly enlightened scholars.

The Other Otto Dresel: Public and Private Musical Identities in a German-American ‘Forty-Eighter’ and his Family, c. 1860–1880

This essay explores the musical life of a German-American ‘Forty-Eighter’ and his family, with particular attention to their domestic musical preferences as reflected in five surviving sheet-music albums. Otto Dresel, easily confused with the far more prominent German musician of the same name who settled in Boston, was a gifted amateur whose public musical activities, both choral and instrumental, typified those of many German arrivals of that generation. This was a largely male realm of affirmative, expansive ideals; here the stress was on civic virtues, happy fraternal bonds, and the celebration of German musical culture as an elevating force in America. The family albums suggests that the music he shared with his wife and children at home in Columbus, Ohio, served quite different purposes. It was performed intimately, in an often melancholy and even mournful mode that reflected the need for personal consolation and was thus more in keeping with typical Victorian attitudes toward the domestic, womanly sphere. Evidence about the troubled course of Dresel's life helps us understand his growing need to take refuge in his home and family as well as in music that helped him and his loved ones deal – for a time, at least – with deepening feelings of regret, failure and loss. This marked contrast between the public and private sides of the Dresels’ musical lives points to a need for greater attention to the distinctive character and functions of intimate family music-making in nineteenth-century America, especially during the years of widespread disillusionment and cultural reorientation that followed the Civil War.

"“Selam“-code in international projections and transformations"

In the article, the florocode, generated by the cultural etiquette and everyday practice of “the language of flowers”, is considered as a multicultural phenomenon in the dynamics of its culturological semiosis and reception by nation’s cultural mentality. The harem code-game (salem), “transferred” from the East (presumably from Turkey) to Europe with its rich centuries-old fund of plant symbols, was reduced to the emblematic “language of flowers” and underwent a radical transformation – re-coding: the formal rhyming principle of generation and the transfer of information by cryptography has become content-associative. Transformation is further presented in the development of the “linguistic” aspects of the florocode – its “grammar” and “syntax”. And, finally, in the process of adapting the florocode by different national cultures (French, German, American, Russian), it was modified synchronously with the change of cultural epochs and the priorities and tastes dictated by them, broadcasting the specifics of the cultural mentality of a particular nation.

Imagining a New Volk: German-American Nationalism in the Age of the Revolution

German colonists who participated in the American Revolution did so in a number of ways that were comparable to their Anglo-American neighbors. Yet German Patriots also had a unique method of expressing American nationalism: their vocabulary. While using the German language in the New World was often a means of preserving identity and cultural institutions, it also provided an avenue through which they could assert a hybrid German-American identity: the word Volk. This paper focuses primarily on the changes in the writings of Henry Miller, the foremost German-American who cast his lot with the Patriot cause. It tracks a shift in his use of language during the American Revolution and demonstrates how he used the concept of Volk first to assert a distinct colonial identity and later to invent an America nation for German consumption.

Code-switching and loan translation in German-American

This squib applies and extends insights from (Diasystematic) Construction Grammar to the code-switching and loan-translation of English verbs (and verbal constructions) in US-German dialects. After presenting recent findings about the nature and interaction of language contact phenomena, I introduce the constructional principles guiding the analysis and the data sources. I then present a wide array of data and formulate hypotheses regarding the processes and motivations underlying each type, appealing to a constructional and usage-based view of the bilingual’s mental lexicon.

The Mama of Dada: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the original mastermind behind Fountain, 1917

The most disruptive sculpture that broke the art world and the notion of art itself; the notorious Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp changed art history forever. Since the anonymous submission to the salon of independent artists in New York 1917, art lovers have never been able to come to a consensus about the piece. Debates and disputes polarized the opinion of the public. As a result, the name Duchamp had become synonymous with the term Readymade, Dada and the avant-garde. Absurdly, sufficient evidence suggests that the French artist Duchamp was not the artist behind Fountain. The female Dada poet and German American contemporary artist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, was the mastermind behind it.