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Discusses private letters that show how burghers in Germany's late medieval and Reformation era lived their lives and what family meant to them. Correspondence of the Nuremberg burgher Linhart Tucher to his family during the plague of 1533; Interaction of the nuclear family, the kin group and the ancestral family; Value of letters as sources for the history of the family on the threshold of the modern era.

This article discusses how the relationship between parents and their children were affected by the second world war in Germany. With fathers away from home for often as long as a decade, many children grew up without a father being physically present. The current historiography suggests that wartime separation caused a crisis in the family. But did the prolonged periods of time apart and the separate experiences of husbands at the Front and wives and children at home really destabilize family relationships? This article questions such a picture of families in ruin. It argues that family relationships were far more resilient in the face of wartime separation than has previously been credited. Indeed, it reveals the importance of children in keeping mothers and fathers focused on getting through the war. It further contends that, even from afar, fathers continued to play an important role in their children’s lives. And this in turn revises our understanding of the situation facing reuniting families. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hans Fallada has suffered from a poor political reputation affecting his position in the literary canon. Instead of straightening out this political and canonical maladjustment, the essay argues for Fallada's significance as a bad example for those looking for moral and political lessons in mid-century German letters. Der Alpdruck, his 1947 novel about a Soviet-installed mayor, depicts his wrong-headedness, first, as the autobiographical protagonist fails to adopt a satisfactory affect toward postwar guilt and innocence, and second, as he eyes two would-be benefactors, fictional counterparts to Gottfried Berm and Johannes R. Becher, with a wily realism that serves as a foil to their cultural or political responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]