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The article offers information on the life and works of writer W. G. Sebald. Topics discussed include literary establishment during his lifetime such as "Austerlitz;" information on Sebald's metamorphosis; and many troubling and irresolvable questions raised by his rapid institutionalization as a writer of global importance. It also mentions that his admission to the sanctum sanctorum of German letters furnished the Sebald Industry's global workforce.

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.

The article focuses on Micha Josef Berdyczewski. Topics include he was a Little Russian-born writer of Hebrew, a journalist, and a scholar. He appealed for the Jews to change their way of thinking, freeing themselves from dogmas ruling the Jewish religion, tradition and history, but is also known for his work with pre-modern Jewish myths and legends. He wrote in Hebrew, and German and has been described as the first Hebrew writer living in Berlin to be revered in the world of German letters.

The article discusses an unsent letter by Albert Stohr, the Archbishop of Mainz, Germany, to the German Ministry of the Interior, dated August 10, 1943. The authors outline Stohr's opposition to National Socialism, to the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany, and in particular to Nazi policies against interfaith marriages between Jews and Christians. A critical, annotated edition of the letter, discovered at the Dom- und Diözesanarchiv (Cathedral and Diocesan Archives) in Mainz, is provided in an appendix.

Literary writing has operated as a space of inquiry unsettling the literal and figurative ground on which thinking takes place. From Hölderlin's invocations to the ether, to Walter Benjamin's characterization of Baudelaire's poetry as unfathomable, a certain tradition of writing, particularly in German letters, takes shape around a critique of gravity. Against the background of a geopoetics, I propose to turn to the question of an inconstant and inconsistent ground in Paul Celan's 'geological lyric' by explicating the relationship in his writing between the earth and its unthought other: air. This reading has as its object of inquiry what I am calling Celan's aerography, which is doubly articulated in the turn to aerial space in his poetry and in his articulation of the work of air in those terrestrial landscapes formed and deformed by aeolian processes. I argue that the radically dissipative geographies evoked in his poems could extend critical geographic inquiry into a multiple and turbulent materiality; however, the sheer spectrality of the material world in Celan's poetry seems to require an (a)material criticism, that is, a materiality without matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Discusses Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's use of language in his letters. Discrepancy between Mozart's musical genius and extra-musical life; Differences in biographers' view of Mozart's personality; Mozart's peculiarities in the context of his time and society; Social standing of the artist; Development of the German language.

Describes German correspondence styles in order to assist American managers. German memo; German letter.