Selected German holidays and celebrations

German Holidays & Celebrations
1Commercial  2 Wikipedia  3 Calendar  4

Karneval

°Karneval, also known as the “fifth season,” begins on November 11^th at 11:11 am. The eleventh minute of the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. In this hour the “Council of Eleven” comes together to plan the events of the upcoming festival.

° Carnival traditions started in the 19^th century. Many of the Carnivals around Germany have elected Carnival Kings, Queens, or Princes

° Though the Council congregates on November 11^th, the festivities do not begin until 40 days before Easter. Carnival signifies the last parties before Ash Wednesday.

° Celebrations kick-off with “Women’s Carnival” on the Thursday preceding Ash Wednesday. This day is a day for the Women of Germany. They may kiss any man they wish after first cutting off his tie.

° Rose Monday is where marching bands, dancers, and floats parade through the streets of the cities. They throw confetti, sweets, and toys into the crowds. Most of the floats are adorned with carved caricatures of politicians and other characters.

° On Shrove Tuesday, costume balls are held all throughout Germany, and they hold the burning of the Carnival Spirit, when life-size straw effigies are burned.

° Quiet Ash Wednesday marks the end of the festival.

Oktoberfest

° Oktoberfest is Munich’s largest fair and highlight of the years events in Germany. A Bavarian tradition originally started in 1810 in Munich, Germany. It all started with the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese on October 12^th and a celebratory horse race held on October 17^th.

° Many events take place during the 16-day event, including horse races, plays and socker games.

° The festival is held on the field/meadow named the Theresienwiese, for princess Therese.

° Oktoberfest takes place during the 16 days up to and including the first Sunday in October. The festival schedule was modified in 1994 to include German Unity Day in the festivities. In the event that it is a Jubilee year the festivities go until the first Monday in October.

° The festival follows a set schedule of activities over the course of the 16 days. This includes family days, Italian weekend, a costume parade, firecracker shooting and of course the tapping of the first keg.

° Over the years they have had to cancel 24 years of Oktoberfest celebrations

° There are 14 main large tents that can seat anywhere from 1,000 and 9,000 people inside with even more room outside of the tents.

° Oktoberfest accommodates as many as 6 million people each year that come from all over the world to celebrate the German tradition.

German Unity Day

° German Unity Day, Tag der Deutschen Einheit, is celebrated on October 3^rd, the date when the reunification treaty was signed between the two Germanys in 1990, following the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9^th, 1989

° It was originally going to be celebrated on November the 9^th, the day the Berlin wall fell, however this is also the date of the Nazis infamous Kristallnacht. This was found to be inappropriate for a holiday so they used the formal date when everything became official on October 3^rd 1990.

° Before 1990 West Germany's national holiday was on May 23^rd and October 7^th in East Germany.

° Each year a different city hosts a large celebration for the day. These celebrations include food, fireworks, concerts, and speeches by political leaders.

Erntedankfest

° Erntedanktag is an official German holiday. Harvest Festivals (Erntefests) are celebrated in churches and market places, in homes and dance halls. While the German-speaking countries also observe the principle of separation of church and state "politically", public displays of religious holiday traditions are a part of the local culture. The mostly Protestant German Erntedankfest observance dates back to around 1770.

° Since the Reformation the 29th of September has been considered the end of the harvest season, and Erntedankfest with a special church service is celebrated on the first Sunday of October.

° Erntedanktag literally means “Harvest-Thanksgiving-Day“

° Erntedankfest literally means "harvest festival of thanks”

° It is not a national holiday, but more of a religious celebration with roots in the rural harvest festivals. When it is celebrated in larger cities, it is usually part of a church service.

1. Write a post providing your personal response to the movie we viewed together: Baader-Meinhof Complex. 250-300 words. Yes, we did not finish the film yet. But you have seen enough to complete this task. 
2. Then reserach the "Rote Armee Fraktion" RAF and provide a second post with your findings of
- the causes
- the three generations of activists
- the end of the RAF
- the similarities between current day's terro attacks and the RAF (similarities and differences)
again 250-300 words.
Class discussion and debate. Additional information:
Aust.BBC.

I would like to discuss the topic next week in class on Wednesday. Here is what Anna VA wrote about the topic last year:
"The RAF started out as the Baader-Meinhof group which was formed in 1970 in Germany. It started out as a student protest movement in West Germany. There were three successive incarnations of the organization, the "first generation" consisted of the founders; Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler, and Ulrike Meinhof. The "second generation" RAF, which operated in the mid to late 1970s after several former members of the Socialist Patients' Collective joined, and the "third generation" RAF, which existed in the 1980s and 1990s.
The group executed numerous operations, especially in the fall of 1977, which led to a national crisis that became known as "German Autumn". Over the course of the 28 years the RAF was in business they were held responsible for 34 deaths and many bombings and robberies.
The RAF was a left-wing group and was deemed to be one of the most violent and prominent in Europe. There {should be: they} were known as a communist and anti-imperialist group that engaged in urban guerilla resistance against the fascist state of Germany."
Source: http://annavanalst.blogspot.com/2010/12/rote-armee-fraktion.html

Next Wednesday Nov 28

We will have a brief discussion of Berlin calling - I read several posts with interest and expect students to voice their views in class on Wednesday; many people have not posted the reaction paper, and that will turn into a problem come grading time. Interesting also that the make-up did not generate any response so far. I cannot access the blog of Mr. Pucel. Please see me after class.
I will introduce the next topic in class, and we will screen the Baader-Meinhof film. That will be continued a week later. The last class meeting will be all about food, holidays, and every-day topics in German speaking countries. In lieu of a final, I will expect a post of 500-800 words summarizing what you have heard, seen, studied, and learned about German culture this semester. Review your own blog, the class blog, and your class mates' blogs for that task.

The eve before turkey: no class.

The reaction paper about Berlin calling is due next Wednesday at noon. I uploaded two movies here that you are encouraged to view and compare for the 28th in a new blog post of 300 words. This is a make-up post in case you have missed other blog posts in the past. It will make up for one missing post. The two films are:
The Edukators (here)
and
 Good bye Lenin (here).

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B13cG7ck2KwtcmVfTmFBcWs4QXM/edit

If several students stream at the same time, it may not work smoothly. So, my upload is just the back-up solution and you should secure your own access to these two films, view them, and compare them with an eye on youth culture, and the goals, aspirations, values, and preferences that the films suggests German Youth to have.  
Class meets again next week, November 28.
                                                                      We are done with student topics and will jump right into a film that takes every minute we have: the Baader Meinhof Complex (German Workbook) I may split the viewing to gain time to introduce the topic and discuss your observations after we have seen it.

Interludium 2 - German Youth Culture (at the limits)

Award for Berlin Calling
The Plot on Wikipedia


We will discuss the handout and view and discuss the 100 minute film. Bring your glasses - the film is subtitled.

The questions you need to answer while viewing:

1. What do drugs mean to Ickarus?

2. Why, when, and how are his fans taking drugs, and which drugs do they take?

3. While we can see that his drug habits get him ill and into a psychosis, and while we witness his relapse and inability to work successfully, why does the subculture Ickarus is in focus on drugs?

4. Compare the standards you know from your home society with the people you see depicted in this movie. Which are the stark differences and contrasts?

5. Germany is considered a strong industrial nation the world over. Do you think that the youth culture as depicted here could change that? How about work ethics of Ickarus and of Alice, the label director who fires and then re-signs him?

6. Which similar "cult movies" of US origin have you seen, if any?

...

The report you need to write and post by next week Wednesday, noon needs to contain:

- written answers to the questions above, 

- and write your personal reaction to the film. Point out cultural differences that "jumped" at you, behaviors that you would not have seen or expected in the US, and summarize your viewing experience. 

That post will be not less than 300 words, excluding answers.

P.S. We will be viewing three movies this semester. These three, as different as they may appear, have a few common threads and themes: the individual person making choices or being culturally indoctrinated to follow a certain path - or fight that path (last movie: The Baader-Meinhof Complex) and the human experiences made between living life to its fullest, and death. Germans are more critical and more outspoken than Americans about what they think, like, dislike, and care for. View the films with an eye toward such differences in habit and cultural expression.

dw on German Fine Arts

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Fine Arts - a place for new ideas

Since the 1990s German painting and photography have been enjoying international success. Abroad, this new German painting revelation is known under the label “Young German Artists“. The artists involved come from Leipzig, Berlin and Dresden. Neo Rauch is the best known representative of the “New Leipzig School“. His style is characterized by a new realism that has emerged, free of all ideology, from the former “Leipzig School” of East German art. The paintings reveal for the most part pale figures that would appear to be waiting for something indefinite; a reflection, perhaps, of the situation in Germany at the beginning of the new millennium. So-called “Dresden Pop“, propagated among others by Thomas Scheibitz, references the aesthetics of advertising, TV and video to playfully deal with the aesthetics of finding certainty in the here and now. 

For most younger artists, dealing with the Nazi era, as was the case in the works of Hans Haacke, Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys, belongs to the past. Rather, a “new interiority” and an interest in spheres of experience that collide with one another are emerging in the art scene: The works of Jonathan Meese and André Butzer reflect depression and compulsive phenomena; they are seen as representatives of “Neurotic Realism“. The subject of Franz Ackermann’s “Mental Maps”, in which he points out the disasters behind the facades, is the world as a global village. Tino Sehgal, whose art exists only at the time it is performed and is not allowed to be filmed, is aiming for forms of production and communication that have nothing to do with the market economy. The interest shown in art in Germany can also be witnessed at the documenta, the leading exhibition of contemporary art worldwide held every five years in Kassel; documenta 13 will open on June 9, 2012.

As opposed to the Fine Arts – whose importance is underlined by the boom in the foundation of new private museums – photography had to struggle for a long time to be accepted as an art form in its own right. Katharina Sieverding, who in her self portraits sounds out the boundaries between the individual and society, is considered to be a 1970s pioneer. The breakthrough came in the 1990s with the success of three young men who studied under the photographer duo Bernd and Hilla Becher: Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff portray in their pictures a double-edged high-gloss reality and possess such a trailblazing international influence that they are simply referred to as “Struffsky".

Source: http://www.tatsachen-ueber-deutschland.de/en/culture-and-media/main-content-09/fine-arts.html

German literature - German Media

What is literature today (2012)?
What is needed to call something literature?
Who drives literature? Who consumes it?
How does literature link into the media topic?
What is the difference between a newspaper article on-line and a book with a spine?
Haptic value, use, distribution, value to the archive of human knowledge and daily exchange of information?
The Media topic relates directly to the literature topic.  Read the dw article, mirrored here.


We will hear about famous authors who wrote in German. You will hear Goethe and Schiller most often, referring to authors who lived and worked together at the beginning of the 19th century in Weimar. Google Friedrich Schiller and Johann Worlgang von Goethe (the more important one). They are classics, and Goethe is often compared to Shakespeare because Goethe is part of every German curriculum, as is Shakespeare.

To get an idea about literature and the past one thousand years of it in the middle of Europe,  I recommend the on-line article from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, here the clip in case you cannot access it on-line. Click on the image on the left and see how the Encyclopaedia Britannica offers related articles that may be of interest for you.

Homework for Wednesday

please expand in a blog post on either of the health topics, or the role of women. All other groups need to present next Wednesday. A handout works better, don't you think? The following week we will look at the youth culture in Berlin and see "Berlin calling". Many of you wanted to address the topics food and leasure-time activities, and I will try to include that after our Baader-Meinhof topics when we will address the generation of 68ers and the "invention" of modern terrorism.