The article is a brief introduction into the specifics and methodology of typological studies of indefinite pronouns, and presents the concept of an implicational map for indefinite pronoun functions, proposed by Haspelmath (1997). The implicational map identifies nine core functions (contexts) of indefinite pronouns that must be distinguished for the purposes of cross-linguistic comparison, and shows the semantic complexity of indefinite reference. The typological analysis conducted in this article focuses on the main similarities and differences in the form and meaning potential of indefinite pronouns, and is restricted to the three major types of Polish and German indefinite pronouns.
 

The experience of reading the reports produced by various departments of the Lodz town government in the times of the Nazi occupation gives us a unique opportunity to become acquainted with the functioning of the fascist bureaucracy. There is much we can learn there about the work of the office in question and the lives of its officials in a broader context of the effectiveness of their activity. It transpires, for example, very clearly that no legal equality existed between the Germans and the Jews. This is corroborated by the fact that, in the rare cases of municipal claims against the Jews in the Lodz ghetto, those claims were upheld and enforced very meticulously.
 

The article presents a synthetic summary of the state of research on the Łódź ghetto. The author focuses on research by Polish and German scholars. The paper presents edited source texts, such as newspapers or reportages, one of the most important documents of the Holocaust literature, namely the “Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto / Litzmannstadt Getto”, as well as studies on various phenomena in the ghetto, such as culture and literature, daily life, or deportation of Jews from various German cities to the Łódź ghetto. The article also mentions the current works on subsequent editions.
 

The Amphitryon-theme ran through some interesting transformations within German literature. This article explores these variations in a wider comparative context. Instead of a thematological approach – that sometimes emanates from problematic notions of textuality, questionable processes of canonization, and philological and national boundaries – intertextual perspectives and post-structuralist psychoanalysis will be applied to examine the history of the theme. Against this background, the relationships among the characters will be analysed while simultaneously focusing on the processes of staging an identity. Thus, this article strives to prove two things: First of all, that all literary transformations of Amphitryon create a new and specific environment of rules, orders and disorders; thus, they represent rearrangements of the existing power-relations between gods and men. And secondly, that the most exciting aspects of the myth are perhaps only visible when the theme is not perceived within a genetically and chronologically structured history of influences and is taken out of philological and national boundaries.
 

In detailed investigations of the use of cases in present-day German, caused by Sebastian Sick‘s book Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod, I discovered that the statements by Sick (2004) present only half of the truth (or even less), since the replacement of the genitive by the dative is only part of more extensive changes: the dative is also replaced by the genitive (especially after prepositions), dative and accusative are exchanged, and all three oblique cases are exchanged by the nominative. My initial findings concerned cases assigned by verbs and prepositions as well as cases in appositives. Meanwhile, I noticed that you can find case changes also in conjoined NPs like den Leichen von Generalbundesanwalt Buback und seines Fahrers (rather than: seinem Fahrer). In my article many examples for case changes are presented and interpreted. They show the increasing uncertainty of speakers of German in their use of cases in all of the three affected areas (government by nouns and prepositions, apposition and coordination). We can draw the conclusion that the case system of German has become instable, that it is changing and might possibly be given up altogether − a change that already has taken place in all other Germanic languages except Islandic.
 

The number of migrants in contemporary Germany is constantly growing. There are also increasing problems arising as a result of cultural differences between the immigrants and the local population and also due to different habits of both groups. These differences, foreign traditions and their perception in Germany seem to be important topics from viewpoint of cultural studies not only for scientist, but also for students of German Studies, especially if the customs and forms of life become the subject of literature. In the following article the authoress is trying to bring near some of the main cultural differences between migrants and the local community depicted in the literature. To achieve this goal she analyses selected texts of German writers of Turkish origin. She also makes an attempt at answering the question whether and to what extent such a kind of literature can be useful for the audience outside Germany.