Benn‘s manifold and excessive intertextuality can be interpreted as his way of writing modern poetry. In comparison with traditional “Erlebnislyrik” he achieves modernity through an alienation of the world using the terminology of positivist medicine in his expressionistic period. Later, face to the disoriented Weimar society he, like many contemporaries, is clinging to the old meanings and forms of myth. During the 50ies he gets involved in the new perception of phraseology of mass media and the appeal of modern everyday life. The return to the lyrical tradition during the 30ies and 40ies is a well-directed borrowing to confirm his own way under the threat of the Third Reich. Thus Benn creates his modern poetry by referring to the insights, experiences, and expressions of other authors that transgress the existing limits in literature and poetry.

The negative stereotypization of East European Jews by assimilated West European Jews had both social and ideological grounds, and resulted from viewing East European Jews as a group of alien identity, that is of dissimilar language, culture and customs. The aim of the paper is to characterize the negative stereotype of East European Jews on the basis of analysis of Nathan Birnbaum’s press articles that attempted to break with this stereotype. The author focuses on the investigation of problems related to Ashkenazi identity in its general context and analyses these of its aspects that most frequently become the source of negative ethnic stereotypes, namely religious, linguistic and cultural.

This paper attempts to provide a synthetic characteristic of the reception modes of Cathedral of Cologne predominating in poetry from c. 1800 to the early 20th century. The paper discusses the three basic reception modes of the Gothic – as a sacred place, as a natural style, as the German national style. The unfinished Cologne Cathedral was perceived after the Napoleonic wars as a symbol of the former glory of the German Nation. However, as the works on the completion of the building were progressing, the nostalgia about the past was gradually replaced by the national pride, which is visible in the metaphors used: in the second half of the 19th century we can observe the growing popularity of the “geological” similes (the cathedral as a mountain or rock), whose purpose is not only to reflect the “naturalness” and size of the Cologne church, but also the power of the nation which built it.

In the article I attempt to analyze Kathrin Röggla’s “cinematic style” using a theory which assumes the simulation of media-related forms in literature (e.g. Philipp Löser’s works). Her literary style is characterized by features such as film metaphor (e.g. the “dual perception” phenomenon), editing seemingly unconnected scenes, citations from TV and interview recordings, and narration inspired by film techniques such as time-lapse and slow motion. The author seems to be fascinated by Japanese anime and Harun Farocki’s film essays. David Lynch’s and Tom Tykwer’s masterpieces function as metaphors for today’s entangled reality in her work. In “tokio, rückwärtstagebuch” she depicts the culture clash phenomenon similarly to Sofia Coppola in Lost in Translation. Both Kathrin Röggla and Susan Sontag criticize the voyeuristic personality of modern man and the influence of our media-dominated culture on the means of artistic expression.

Im Laufe der Krakauer Tagung des Verbandes Polnischer Germanisten fand am 11. Mai 2013 in der historischen Aula des Collegium Maius die feierliche Überreichung der Ehrenstatueten des Verbandes Polnischer Germanisten an Dr. Gisela Janetzke von der Humboldt-Stiftung und Prof. Dr. Heinz Vater aus Köln statt. Die beiden Wissenschaftler wurden für ihren hervorragenden Beitrag zur Intensivierung und zur Festigung der deutsch-polnischen wissenschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit ausgezeichnet. Die zu diesem Anlass im Collegium Maius zahlreich erschienenen Gäste wurden durch die Prorektorin der Jagellonen-Universität Kraków, Prof. Dr. Maria-Jolanta Flis und die Präsidentin des Verbandes Polnischer Germanisten, Prof. Dr. Zofia Berdychowska, begrüßt. Die Verdienste der beiden Preisträger beschrieb hiernach in seinen Laudationes der Ehrenvorsitzende des Verbandes Polnischer Germanisten, Prof. Dr. Franciszek Grucza. Der Wortlaut der beiden Lobreden sowie die Dankesworte der beiden preisgekrönten Wissenschaftler seien nachstehend angeführt.