Cultural Handbook
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GERMANIC CULTURE
GEOGRAPHY
Q. What are the major German-speaking nations and their capital cities?
A. Berlin is the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany; Vienna is the capital of Austria , Bern is the capital of Switzerland .
Q. What are the national languages of Switzerland?
A. The official languages of Switzerland are German, French, Italian, and Rhaeto-Romanic. The latter is an Alpine Romance language spoken by only 1% of the Swiss.
Q. How large is Germany ?
A. The Federal Republic has close to 80 million inhabitants and is about as large as Montana.
Q. What are four major German cities?
A. Four major German cities are Hamburg in the north, Cologne in the west, Munich in the south, and Berlin in the east.
Q. What are four major German rivers?
A. The Elbe in the north, the Rhine in the west, the Danube in the south, the Oder in the east.
Q. What is Germany's and Europe's busiest seaport?
A. The North German city of Hamburg , on the Elbe River, is Europe's busiest seaport.
Q. What is Bavaria ?
A. Bavaria is the largest state in West Germany. It is located in the southern part of the country. The capital is Munich.
HISTORY
Q. Who was Charlemagne (Karl der Große)?
A. Charlemagne was king of the Germanic tribe called the Franks from 768 to 814 and ruled western Europe as emperor from 800 to 814.
Q. Who was Wilhelm Tell?
A. Wilhelm Tell was a legendary 14th-century Swiss freedom fighter. He was the hero of a drama by Friedrich Schiller (1804) which focuses on the Swiss people's struggle for independence.
Q. Who invented the printing press?
A. Johannes Gutenberg , in 1455 in the city of Mainz, invented printing with movable type. Surviving copies of his first work, the "Gutenberg Bible," are among the most valuable books in the world.
Q. Who was Martin Luther ?
A. Luther was a German monk whose theological challenge to the Roman Catholic Church unleashed the Protestant Reformation in 1517. Luther's translation of the Bible into German in 1534 was a major influence in the development of the modern German language.
Q. What was the Thirty Years War?
A. The Thirty Years War was a series of religious wars fought in Europe between 1618 and 1648. It was one of the most devastating wars for Germany, whose population was reduced from 18 million to 6 million people.
Q. Who were the two great cultural and political leaders of the eighteenth century?
A. Frederick the Great ruled Prussia for 46 years, while his rival Maria Theresia governed Austria for 40. Both monarchs presided over military, civil, and educational advances.
Q. Who were the authors of the Communist Manifesto?
A. Germans Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , living in London, wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848.
Q. Who was Otto von Bismarck ?
A. Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) was the first chancellor of the German empire. In 1871 the so-called "Iron Chancellor" managed to unify the thirty-two German states and principalities into one nation headed by the Prussian king as emperor.
Q. When were the two World Wars?
A. World War I began in 1914 and ended with an armistice in 1918. World War II began in 1939 with the German invasion of Poland and ended with Germany's unconditional surrender in 1945.
Q. Nazi Germany called itself "The Third Reich." What were the other two?
A. The Holy Roman Empire was the first, until 1806, and Bismarck's united Germany of 1871-1918 was the second.
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LANGUAGE
Q. What is a swastika?
A. The swastika, a twisted cross, was the emblem of Nazi Germany, officially adopted in 1935.
Q. What is Mein Kampf?
A. Mein Kampf (literally: My Battle) is a book by Adolf Hitler, setting forth his doctrines and program of National Socialism. It was written between 1924 and 1926.
Q. What does the word Nazi mean?
A. Nazi stands for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers Party.
Q. What does the word Gestapo stand for?
A. The Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) was the German internal security police as organized under the Nazi regime.
Q. Who was Konrad Adenauer ?
A. Konrad Adenauer was the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic (1949) and founder of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a conservative West German political party.
Q. What is referred to as the "economic miracle"?
A. The sensational recovery of the German economy after the devastation of World War II, stimulated by American aid through the Marshall Plan, is called the "economic miracle."
Q. What was the Berlin Wall , and when did it stand?
A. The Berlin Wall, a carefully guarded border between East and West Berlin, was erected in 1961 to halt the flow of refugees from East to West. Over 3 million citizens of the German Democratic Republic had fled to the West before the wall was built.
Q. What are the major stages in the development of the German language?
A. Primitive Germanic dialects developed into Old High German, for which only a few 8th- and 9th-century texts exist: Middle High German, the language of the medieval golden age, and New High German, the standard language since the 16th-century.
Q. What does the word Autobahn mean?
A. The word Autobahn means motorway, the name given to the superhighways in Germany. The construction of the roads was initiated by the Nazis primarily to carry troops but also to stimulate a sluggish economy.
Q. What does the word Blitzkrieg mean?
A. Blitzkrieg means war of lightning. It was the name given to intensive air raids and sudden military strikes of the Germans during World War II.
Q. What does the word Kafkaesque imply?
A. The word Kafkaesque refers to situations found in the works of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) in which the main characters try in vain to escape from a nightmare world.
Q. What is an umlaut?
A. The umlaut is the diacritical mark placed over German back vowels (a, o, u, au) to indicate a change in the vowel sound (ä, ö, ü, äu).
Q. What does the word Weltanschauung suggest?
A. Weltanschauung connotes a comprehensive world view or philosophy of life.
Q. What is meant by the word Gesamtkunstwerk?
A. A Gesamtkunstwerk is a total work of art. The word was coined by Richard Wagner to get across the concept that all art forms (music, singing, drama, painting) should be combined to give opera a higher standing.
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ARTS, LITERATURE, CULTURE
Q. What eras are referred to as the two great golden ages of Germanic culture?
A. The period around 1200, a great synthesis of culture called the High Middle Ages, and the decades around 1800, called the Age of Goethe , for Germany's greatest poet, are Germany's two golden ages.
Q. Who was Albrecht Dürer?
A. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was a German painter and engraver regarded as the inventor of etching. He was renowned for his woodcuts.
Q. Who were the two great German composers of the Baroque era of the early 18th century?
A. Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Händel were the great Baroque composers.
Q. Who was the composer of "Die Zauberflöte" (The Magic Flute)?
A. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) composed the Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, and 20 other operas.
Q. Which great composer is best known for his nine symphonies?
A. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) mastered many forms but was most famous for his nine symphonies.
Q. What is meant by Storm and Stress?
A. Storm and Stress (in German, Sturm und Drang) is the pre-Romantic literary movement (1760-85) which extols nature over civilization, originality over imitation, religion over irony, passion over convention, lyricism over didacticism, e.g. Goethe's Werther.
Q. Who were the Brothers Grimm ?
A. Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm were collectors of German fairy tales (e.g. Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel). They were also philologists and folklorists. They began the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary), a task completed only recently.
Q. What do we mean by the Hegelian dialectic?
A. G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher. His philosophy advocates a process of change whereby an ideational entity (thesis) is transformed into its opposite (antithesis) and preserved and fulfilled by it, the combination of the two being resolved in a higher form of truth (synthesis).
Q. What was Faust ?
A. Faust is Goethe's major work, a drama which incorporates the famous pact with the devil Mephistopheles. Faust, a magician and alchemist, bets his soul that Mephisto cannot satisfy his craving for knowledge, power, and worldly experience.
Q. What is a Bildungsroman?
A. A Bildungsroman, or novel of education, is a novel in which the young hero goes through a series of educational experiences which ultimately make him into an intelligent and perceptive human being, e.g. Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1795).
Q. Who are the most significant German authors of the twentieth century?
A. Novelists Thomas Mann ( The Magic Mountain ), Franz Kafka ( The Metamorphosis ), Günter Grass ( The Tin Drum ), and playwright Bertolt Brecht ( The Threepenny Opera ) are generally regarded as Germany's most prominent modern writers.
Q. Which area of Germany tends to preserve old customs and traditions longer?
A. The south tends to be more conservative, both culturally and politically.
Q. Which religious observances are commemorated by two consecutive national holidays? Which festival prompts the wildest celebrations?
A. Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost are two-day holidays. Carnival, the equivalent of New Orleans' Mardi Gras, is the wildest celebration, especially "Rose Monday," two days before Ash Wednesday.
Q. What is a BMW?
A. A BMW is an expensive and well made German car. The letters stand for Bayerische Motorenwerke or Bavarian Motor Works.
Q. What was the German Democratic Republic ?
A. The GDR was a communist state established in 1949 the post-World War II Soviet Occupation Zone. It was closely allied with the Soviet Union and a member of the eastern European military alliance known as The Warsaw Pact. The GDR ceased to exist on October 3, 1990, when German reunification made it part of the Federal Republic.
Q. Who is the present chancellor of Germany?
A. Gerhard Schröder, leader of the Social Democrats, is the chancellor of the Federal Republic.
Q. Which of the 16 German states are city-states?
A. The city-states of the Federal Republic are Hamburg, Bremen, and Berlin.
Q. What are Germany's two leading political parties?
A. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU; conservative) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD; liberal) are the major parties in the Federal Republic.
Q. To which political and miltary alliances do the Germanic nations belong?
A. The Federal Republic is aligned with the western democracies and belongs to NATO . Austria and Switzerland are western-style democracies and are militarily neutral.