Strange Bedfellows and Their Grandchildren: German Literature as Evidence and Confession of Reunification

From Hegel to Merkel, from Bismarck to BMW, German culture has defined and re-defined itself through a cycle of reaction; thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Modern Germany has certainly not escaped this pattern, existing in a very deep and surprisingly present way in reaction to the collapse of the East German state and the formation of a unified Germany. This paper examines the ways in which contemporary German authors evidence this reaction in their work. As a nation at the heart of the East/West divide throughout the Cold War, Germany provides an ideal lens through which to view the shifting cultural, economic, artistic and societal trends of the last three decades. Feelings of powerlessness, loss and nostalgia are evidenced within these trends. Even a small sampling of contemporary German sources sheds light on the ways in which national and personal trauma are internalized and digested—both in the individual and in society as a whole. Using the novels Simple Stories (Schultze, 2002), Berlin Blues (Regener, 2001), and the short stories Ubuville (1998) and German Lesson (Wondratschek, 1998) among others, this paper examines the ways in which contemporary German authors manifest this reaction in their work. This paper demonstrates that although the works vary in form and tone, they all display the feelings of disaffection and the omnipresence of the reunification as the great ,“elephant in the room” of modern Germany. The forceful merging of two nations, two political systems and two peoples, left behind a great and living trauma, one which is made manifest daily in the thoughts and actions of Germans (especially in the East) and in their creative output. As attention in the global West was focused unilaterally on the West Germans and the financial burden they bore as a result of reunification, the real plight of reunification and the true force of the trauma (that is, the trauma endured by East Germans) was largely ignored. This paper is thus useful in not only sounding the depths of modern German literature, but also in defining the effects of reunification on those that faced regionalist discrimination and financial pillaging at the hands of the global West. This paper demonstrates how, in the ever shifting maelstrom of an increasingly globalized world, post-unification Germans and particularly former East Germans are an ideal subject of study to increase our understanding of inter- and pan-generational trauma and the resultant processes of personal identification in which we all, to some degree, take part

A three stage model for adsorption of nonionic surfactants

Copyright @ 1993 American Institute of Physics.A three stage model for the adsorption of nonionic surfactants is proposed which makes use of existing theory from studies of random sequential adsorption. The model is simulated and the adsorption curves are found. The theory of random sequential adsorption is used to calculate the coverage exactly at the end of each of the three stages

Spin diffusion of correlated two-spin states in a dielectric crystal

Reciprocal space measurements of spin diffusion in a single crystal of calcium fluoride (CaF$_2$) have been extended to dipolar ordered states. The experimental results for the component of the spin diffusion parallel with the external field are $D_{D}^{||}=29 \pm 3 \times 10^{-12}$ cm$^{2}$/s for the [001] direction and $D_{D}^{||}=33 \pm 4 \times 10^{-12}$ cm$^{2}$/s for the [111] direction. The diffusion rates for dipolar order are significantly faster than those for Zeeman order and are considerably faster than predicted by simple theoretical models. It is suggested that constructive interference in the transport of the two spin state is responsible for this enhancement. As expected the anisotropy in the diffusion rates is observed to be significantly less for dipolar order compared to the Zeeman case.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Resubmitted to PRL - new figure added / discussion expande

Adversarially Trained Autoencoders for Parallel-Data-Free Voice Conversion

We present a method for converting the voices between a set of speakers. Our method is based on training multiple autoencoder paths, where there is a single speaker-independent encoder and multiple speaker-dependent decoders. The autoencoders are trained with an addition of an adversarial loss which is provided by an auxiliary classifier in order to guide the output of the encoder to be speaker independent. The training of the model is unsupervised in the sense that it does not require collecting the same utterances from the speakers nor does it require time aligning over phonemes. Due to the use of a single encoder, our method can generalize to converting the voice of out-of-training speakers to speakers in the training dataset. We present subjective tests corroborating the performance of our method

Deoxyguanosine-resistant Leukemia L1210 Cells: Loss of Specific Deoxyribonecleoside Kinase Activity

A mouse leukemia L1210 cell line was selected for resistance to deoxyguanosine. The deoxyguanosine-resistant cells (dGuo-R) were 126-fold less sensitive to deoxyguanosine than the wild-type cells. The IC50 values for araC and araG were increased, but only 10-12-fold in the dGuo- R cells when compared with the wild-type cells. The dGuo-R cell line showed an increased level of resistance to 2-fluoro-2'-deoxyadenosine and 2-fluoroadenine arabinoside (11-14-fold), but essentially no increase in resistance to deoxyadenosine or adenine arabinoside. Deoxyribonucleoside kinase activity was decreased only slightly (19%) when deoxycytidine was utilized as substrate; when cytosine arabinoside or deoxyguanosine was used as the substrate, the kinase activity in the extracts from the dGuo-R cells was only 10% of the enzyme activity in the extracts from the wild-type cells. The determination of the kinetic parameters, Km and Vmax, indicated that there were marked decreases in the Vmax values for deoxyguanosine and cytosine arabinoside as substrates, but not for deoxycytidine as substrate; the Km values for deoxycytidine and cytosine arabinoside were increased in the extracts from the dGuo-R cells. By use of high-performance liquid chromatography, the kinase activities in the extracts from the wild-type and resistant cells could be resolved. There was the specific loss of kinase activity toward cytosine arabinoside and deoxyguanosine as substrates. These data indicate that the dGuo-R cells have decreased levels of a specific deoxyribonucleoside kinase activity. Originally published Journal of Biological Chemistry, Vol. 268, No. 1, Jan 199

Information and Opportunistic Behavior in Federal Crop Insurance Programs

Opportunistic behavior in crop insurance can arise due to asymmetric information between producers and the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation. Producers who insure fields using transitional yields based on county average yields or who select options such as buy-up coverage or revenue insurance may increase their return from crop insurance. Using field-level crop insurance contract data for several crops in five growing regions, we find evidence that producers can profit from using buy-up coverage, revenue insurance, and transitional yields and that the level of producer opportunism is crop but not necessarily land-quality specific and is greater due to premium subsidization.opportunistic behavior, crop insurance, buy-up, revenue, transitional yields