Politics, Radicalism and Anglo-German Relations: The Reception of Ernst Moritz Arndt in Early 19th-Century Britain

This essay presents the early reception of Ernst Moritz Arndt in Britain. Retrieving this largely forgotten engagement with Arndt, and engagement of Arndt as it turns out, provides two insights. On a more general level it illustrates the influence of political constellations and political expediency on the introduction and reception of authors and texts. On a more specific level, it gives an insight into the engagement of young English liberals with the (radical) political thinking of the German Wars of Liberation, especially with its liberal and spiritual aspects, and its efforts to exert influence in a growing and increasingly powerful public sphere

Constitutionalism and cultural identity as revolutionary concepts in German political radicalism 1806-1819: the case of the Burschenschaftler Karl Follen

The aim of this essay is to investigate the concepts of cultural identity and national sovereignty as they emerge in radical German nationalism after 1806 in relation to French Revolutionary ideas and seek to reconstruct a radical revolutionary, i.e. a ‘French Revolution’, context for the idea of German national unity. Such a ‘French Revolution’ context differs from attempts to create national unity ‘from above’, it also questions the view that the ‘Teutomania’ emerging in the context of the Wars of Liberation can only be interpreted as the precursor to chauvinist German nationalism of later periods

‘Incorrigible Jacobins’: Hazlitt’s Engagement with German Literature

The fact that William Hazlitt engaged closely with contemporary German literature throughout his life has so far not received any detailed attention in Hazlitt research. The essay focuses on Hazlitt's assessment of German drama put forward in his third lecture series on Elizabethan drama, given in December 1819, and argues that his characterization of contemporary German drama as revolutionary and 'paradoxical' is intended to suggest to his audience that this kind of literature can function as a model for socially and politically progressive English literature. German literature's model function is facilitated by what Hazlitt outlines as the close kinship between the English and German literary traditions. Hazlitt's argument that German literature is revolutionary is informed by key ideas from German Sturm und Drang and German Romantic cultural theory, which he appears to draw from August Wilhelm Schlegel. Hazlitt's characterization of German literature as 'paradoxical', however, relies on his own definition of this term as describing possibly irresponsible, yet revolutionary effective, iconoclastic art and thought. This paradoxical quality of contemporary German literature derives, for Hazlitt, from its recent revolutionary heritage

From Teamchef Arminius to Hermann Junior: glocalised discourse about a national foundation myth

If for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest’, fought in 9 CE between Roman armies and Germanic tribes, was predominantly a reference point for nationalist and chauvinist discourses in Germany, the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen attempts to link public remembrance with local/regional identities on the one hand and international/intercultural contact on the other. In the run up to and during the ‘anniversary year’ of 2009, German media, sports institutions and various other official institutions articulating tourist, economic and political interests attempted to create a new ‘glocalised’ version of the public memory of the Teutoburg battle. Combining methods of Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper analyses the narrative and argumentative topoi employed in this re-orientation of public memory, with a special emphasis on hybrid, post-national identity-construction. Das zweitausendjährige Gedenkjahr der „Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald“ im Jahr 2009 bot eine günstige Gelegenheit, die bis in die zweite Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts dominante Tradition nationalistisch–chauvinistischer Deutungen des Sieges von germanischen Stämmen über drei römische Legionen zu korrigieren und zu überwinden. Der Aufsatz analysiert mit Hilfe diskurslinguistischer Methoden die Anstrengungen regionaler Institutionen und Medien, die nationale Vereinnahmung des historischen Gedenkens kritisch zu thematisieren sowie neue, zum eine lokal situierte, zum andern international orientierte Identifikationsangebote anzubieten. Die Analyse zeigt, dass solche „de-nationalisierten“ Identifikationsangebote zwar teilweise auch früher verwendet wurden, aber heutzutage rekontextualisiert und auf innovative Weise in den Vordergrund gestellt werden

The return of King Arthur and the Niebelungen The significance of national myth in nineteenth-century English and German literature

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DX180258 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

The emergence and dissemination of positive Word-of-Mouth through the construction of an emotional connection to a brand using the example of Starbucks

Mundpropaganda gilt als eines der wirksamsten Marketinginstrumente. Bei Recherchen zum Thema ist die Autorin auf das auf Kaffeeprodukte spezialisierte Einzelhandelsunternehmen Starbucks gestoßen. Die Arbeit wird Aufschluss darüber geben, wie Starbucks ohne den Einsatz von Werbung, sondern durch den Aufbau einer emotionalen Verbundenheit zwischen Konsument und Marke, positive Mundpropaganda entfacht und dadurch zu einem weltweit bekannten Unternehmen geworden ist. Zusätzlich wird die Entwicklung der Mundpropaganda, angefangen bei der Entstehung über die Verbreitung bis hin zur Transformation in weitere, der heutigen Zeit angepasste, Formen beschrieben. Zur Überprüfung der Analysen aus dem theoretischen Teil dient eine empirische Untersuchung innerhalb der Anspruchsgruppen. Die Ergebnisse bestätigen, dass im Falle von Starbucks das Hervorrufen von Emotionen und das Schaffen von Erlebnissen ausschlaggebend für die Entstehung emotionaler Konsumenten-Marken-Beziehung sind. Das Zusammentreffen dieser Voraussetzungen in Kombination mit der hohen Bereitschaft der Konsumenten, gewonnene Erfahrungen weiterzugeben, lassen im Idealfall positive Mundpropaganda entstehen