Ceremonial Storytelling

US society has controversially debated civil-military relationships and war trauma since the Vietnam War. Civic activists today promote Indigenous warrior traditions as role models for non-Native veteran reintegration and health care. They particularly stress the role of ritual and narrative for civil-military negotiations of war experience and for trauma therapy. Applying a cultural-comparative lens, this book reads non-Native soldiers’ and veterans’ life writing from post-9/11 wars as «ceremonial storytelling.» It analyzes activist academic texts, «milblogs» written in the war zone, as well as «homecoming scenarios.» Soldiers’ and veterans’ interactions with civilians constitute jointly constructed, narrative civic rituals that discuss the meaning of war experience and homecoming

Clash of Cultures? "Noble Savages" in Germany and America

Als Ferdinand Pettrich im September 1835 in den USA eintraf, waren Vorstellungen vom Wesen amerikanischer Ureinwohner in den deutschen Staaten bereits ausgeprägt und folgten bestimmten Mustern. Die Zeit der Indianerbegeisterung als Massenphänomen, die Karl May zum meistgelesenen deutschsprachigen Schriftsteller machte und Hunderttausende in die Vorstellungen amerikanischer und deutscher Wild-West-Shows trieb, lag damals zwar noch etliche Jahrzehnte in der Zukunft, und die bildlichen Vorstellungen vom berittenen Krieger der Prärien als dem ‚Standardindianer' würden sich erst ab Ende der 1830er- und während der 1840er-Jahre mit den Illustrationen von Bodmer und Catlin entwickeln. Jedoch war ‚der Indianer' bereits ein fester Bestandteil in der Vorstellungswelt von Amerika wie auch der eigenen Gruppenidentität. Bereits an den ersten transatlantischen Erkundungsreisen waren Deutsche beteiligt, frühe Berichte über die Bewohner dieser ‚neuen Welt' verbreiteten sich Dank der Entwicklung des Buchdrucks schnell durch Mitteleuropa. Beim Eintreffen Pettrichs in Amerika war Coopers Letzter Mohikaner bereits in der deutschen Übersetzung erschienen und zum Verkaufsschlager geworden.When Ferdinand Pettrich arrived in the United States in September 1835, perceptions about the nature of Native Americans had already become established and followed certain patterns. The era of Indian enthusiasm as a mass phenomenon—which made Karl May the most-read writer in the German-speaking world and drove hundreds of thousands to American and German Wild West shows—at that time still lay a number of decades in the future. Pictorial representations of mounted warriors of the prairie, which became the ‘standard Indian,’ were first developed through the illustrations of Karl Bodmer and George Catlin around the end of the 1830s and during the 1840s. Nevertheless, 'the Indian' was already a standard part of the vocabulary of perception for America—as well as of the Germans’ self-perception as a group. Germans took part in the fi rst transatlantic explorations, and early reports about the inhabitants of this ‘new world’ spread across Central Europe thanks to the quick development of the printing press. Upon Pettrich’s arrival in America, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last Mohican had already been translated into German, becoming a bestseller there

Fighting Like Indians. The "Indian Scout Syndrome" in American and German War Reports of World War II

Whether invoking the noble—or the cruel—savage, the image of Native Americans has always included notions of war and fighting. Non-Natives have attributed character traits to them such as cunning, stealth, endurance, and bravery; and they have used these im ages to denounce or to idealize Native Americans. In the U.S., a prolon ged history of frontier conflict, multiplied by popular frontier myths, has resulted in a collective memory of Indians as fighters. While images of fighting Indians have entered American everyday language, Germans have had no significant collective history of American frontier settlement and conflicts with Native Americans. Nevertheless, they have acquired a number of idioms and figures of speech relating to Indian images due to the romanticized euphoria for Native themes, spurred by popular nove ls and Wild West shows

Simulation of Multiregional Population Change: An Application to the German Democratic Republic

This paper uses the multiregional demographic model to simulate to the year 2030 six scenarios of population development in the German Democratic Republic. It extends the work of the Migration and Settlement case study for the GDR by Mohs (1980) by illustrating how the model can be used as a tool for making simulations that are based on changing rates of fertility, mortality, and migration

The Lifecycle of "Facts": A Survey of Social Bias in Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graphs are increasingly used in a plethora of downstream tasks or in the augmentation of statistical models to improve factuality. However, social biases are engraved in these representations and propagate downstream. We conducted a critical analysis of literature concerning biases at different steps of a knowledge graph lifecycle. We investigated factors introducing bias, as well as the biases that are rendered by knowledge graphs and their embedded versions afterward. Limitations of existing measurement and mitigation strategies are discussed and paths forward are proposed.Comment: Accepted to AACL-IJCNLP 202