The collected essays in Migration and Cultural Contact: Germany and Australia investigate historical documents, letters, film, literature and other cultural sources to reveal how each country influenced the culture, intellectual thought and aesthetics of the other from earliest colonial times through to today.

This book approaches Australo-German relations from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. It maps new pathways into the rich landscape of the Australo-German transnational encounter, which is characterized by dense and interwoven cultural, historical and political terrains. Surveying an astonishingly wide range of sites from literary translations to film festivals, Aboriginal art to education systems, the contributions offer a uniquely expansive dossier on the migrations of people, ideas, technologies, money and culture between the two countries. The links between Australia and Germany are explored from a variety of new, interdisciplinary perspectives, and situated within key debates in literary and cultural studies, critical theory, politics, linguistics and transnational studies. The book gathers unique contributions that span the areas of migra tion, aboriginality, popular culture, music, media and institutional structures to create a dynamic portrait of the exchanges between these two nations over time. Australo-German relations have emerged from intersecting histories of colonialism, migration, communication, tourism and socio-cultural representation into the dramatically changed twenty-first century, where traditional channels of connection between nations in the Western hemisphere have come undone, but new channels ensure cross-fertilization between newly constituted borders.

His books includes Czech-German Relations and the Politics of Central Europe (2002).

This book deals with immigration processes of Germans who have arrived in Australia since 1945. It is an attempt to catch the voices of these people, to let them talk about their hopes, aspirations, achievements and disappointments. In 2010 notices were sent out all over Australia, asking Germans (most of them Australians today) to write about their experiences, about challenges and positive happenings. The book contains 28 chapters written by German-born women and men from all walks of life, some came to Australia as children, some as adults, others talk about the lives of their immigrant parents, one person pays tribute to a partner he has lost recently, and who describes her impressions about university life in Germany and in Australia, another person looks back at twenty-three years in Australia and the fine line that divides him and the Australian people. Most, but not all, are success stories. This book also includes three chapters about organisations that provided a buffer zone for new arrivals in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: Club Harmony of Melbourne, the Club of the Danube Swabians in Adelaide, and the SA German Club. The final chapter is an interview with a person who had to flee Nazi Germany in 1938, with Ernie Salomon.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Constance, 8 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: ...] The aim of this work will be, on the one hand, to describe the history of German settlement on both continents, and more importantly of the influence of German on American English as well as on Australian English. On the other hand, a direct comparison between the German influences will be made, and hopefully it will prove that even though half the globe separates both continents from each other, there are similarities to be found. It is to be expected though, that if there are analogies, they will be regionally restricted, since both in the United States and in Australia, contact situations seem to be restricted to those areas where Germans settled from the earliest days on. Beside the clarification of some general definitions, which will prove necessary for an understandable analysis, the difficulties in researching this topic will be made evident. One thing that will not be considered in this examination is the influence of Yiddish- German on American English since, one the one hand, it proves hard to differentiate exactly between the German and the Yiddish aspects and on the other hand because the Jewish impact on Australian English is marginal. Therefore Yiddish-German is rather unimportant in the comparison of both varieties. ...]

This book presents a comparative study of Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) and Mário de Andrade (1893-1945), analysing their contributions to oral language traditions and to the body of criticism on modernism. This is the first work to offer an analysis of Tzara’s posthumously published prose Personnage d’insomnie, and the first in the English language that explores de Andrade’s libretto for the opera Café, as well as other examples of their poetry and prose. The Romanian Jewish poet and writer Tzara, later a naturalised French citizen, became a central figure in the European avant–garde from 1916 when he took part in the Dada Movement. Mario de Andrade, the Brazilian poet, writer and musicologist of mixed origins, was a contemporary of Tzara and a similarly central figure in the 1922 São Paulo Modern Art Week that defined Brazilian Modernism. Both emerged from very different backgrounds, but they followed a parallel creative path. This book discusses their research and adaptation of various language manifestations, ethnopoetics and folk traditions that led them to the creation of distinct and individual styles. The historical and socio-political events of the late 1930s would later prompt both authors to develop militant poetics. Through chronologically compatible case studies, the reader will discover that Tzara and de Andrade, alongside their playful language, actively criticised cultural imperialism and advocated against hate. Journeys can be physical and intellectual; they can crisscross, leave traces and overlap. This book takes the reader from two starting points, a small Romanian town in the foothills of the Carpathians, and a two-storey house in an unusually tranquil street in São Paulo, Brazil, to the heart of the twentieth-century avant-garde. As it shows, Tristan Tzara and Mário de Andrade traversed borders and geographical points, and their poetics meet in Mozambique, Parisian cafés and Bantu chants.

This volume trace ways in which time is represented in reverse forms throughout modernist culture, from the beginning of the twentieth century until the decade after World War II. Though modernism is often associated with revolutionary or futurist directions, this book argues instead that a retrograde dimension is embedded within it. By juxtaposing the literature of Europe and North America with that of Australia and New Zealand, it suggests how this antipodean context serves to defamiliarize and reconceptualize normative modernist understandings of temporal progression. Backgazing thus moves beyond the treatment of a specific geographical periphery as another margin on the expanding field of 'New Modernist Studies'. Instead, it offers a systematic investigation of the transformative effect of retrograde dimensions on our understanding of canonical modernist texts. The title, 'backgazing', is taken from Australian poet Robert G. FitzGerald's 1938 poem 'Essay on Memory', and it epitomizes how the cultural history of modernism can be restructured according to a radically different discursive map. Backgazing intellectually reconfigures US and European modernism within a planetary orbit in which the literature of Australia and the Southern Hemisphere, far from being merely an annexed margin, can be seen substantively to change the directional compass of modernism more generally. By reading canonical modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot alongside marginalized writers such as Nancy Cunard and others and relatively neglected authors from Australia and New Zealand, this book offers a revisionist cultural history of modernist time, one framed by a recognition of how its measurement is modulated across geographical space.

How have Australia, France and Germany engaged with immigration and ethnic diversity? Are there national stereotypes that have blocked effective policy-making and exacerbated conflicts? This book looks at the role of the social sciences in national discourses of migration and how scholars can explain how migration is shaping global society.

Today Europe stands at a crossroads unlike any it has faced since 1945. Since the 2008 financial crash, Europe has weathered the Greek debt crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis, and the identity crisis brought about by Brexit in 2016. The future of the European project is in doubt. How will Europe respond? Reform and revolution have been two forms of response to crisis that have shaped Europe’s history. To understand Europe’s present, we must understand that past. This interdisciplinary book considers, through the prism of several landmark moments, how the dynamics of reformation and revolution, and the crises they either addressed or created, have shaped European history, memory, and thought.

[Truncated abstract] This thesis explores gender as a social structure (comparable in its effect to other structures such as race, ethnicity and class) and its impact on the migration of German-born women to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. I argue, that the concept of 'gender culture', a catalogue of 'appropriate' behavior societies create for and with male and female members, influenced significantly migration opportunities and policies, and infused every aspect of the migration experience of these women. In my thesis I investigate how women operated under the given constraints of gender culture in West Germany and Australia and reproduced, arranged themselves with or rejected these norms in a migration context. The study is drawing on methodological approaches developed in women's and gender studies, oral history and anthropology. In the past three decades research on female migration has blossomed: scholars today come from numerous disciplinary backgrounds, apply various methodologies and have in general turned their attention to gender as a category of analysis. The migration of German-born people to Australia in the post-War period, however, still awaits such a gender-focused analysis even though German-born migrants represented the third largest non-English speaking group of migrants between 1945 and 1961 in Western Australia. My thesis is a starting point in addressing this gap in exploring how gender impacted on the migration of German-born women. My thesis demonstrates that a previous understanding of women as dependent, secondary migrants does not hold up to closer historical scrutiny which is based on feminist oral history, re-reads of archival material, and is informed by recent developments in the interdisciplinary field that is migration studies, such as transnationalism and the study of emotions and social relations. In the first part of my thesis I try to arrive at a better understanding of the conditions and regulations of female migration set out by the migration policies in place. In the act of creating migration categories such as 'bride', 'wife' and 'mother' accumulated in the expression 'dependent', governmental agencies shaped and gendered the migration of German-born people to Australia. Access and support, via the Assistant Passage Scheme and information services, were only granted to women if they fitted inside these categories. ... I further explore how women negotiated their position in their multiple roles as daughters, wives and mothers at the intersection of gender, migration, class and emotion. My findings show that migration for participants was at all times a highly intricate, often ambiguous and sometimes even contradictory experience. Migration could bring personal gains but also held the potential for conflict when migrants were not able to bridge the rift between ideals (as represented in gender culture) and lived realities. Drawing on interviews with migrating women, documentation of migration policies, information material and case files this study shows how gender permeates institutional as much as individual realms of action. My research unveils how notions of womanhood, as represented in contemporary West German and Australian gender cultures, structured women's migration experiences and women's understanding of their own biographies. Gender is identified as a powerful tool of social stratification, which mediates social interaction but it is also a medium through which policies and regulations transcend into social reality.