Letter from the Department Head

Dear Alumni and Friends,

Rather than sending out the usual annual newsletter, we are trying out a new format this year. If you have access to the Internet, I would like to invite you to visit our newly enhanced Web page, which contains a wealth of information about our department, our faculty and various programs, and our News and Events page. In this letter, I will give you a brief overview of upcoming events and provide you with links to sites where you can find more in-depth information and visual illustrations.

Highlights of the Past Academic Year:

• Our Centennial Conference in October, which brought together a large number of scholars, journalists, and dignitaries for three days of lectures, banquets, and an excursion to the Central Pennsylvania countryside, was a rousing success (for a retrospective look at the program, click here). We all had so much fun that we decided to create an annual symposium devoted to the German heritage in Pennsylvania. This years event is planned for Saturday, October 12, and will feature a lecture on Amish and Mennonite agriculture, a trip to the Amish communities in Big Valley, a presentation of two recently acquired collections at the University Libraries, and a Pennsylvania German banquet. Roger Cohen, the deputy foreign editor and former Berlin correspondent of the New York Times, will be delivering our Preisner Lecture on the preceding afternoon. Alumni are cordially invited. You will receive a more detailed program and registration form later in the year. Updated information can also be found at http://german.la.psu.edu/germanday.htm.
• On April 9, Wolfgang Ischinger, the German ambassador to the United States, visited the Penn State campus and our department. Pictures of this memorable event can be found here.
• During the Spring Semester, Simon Richter, the chair of the German Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and Peter Hohendahl, the Jacob Schurmann Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, provided us with intellectual stimulation. Professor Richter talked about Friedensreich Hundertwassers imaginative remodeling of a GDR-area high school, whereas Professor Hohendahl addressed the relevance of Jrgen Habermas theory of the public sphere in an age of globalization.

Faculty Publications:

Three of our colleagues published books in 2001. Gerhard Strasser's Emblematik und Mnemonik der frhen Neuzeit appeared in Germany, and Michael Naydans bilingual Ukranian-English edition of Lina Kostenkos poetry, entitled Landscapes of Memory, came out in Lviv, Ukraine. Michael Hager, our German language coordinator, published his new textbook Deutsch im Berufsalltag. The book introduces students to German for business and social situations and contrasts German and American contemporary culture. It has been successfully used this year at Penn State and a host of other institutions. For a sneak preview of some sample pages, go to http://german.la.psu.edu/book.htm. Information about the book can also be found at http://deutsch.heinle.com.

Students:

We have been successful in recruiting some highly qualified and unusual graduate students for our new Ph.D. option in German and Applied Linguistics. One of them is Nina Vyatkina, a native of Tomsk, Siberia, with a degree in German from Moscow State University. Sabine Storch, our 2001/02 exchange student from Kiel, wrote a profile of Nina that will be published in State College Magazine. The text of her article can be found at http://german.la.psu.edu/student.htm. One of our graduate students in German literature, Heide Crawford, who is completing her dissertation on The Vampire Figure in the German Horror Ballad since the Eighteenth Century, has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Kansas for Fall 2003. There is positive news to report about our undergraduate students as well. Nathan Shrefler, a graduating senior in the Schreyer Honors College, obtained a Fulbright Teaching Scholarship. He will be teaching English at the Freiherr-vom-Stein-Schule in Gladenbach, a small town outside of Marburg.

Slavic Program:

We obtained an institutional grant from the Department of Defense together with the College of Agricultural Science to foster an exchange program between Penn State and Moscow State Agroengineering University. This summer, our Russian culture course will be offered entirely on-line in collaboration with the College of Agricultural Sciences (for a course preview, see http://www.onlinelearning.psu.edu/r100). In the fall semester we will offer a Russian language course for agriculturalists that will be transmitted simultaneously to various other locations in the country. Similar plans for Ukrainian culture and language courses are underway.

Fasching and Weihnachtliederabend:

For the second time, we organized a Fasching Party for German undergraduate students and faculty at Schnitzels Tavern in Bellefonte. Students from Vickie Zieglers German literature class performed two Schwänke by Hans Sachs. At our traditional Weihnachtsliederabend last December, the musical entertainment was provided entirely by our students and faculty, including a barbershop quartet composed of German majors, graduate students playing the oboe and providing vocal solos, and the department head on the piano. Our ad hoc chorus of Germanists produced a recording of "Stille Nacht" and "O Tannenbaum" as the background soundtrack for an interview with author Stanley Weintraub on his book The Christmas Truce, which was broadcast to a nationwide audience December 23 on the CBS Sunday Morning show. We were supposed to sound like WW I German soldiers, and apparently we did!

If you have any comments or questions, I would love to hear from you. My personal e-mail address is ajw3@psu.edu. If you would like to receive future updates electronically, which would allow you to instantly click on any or all of the links, please send us your e-mail address. And of course I hope that you have noted October 12 as the date for your homecoming to Happy Valley this year!

With best regards,

Adrian Wanner
Department Head