Sprachbewahrung nach der Emigration - das Deutsch der 20er Jahre in Israel
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In collaboration with:
Sigrid Graßl
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Edited by:
Anne Betten
In 165 extracts from interviews conducted in Israel between 1989 and 1994, a total of 121 German-speaking Jews able to escape from Nazi Germany in the thirties are recorded here, communicating personal memories and views on various subjects. They originate from a variety of areas in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland. Equally varied are their family and social background, the ways in which they found their way to Palestine/Israel and the different milieus they now live in. What they all have in common is the cultivated German of the educated upper middle-classes of the nineteen-twenties in which they memorably relate their experiences. The CD included contains 38 of these extracts, thus providing -- together with the book -- an unparalleled piece of linguistic and historical documentation.
This volume contains 105 transcripts dealing with language and supplements Phonai volume 42 (= Part I) which contains 165 excerpts from interviews with German-speaking Jewish emigrants to Palestine/Israel largely on biographical subjects. The CD enclosed contains 41 of these excerpts and conveys an acoustic impression of the high proficiency and fluency of the speakers, all between the age of 60 and 100. The subsequent linguistic analysis divides into 10 subsections examining the sociolinguistic backgrounds of the cultivated 'educated' German displayed by the speakers and its grammatical and stylistic characteristics. Together the two volumes document and describe a variety of German distinguished first of all by its striking orientation to written and literary standards and models, and secondly by occasional lexical enrichments from the Hebrew-speaking world surrounding the speakers. This historically unique variety of German is doomed to disappear with the last generation of emigrants.
