French, German, & Spanish Studies Resource Guide: German Studies

A brief selection of books, highlighted on the Sawyer Library Blog, describing the tragic horror of World War II in Germany and Europe.

"The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek provides access to Germany's cultural heritage in digital form. This includes digital collections and indexing information from libraries, archives, museums, cultural heritage offices and media libraries as well as universities and other research institutions. [...] The contents of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek include digital representations and derivatives of books, documents, paintings, statues, installations and monuments, all the way through to films and music. "

Letters from Soldiers on the German Front.

Three German academic institutions (Rheinisch-Westfalische Technische Hochschule; Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main; and the Germania Judaica Library in Köln) have digitized over 100 German language Jewish periodicals from 1806-1938. The publications document the religious and political upheavals within the Jewish communities, and thereby provide local / regional history as well as general social & cultural history. Liberal, orthodox, & zionist views are represented.

SOPHIE hosted by the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University. It provides access to primary texts by 18th and 19th century German-language women authors in multiple genres.

The Electronic Journals Library offers full-text scientific and academic journals, covering the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. It was developed at the Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg in cooperation with the Universitätsbibliothek der Technischen Universität München, and it has 407 member libraries. Users may browse by subject category, and may limit results to only those journals which are freely accessible to all.

Compiled by Richard Hacken, the European Studies bibliographer at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, this site provides links to primary documents spanning from 'Medieval Germany' to 'Germany Divided and Reunified.'

This collection of digitized maps is provided by the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. Many of the maps presented here are in the public domain, and are not subject to copyright restrictions. The collection includes current, historical, and thematic maps.

Bibliotheque Kandinsky, in France, has digitized nine rare manuscripts by Bauhaus artists and thinkers, making them freely available to the public. Authors include: Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, L. Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, J.J.P. Oud, and Kasimir Malewitsch.

An online English-German German-English dictionary from the Informatik der Technischen Universität München. LEO contains over 565,000 entries, and it includes conjugations and declensions (provided by CanooNet: Deutsche Wörterbücher und Grammatik. In addition, Leo also has German-French and German-Spanish dictionaries.

A picture dictionary in German and English, produced by QA International, a subsidiary of the Canadian publisher Québec Amérique. PONS also offers a multilingual language portal, which covers 11 languages, including the German Sprachenportal.

A two volume A-Z encyclopedia of topics in German Literature.

"In-depth reviews [...] of the essential literature of the Holocaust: histories, biographies, memoirs, diaries, testimonials."

Although this is not a dictionary, the toolbar Lexibar gives assistance in writing by providing "access to special characters not always available on your keyboard." The software is free, but requires installation.

These volumes, along with the two series listed below, are PDF file images of each page in each yearbook. Collectively these three series provide a statistical overview of Germany from 1880-1990.

Those who are interested in current statistics for the Bundesrepublik Deutschland should view
Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland (English) at http://www.destatis.de/. Of course, there is a German language page for this site as well.

The statistical yearbook for the (East) German Democratic Republic: these volumes, scanned and converted to PDF files, provide statistics on the GDR population, government structure, economy, industry, agriculture, trade, culture, and environment.

The German Studies Web is part of WESS WEB - the Western European Studies Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). "The German Studies Web is designed to provide access to scholarly resources in German Studies, including all German-speaking countries." Users will find links to resources in areas such as literature, history, politics, theater, film, and the arts.

Der Fachportal für deutsche Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft. A virtual library for German Language and Literature studies. All linked resources are in German. A similar portal is germanistik.net - Internet Resources for Germanists, a site created by Alan Ng, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Unfortunately, germanistik.net is no longer updated. However, taken together, these two portals provide a good launching pad for German studies.

The Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Institut für Germanistik produced this directory (in German) which covers German-based web resources on German language and literature studies. Sections include digital texts, "Germanistik" institutions, and specific eras in German literature and culture (e.g. Aufklärung, Sturm und Drang, and the Weimarer Republik.) The 'Lexika' section offers online encyclopedias and dictionaries.

"Litrix.de is a project initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation and supported by the Goethe-Institut with the aim of promoting an appreciation of contemporary German literature and its translation." One can search for German authors, books or magazines. Book excerpts of up to twenty pages in length are available in German, English, Chinese, Arabic, and Portuguese.

Perlentaucher ("pearl diver") is a German language, independent, online magazine devoted to culture and literature.

The mission of the Goethe-Institut is to promote German culture and international exchange. This section of the site includes a guide to German Cinema, essays on topics ranging from "Immigration in German Cinema" to "The Documentary Film in Germany," and links to databases of German films. The entire website is available in both English and German.

Amazon speaks for itself. This is the German version.

"Autorenschicksale nach der Bücherverbrennung am 10. Mai 1933. Dokumentation zum Projektseminar „Literatur und Verfolgung ab 1933“ als Ausstellung in der Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Düsseldorf vom 8. Mai bis 30. Juni 2003."

An English language listing of the collections and digitized publications held by the German National Library. There are digitized versions of dozens of periodicals, produced both in exile and within Germany, covering the years between 1933 and 1945, as listed below:

The European Library "provides a central gateway to access the online catalogues and digital collections of Europe’s national libraries." Users may search or browse the collections of 20 national libraries at once, or individually.

"Rund um die Uhr bekommen Sie in den Sendungen bei WDR 5 Informationen aus Politik und Gesellschaft, Kultur, Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und vielen anderen Bereichen."

Click "Live hören" to listen online.

Offers a variety of self-paced online courses, sorted by level, along with a course finder and a placement test.

This is the German section of eufeeds. Eufeeds, produced by the European Journalism Centre, is an RSS news aggregator that provides national, regional, and local news feeds from over 1000 European news sources.

This is the online version of the daily newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - one of Germany's most important and respected newspapers.

Readers looking for thoughtful essays on current topics in politics, education, the arts, literature, and science should visit Die Zeit, the online version of the weekly journal. The print version of Die Zeit was established in 1946, and is based in Hamburg (even though the coat of arms logo is that of Bremen).

This is the online version of the German language newspaper based in Berlin. Topics are wide ranging and include politics, economics, finance, real estate, culture, media, science, books, travel, and local news from Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg.

Online version of a well established weekly German news magazine. The magazine was founded in 1947, and it prides itself in its independence from political and commercial groups. English translations are available for selected articles. The Sawyer Library retains the current two years of Der Spiegel in print, and it is available from 1999 to the present in LexisNexis Academic.

An academically oriented internet directory.

Vascoda was once a unified means of searching 30 German libraries and academic portals, covering the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. As of January 2011, the search engine is no more, however it is still possible to search within the individual participants.