German Studies

All of these outstanding texts (61 stories, 80 poems, a letter and an essay) – many of which are litle-known outside of the German-speaking cultural sphere – have been translated specially for this site, either because available English translations of them are not free of copyright or because they’ve never been previously translated into English.
All of the translations done for this site are copyright-free.
see also => INDEX OF ALL THE GERMAN-LANGUAGE LITERATURE ON THIS SITE, BY (…)

In the spoken German language there are a remarkable number of “tone words” (Abtönungspartikeln) that are regularly not to say constantly injected into sentences by speakers of all ages, particularly of the younger generations, to add colouring and nuances to what’s being said.
Most of these special words, as can be seen in the comprehensive table below, are words that have an entirely different function in the standard (written) language and that have acquired over time their special (…)

The German language has a large number of prefixes and suffixes whose function is to enable the formation of an open-ended number of new words by adding new nuances, aspects and dimensions to other words.
These powerful tools can be added in front of or behind just about anything to create new, usually particularly precise and expressive terms that are so numerous that only a small sub-section of these terms are ever included in the dictionaries – there just isn’t room for all the possible (…)

Thomas Mann’s monumental (308,000 words, 984 pages) The Magic Mountain is to German literature what “Don Quixote” is to Spanish literature, what "War and Piece" is to Russian literature, and what "À la recherche du temps perdu" is to French literature – a reference and a model that remains at the top of the most illustrious literary works ever produced in the language.
The reader of this seminal work is immediately struck by the extensiveness and expressiveness of the vast vocabulary used (…)

While it is widely considered that the almost-universal language of Shakespeare and Bob Dylan has the largest number of words of any Indo-European language – languages of agglutinative language-families, such as Japanese, Turkish and Hungarian, which by construction attach many suffixes to a root as the meaning of a phrase evolves, cannot be compared to Indo-European languages in lexical terms – it seems obvious to us that this distinction rather belongs to the language of Goethe and Thomas (…)

You will find in this compilation of works a reasonably comprehensive, albeit necessarily incomplete, sampling of the outstanding German-language short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels and plays that have been written by German, Austrian and Swiss authors over the past several hundred years.
Titles that are available on the site [1] are highlighted in red and can be seen by clicking on the title. No. Date Author German Title English_Title_____ Genre (…)

Based on a study of the evolving number of words in the successive editions of our German-English Literary Dictionary, we can safely venture to say that, for German:
– there are about 2 meanings per word on average for the 10,000 or so most commonly-used words (such as those listed in the initial version of our dictionary);
– there are 1.6 meanings per word when the word-population is expanded to 30,000 or so widely-used terms, such as those in the latest version of the dictionary;
– (…)

The core of this 34,000-word bilingual literary dictionary consists of all of the words looked up in various dictionaries while working through some 60-odd German-language novels and short-story anthologies, as well as all of the commonly-used nouns and adjectives and all of the prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, pronouns and articles.
For each separate meaning of an entry-word (see the analysis of the number of different meanings for each type of word below) we have included, in (…)

Mark Twain concluded this very entertaining overview of the German language with the statement: "... a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years."
His reflections on the particularities of the language of Goethe, and his suggestions for reform – a most topical subject – make very good reading indeed.
Recommended for germanophiles and germanophobes alike! An e-book is available for downloading (…)

AUTHOR________________________ TITLE________________________________________________ GENRE______ DATE____ WORDS COUNTRY________ 1 Clemens Brentano The Story of the Good Kasperl and the Pretty Annerl novelette 1817 12,703 Germany 2 Josef and Wilhelm Grimm Three Grimm Brothers Witch Tales short stories 1812-15 5,414 Germany 3 Wilhelm Hauff “Caliph Stork” and 7 other fairy tales short stories 1826 43,732 Germany 4 Adalbrecht Haushofer Sonnets From the Prison of Moabit poems 1946 9,391 (…)