First Caféklatsch 2016

Dear members and friends of the Auckland Goethe Society!

Our first Caféklatsch on 13.1.16 was great! 
11 lovely people joined the group:
Heike from Germany, Anna from Germany, Ulli from Germany, Mahi from Greece, Nicole from Canada, Chen from China, Kate from China, Amber from NZ, Anthony from NZ, John from England, Waidi from Iraq.

Machi Christidou

Heike Papenthin

Dr. Anna Bauer

Thank you all for your participation.We had a great time!
We hope to see you and more members and friends  again next month.

Liebe Mitglieder und Freunde!
 
Unser erster Caféklatsch am 13.1.16 war super! 11 nette Leute waren dabei:
Heike aus Deutschland, Anna aus Deutschland, Ulli aus Deutschland, Mahi aus Griechenland, Nicole aus Kanada, Chen aus China, Kate aus China, Amber aus Neuseeland, Anthony aus Neuseeland, John aus England, Waidi aus dem Irak.
Wir danken allen für die schöne Zeit.
Wir hoffen, Sie und andere Mitglieder und Freunde nächsten Monat wiederzusehen!

Machi Christidou

Birkenstock meets Jandals

Life Swap creators @Heike Papenthin

The creators of Life Swap were in Auckland for our last event of 2015 on December 3rd. They shared some insider informations about Jörg, 27, from Münster, Germany and Duncan, 27, from Wellington, New Zealand, which are the main characters of the endearing cultural exchange animation series.

How to Succeed on the Globalised Job Market

Students with Dr. Anna Bauer photo: Astrid Wolter

German companies are everywhere, so we decided to the make the most of our good connections again this year. Working together with the New Zealand German Business Association, the German Embassy, the University of Auckland, and the DAAD, the Auckland Goethe Society invited three representatives of German-owned and globally active companies to University of Auckland's City Campus on October 7, 2015: Holger Detje (Managing Director of Bayer NZ), Mark Harrison (Director of DB Schenker NZ) and Mark Robinson (National Business Development Manager of Kärcher NZ). 

Holger Detje, Managing Director of Bayer NZ. photo: Astrid Wolter

The event was targeted at students, undergrads and postgrads alike, who are aiming for an international career, and a crowd of about 60 came out to have their questions answered during this busy time of the academic year.

Interested students photo: Astrid Wolter

Brief welcomes started the evening off, on behalf of the organisers by Anna Bauer (AGS, UoA, DAAD) and Monique Surges (CEO of the NZGBA), who also moderated the event. During their following presentations, the three representatives didn't just introduce their companies, but also related to the audience how they personally had got where they were, working in high positions with global players. This sparked a good many questions from students during the Q&A session, touching on topics such as the importance of good grades as well as language proficiency and how to get an application picked out for interview. The Q&A continued less formally over drinks and nibbles for over an hour, and a good many business card changed hands during the course of the evening.

We would like to thank the NZGBA, the German Embassy, the DAAD, and the University for making this event possible for the third year in a row.

Anna Bauer

NZ artists in Berlin - Linda Tyler

Many New Zealand artists have chosen to live and work in Berlin as a congenial city in which to launch an international career while still retaining links back to their home country. 

Linda Tyler

Associate Professor Linda Tyler is Director of the Centre for Art Studies at The University of Auckland. On 28 October 2015 at the Gus Fisher Gallery in central Auckland, Linda presented an informative and fascinating look into several such artists and their work and examined what it is that Berlin offers that makes that city so attractive to these young artists.  

The evening was attended by society members, academics, artists and many professionals in the art scene of Auckland. Next time we will know to invite members of the Auckland Council to such an interesting evening!

Wendy Thomson

Film screening "Aschenputtel (Cinderella)"

Aschenputtel © ARD Degeto

The previous week saw our talk on fairy tales and how they were adapted to the region the Grimm brothers collected them from, and this week, on September 24, we screened a recent German TV adaption of Aschenputtel (Cinderella). In this version, Aschenputtel is a feisty young woman stuck in a situation going from bad to worse with a malicious stepmother and a jealous stepsister. Not losing her courage, though, Aschenputtel makes the impossible possible, attends the prince's ball and thereby finds a way out of her miserable situation. After the film, the dozen people in the audience indulged in story time, and Anna Bauer read out one of the versions of Aschenputtel in German, as recorded by the Grimm brothers. The screening of the film was made possible thanks to the support of the Goethe-Institut.

Auckland Goethe Society

Where did Rapunzel live?

Janelle Wood, daughter Elena and friend Amber © Doris Evans 

Did you know that Germany has a fairy tale road (Deutsche Märchenstraße)? And that many fairy tales were told with a specific setting in mind? And that many of these settings (castles, towns, landscapes) still exist today? Dr. Anna Bauer, DAAD-Lecturer in German School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics at the University of Auckland, not only comes from the area, where the Grimm Brothers lived and worked, she also has an abundance of knowledge about the origins of their fairy tales. She shared her insider insights with an interested audience at the Auckland University on Tuesday, September 17.

Dr. Anna Bauer © Doris Evans

Many of the fairy tales that we're most familiar with today were collected by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 19th century. The brothers had just finished their university studies in Marburg in Germany and moved back home to Kassel, about 200km north of Frankfurt, when they were asked to collect fairy tales. The people who told them the tales were from that area, and even though many tales originated from as far away as France, their stories had been adapted to fit different places and features found in the region around Kassel. 

That way some of the most famous tales are tied to specific places, e.g. Rapunzel to the Trendelburg castle, and Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty) to the Sababurg castle. The outfit of Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood) is typical of the traditional children's dress in the Schwalm area between the towns of Kassel and Marburg, and Frau Holle (Mother Hulda) is said to have shaken out her duvets from the mountain Hoher Meißner south-east of Kassel. Today, the German Fairy Tale Route (Deutsche Märchenstraße) links all these and more spots together and lets you travel the less trodden path from Bremerhaven in the north down to Frankfurt in the mid-west of Germany. En route, you get to visit all kinds of different castles, some well maintained, some with only ruins left over, little villages, small towns and much more. Many people in the area are very fond of "their" fairy tales and have organised regular fairy tale events or put together spaces where you can engage with the local lore. In the centre of the route, Kassel stands out with its brand-new Grimm World (Grimmwelt) museum, which brings together the work of the brothers Grimm and many other fairy tale collectors and even writers from across the globe.

Auckland Goethe Society

German Trivia Evening

On Wednesday 20 May the Auckland Goethe Society’s inaugural German Trivia Evening took place at the University of Auckland. With an outstanding attendance of 70 people, the venue was filled to capacity. School teams, university teams, native speakers and teachers of German all competed in their own categories for a range of attractive prizes.

© Stephan Resch

Participants first had to show their general knowledge of things German, Swiss and Austrian. Then they had to show their linguistic inventiveness with a number of intriguing word puzzles. In the picture round, participants had to identify 15 German speaking personalities from the fields of culture, politics, sports and entertainment. The music round encouraged much discussion among the groups as music from a large variety of genres had to be identified. Finally participants had to show how good they are at guessing the answers to some uniquely German questions. Care for an example? “Wie viele Zacken hat ein Kronkorken?” What would you have guessed?
 
Ten schools from all over Auckland participated. Green Bay High School won the top school prize and was first at the prize table.
 
The evening was hosted by our Vice-president Dr Stephan Resch from the German Department at the University of Auckland with the help of German tutors and members of your Auckland Goethe Society committee. We look forward to seeing you at the next German Trivia Evening!

Wendy Thomson

© Stephan Resch

Germans in the Pacific

Did you know that the German settlers around Nelson originally arrived in the hope of settling in what they thought would be a new German colony in the Chatham Islands? Or that in 1900 half the European population in Tonga was German?

© Wendy Thomson

Tracing this far-flung German presence in the Pacific has been of interest to Professor James Bade for over 20 years, and on 23 April he gave us an engrossing overview of his research, in a presentation called “German Interest in the Pacific 1840-1918 with Special Reference to Tonga”.  

James is Professor of German and Director of the University of Auckland Research Centre for Germanic Connections with New Zealand and the Pacific at the University of Auckland. 

One of his publications, Zehn Jahre auf den Inseln der Südsee 1887-1897: Aus dem Tagebuch der Paula David, was offered for sale to members and guests after the presentation. Paula David was from a German Jewish family in Sondershausen in Thuringia, but spent a decade in Tonga and Samoa before eventually moving to Australia. Meanwhile several of her siblings settled in Auckland, followed several decades later by other family members fleeing Nazi Germany. This critical edition (in English and German) of Paula David's diaries from her time in the Pacific includes many photos from her own collection, as well as fascinating background chapters on her family history and the links between Germany and Tonga.

Felix Delbrück