German Customs and Traditions

1. German Customs and Traditions The Arts By: Emily Pope Period: 8

2. German Art • The area of modern Germany is rich in finds of prehistoric art, including the Venus of Hohle Fels. This appears to be the oldest undisputed example of Upper Paleolithic art and figurative sculpture of the human form in general, from over 35,000 years BP, which was only discovered in 2008; the better-known Venus of Willendorf (24–22,000 BP) comes from a little way over the Austrian border. • The spectacular finds of Bronze Age golden hats are centered on Germany, as was the "central" form of Urnfield culture, and Hallstatt culture. • The court of the Holy Roman Emperor, then based in Prague, played an important part in forming the International Gothic style in the late 14th century. The style was spread around the wealthy cities of Northern Germany by artists such Conrad von Soest in Westphalia and Meister Bertram in Hamburg, and later Stefan Lochner in Cologne. Hamburg was one of the cities in the Hanseatic League, then at the height of its prosperity, and Bertram was succeeded in the city by artists such as Master Francke, the Master of the Malchin Altar, Hans Bornemann, Hinrik Funhof and Wilm Dedeke who survived into the Renaissance period.

3. Medieval German Sculpture

4. 1930 German Art Deco Postcard Lady with Flowers

5. German Music • Forms of German-language music include Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW), Krautrock, Hamburger Schule, Volksmusik, Classical, German hip hop, trance, Schlager, Neue Deutsche Härte (NDH) and diverse varieties of folk music, such as Waltz and Medieval metal. • Medieval metal is a subgenre of folk metal that blends hard rock or heavy metal music with medieval folk music. Medieval metal is mostly restricted to Germany where it is known as Mittelalter-Metal or Mittelalter-Rock. The genre emerged from the middle of the 1990s with contributions from Subway to Sally, In Extremo and Schandmaul. The style is characterised by the prominent use of a wide variety of traditional folk and medieval instruments. • Krautrock is a generic name for the experimental music scenes that appeared in Germany in the late 1960s and gained popularity throughout the 1970s, especially in Britain. The term is a result of the English-speaking world's reception of the music at the time and not a reference to any one particular scene, style, or movement, as many krautrock artists were not familiar with one another. BBC DJ John Peel in particular is largely credited with spreading the reputation of krautrock outside of the German-speaking world.

6. German Music Genres

7. German Literature • Medieval German literature refers to literature written in Germany, stretching from the Carolingian dynasty; various dates have been given for the end of the German literary Middle Ages, the Reformation (1517) being the last possible cut-off point. • The Old High German period is reckoned to run until about the mid-11th century, though the boundary to Early Middle High German (second half of the 11th century) is not clear-cut. • The most famous work in OHG is the Hildebrandslied, a short piece of Germanic alliterative heroic verse which besides the Muspilli is the sole survivor of what must have been a vast oral tradition. Another important work, in the northern dialect of Old Saxon, is a life of Christ in the style of a heroic epic known as the Heliand. • Sturm und Drang (the conventional translation is "Storm and Stress"; a more literal translation, however, might be storm and urge, storm and longing, or storm and impulse) is the name of a movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in response to the confines of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements.

8. German Literature

9. German Theater • No country has as many publicly-funded theaters as Germany. Some 150 of them receive government funding of some sort. A third are classic “three discipline” theaters, showcasing music, dance and plays all in the same place. • In addition, Germany has some 280 private theaters of varying size that show different types of work, with different history and traditions. Some 35 million theater-goers attend an annual total of around 110,000 theater performances, as well as some 7,000 concerts each year. • Germany’s tiniest theater is the Theader in Freinsheim in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The stage has room for just four actors; the house can hold up to 20 audience members. In contrast, one of the country’s biggest theaters is the Deutsche Theater in Berlin, with 1,600 seats and more than 300 shows per year. The Bavarian State Opera is enormous, too. • Germany has some 40 festivals, around 150 theaters and other stages that have no ensemble attached to them, and about 100 touring troupes without a fixed stage. On top of that, there are countless unaffiliated theater troupes.

10. The EkhofTheatre

11. German Dance German dance is an example of the exchange and the relationship among the Courtly Dance, the social dance, and the folk dance. It has its origins in the Allemande (French for "German"). This was a dance popular from the 16th to the 18th centuries, consisting of a calm part in 4/4 time followed by a quick part in triple time. The Schuhplattler is a traditional Austro-Bavarian folk dance evolved from the Ländler. The origins of this social dance are found in an early courtship display (Balztanz). Such a dance was described in 1050 by a monk ofTegernsee Abbey in the knightly poem Ruodlieb, wherein similar postures and movements of the Schuhplatter are depicted.

12. German Dance

13. German Film The history of cinema in Germany can be traced back to the year of the medium's birth. On November 1, 1895 Max Skladanowsky and his brother Emil demonstrated their self-inventedfilm projector the Bioscop at the Wintergarten music hall in Berlin.  In the period immediately following World War I, the film industry boomed, helped by the 1920s German inflation. This enabled film makers to borrow money in Papiermark which would be vastly devalued by the time it had to be repaid. Nevertheless film budgets were tight and the need to save money was a contributing factor to the rise of German Expressionism, as was the desire to move forward and embrace the future that swept most of Europe at the time. Expressionist movies relied heavily on symbolism and artistic imagery rather than starkrealism to tell their stories. Given the grim mood in post-WWI Germany, it was not surprising that these films focused heavily on crime and horror. In the late 1950s, the growth in cinema attendance of the preceding decade first stagnated and then went into freefall throughout the 1960s. By 1969 West German cinema attendance at 172.2 million visits per year was less than a quarter of its 1956 post-war peak.

14. Lola Rennt (German Film)

15. Sites • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_art • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Germany • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_literature • http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,3871070,00.html • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuhplattler