Guides: Germanic Languages &amp; Literatures: For Graduate Students

Historical News

Frankfurter Allgemeine Archive
Online archive of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, 1949-present

German Classics

Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker
Large collection of German canonical texts in authoritative editions.
Goethes Werke
Complete 143 volumes of the definitive Weimar Edition. Includes Goethe's literary and scientific works, his diaries, and a complete collection of his letters.

Reference Shelf

KLG - Kritisches Lexikon zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur
KLG - Kritisches Lexikon zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur provides access to contemporary German-language literature of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Contains more than 800 articles. Detailed essays give a survey of an author's work and influence and include bibliographies of the author's works and of secondary literature.
Historical Dictionary of German Literature to 1945 The history of this period in German literature is told through a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, a comprehensive bibliography, and over 200 cross-referenced dictionary entries on poetry, novels, historical narrative, philosophical musings, drama, and the exceptional writers who emerged and shaped German literature over the centuries.
Literature Criticism Online Literary reference work from Gale combining several literary commentary series, including Contemporary Literary Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Shakespearean Criticism, and others.
Deutsche Biographie The online version of the Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB) (Aachen to Schwarz) and the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB) (1875-1912) together providing biographical entries for German-speaking countries. In addition, references to historical and biographical articles and books.
Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopaedie (DBE) This Dictionary of German Biography (DBE) provides information about people from all aspects of public life: men and women from the German-speaking world from early records to the present. The biographies include origins, education, places of influence, significant works, friendships and relationships, memberships, reception, prizes and honors. Note: DBE contains entries only for figures who are deceased.
IDZ - Index Deutschsprachiger Zeitschriften 1750-1815
Virtuelle Deutsche Landesbibliographie Subject bibliography for German regions. / Meta-Katalog zum Nachweis landeskundlicher Literatur in Deutschland. Landesbibliographien verzeichnen die Literatur aller Sach- und Wissensgebiete über ein Bundesland, seine Orte und Regionen. Aufsätze und Artikel aus Zeitschriften, Jahrbüchern und sonstigen Sammelwerken machen fast zwei Drittel der Nachweise aus.
Berlin-Bibliographie Covers a wide range of publications on all aspects of the city of Berlin, 1985-2002.
Zedlersches Lexikon Historical 18th century encyclopedia. At 68 volumes, one of the largest printed encyclopedias ever, and first to include biographies of living people.

About this guide

Penn Libraries are home to large collections on the history and languages of the German-speaking world and Northern Europe. Germanic Languages and Literatures resources include databases and indexes; reference works, dictionaries, and bibliographies; graphic novels; the 1896 donation of the Bechstein Library of German literature, with items from the 15th to 19th centuries; digitized collections of primary sources; and Penn dissertations in Germanic Languages and Literatures.

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German Studies Databases

Bibliographie der deutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft (BDSL)
Comprising the printed volumes for the years 1985-2003, with more recent years being loaded on an ongoing basis.
MLA International Bibliography
Covers literature, languages, folklore, and linguistics. Includes English and foreign languages.
Literature Resource Center
Biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on nearly 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world.
Historical Abstracts
Historical coverage of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada).
IBZ Online
The bibliography IBZ (Internationale Bibliographie der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Zeitschriftenliteratur) has been the leading international and interdisciplinary reference work documenting academic periodical literature in the humanities, social sciences and related fields for over a hundred years. The spectrum of subjects covered is unrivaled: in no other database are academic journals from so many fields covered. The database IBZ Online now lists more than 4.8 million journal articles from 11,500 journals. Every year some 132,000 entries are added. The database is updated weekly.
Proquest Dissertations and Theses Fulltext (formerly Dissertation Abstracts)
Indexing (since 1861) and abstracting (since 1980) for doctoral-level dissertations completed at North American universities. Page images or fulltext of all available dissertations - including Penn dissertations - from 1997 to present, with some earlier dissertations. Dissertations from selected European universities are also listed. Selected master's theses are included since 1988.

Primary Sources

Deutsche Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert: Nationalsozialismus, Holocaust, Widerstand und Exil 1933-1945
National Socialism, Holocaust, Resistance and Exile, 1933-1945, is a database containing primary sources on the Nationalist Socialist State and the NSDAP, Nazi ideology and propaganda, National Socialist justice and legislation, on resistance and persecution, and annihilation and expulsion in the "Third Reich".

Library Catalogs

KVK - Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog

The Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog allows you to search simultaneously the holdings of many major libraries in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and other European countries; it functions then as a sort of European Union Catalog, and a counterpart to the mainly US/Canadian WorldCat database.
WorldCat
WorldCat is the world's largest bibliographic database and a meta-search engine of catalogs from thousands of online member libraries of OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center, a non-profit cooperative library data that underpins library searches worldwide.

Subject Guide

Charles Cobine

he/him

Contact:

Van Pelt Library 205

215-746-5830

Subjects: Cinema & Media Studies, German Studies

General Databases

Google Scholar Access to Google Scholar with Penn-only links to full-text articles. Once authenticated through Penn's proxy, full-text articles to which Penn Libraries subscribe will become available within the Google Scholar search results.
JSTOR JSTOR specializes in making available the back issues of journals in a wide variety of humanities and social science disciplines. Issues are available both as images and as text, making searching possible both within each title and across the whole database. Penn's subscription currently includes all the available collections: the Arts & Sciences Collection I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII and the Complement the Business II & III Collection the Biological Sciences Collection the Health & General Science Collection the Language and Literature Collection the Music Collection the 19th Century British Pamphlets Access to journals from JSTOR is restricted to current Penn faculty, staff and students. Printing from the JSTOR database requires downloading a helper application called JPrint.
Project Muse Project Muse provides full text access to articles from over 300 scholarly journals in the humanities, arts, social sciences and sciences. Coverage begins in 1995 or more recently and in most cases continues to the present. Issues are available both as images and as text; searching is possible both within each title and across the whole database.
Periodicals Index Online Humanities and social sciences. The scope is international, including journals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and other Western languages.

Other European literature databases

Bibliographie de la littérature française A database produced by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France), the Société d'histoire littéraire de la France (Society of Literary History of France) and published by Classiques Garnier digital. It lists studies published since 1998 on French and Francophone literature, from the sixteenth century to today.
CAIRN Bouquet Général Full-text electronic French journals in French and Francophone Studies as well as general humanities and social sciences journals in French.
Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (DBNL)
DBNL, the Digital Library of Dutch Letters is a digital collection of texts covering all Dutch literature, linguistics and cultural studies from early times to the present.
American Bibliography of Slavic and Eastern European Studies (ABSEES)
Covers North American scholarship on East-Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Swiss Literature Archive Includes finding aids to the SLA's documents connected to the literature of all four linguistic regions of Switzerland: French, German, Italian, and Romansh, with particular emphasis on 20th and 21st centuries.

Germanic Languages & Literatures: For Graduate Students