In the time of Nazi Germany the systematic targeting of Jews for persecution and extermination was rampant. Although this was a dark time for the Jewish people in Europe, they did not simply stand idly by and let this happen to them. The Jewish people found a way to make a mockery of the situation that they wee in, as well as a way to poke fun at the people who persecuted them. The Jews used dark humor to mock the situations that they found themselves in. The interesting point here, though, is that they did not use all the aspects of dark humor that exist. The Jews used situational humor, critical humor, and gallows humor-humor about death-according to the incongruity theory of humor, to make a mockery of the plight that they were in. They did not use all of the different aspects of dark humor, but only the parts that would merge with their need to mock their situation, in order to be able to deal with the reality of what was happening in their lives. For the analysis in this thesis, I researched various collections of Jewish humor in Nazi Germany. I analyzed the jokes in relation to the different humor theories, and gave my conclusion on why these jokes were effective. Based on the evidence, I have come to several conclusions. The Jews that made these jokes only used the aspects of dark humor that would fit in with the atmosphere that they were trying to create. They would not use sexual jokes of any kind because of this. They used jokes that could be used as a shield, to comfort not only themselves but also their compatriots given their situation. The use of humor was a coping measure and a sign of defiance, that helped some of the victims of the Holocaust survive the attempted extermination of the Jews. Given the opportunity, I would widen my focus on this topic to include collective memory, as well, however the scope of such a project would be more fitting for a doctoral paper.

Code-switching, a bilingual language phenomenon, which may be defined as the concurrent use of two or more languages by fluent speakers is frequently misunderstood and stigmatized. Given that the majority of the world's population is bilingual rather than monolingual, the study of code-switching provides a fundamental window into human cognition and the systematic structural outcomes of language contact. Intra-sentential code-switching is said to systematically occur, constrained by the lexicons of each respective language. In order to access information about the acceptability of certain switches, linguists often elicit grammaticality judgments from bilingual informants. In current linguistic research, grammaticality judgment tasks are often scrutinized on account of the lack of stability of responses to individual sentences. Although this claim is largely motivated by research on monolingual strings under a variety of variable conditions, the stability of code-switched grammaticality judgment data given by bilingual informants has yet to be systematically investigated. By comparing grammaticality judgment data from 3 groups of German-English bilinguals, Group A (N=50), Group B (N=34), and Group C (N=40), this thesis investigates the stability of grammaticality judgments in code-switching over time, as well as a potential difference in judgments between judgment data for spoken and written code-switching stimuli. Using a web-based survey, informants were asked to give ratings of each code-switched token. The results were computed and findings from a correlated groups t test attest to the stability of code-switched judgment data over time with a p value of .271 and to the validity of the methodologies currently in place. Furthermore, results from the study also indicated that no statistically significant difference was found between spoken and written judgment data as computed with an independent groups t test resulting in a p value of .186, contributing a valuable fact to the body of data collection practices in research in bilingualism. Results from this study indicate that there are significant differences attributable to language dominance for specific token types, which were calculated using an ANOVA test. However, when using group composite scores of all tokens, the ANOVA measure returned a non-significant score of .234, suggesting that bilinguals with differing language dominances rank in a similar manner. The findings from this study hope to help clarify current practices in code-switching research.

Disability is a label accompanied by a multitude of misconceptions and stereotypes. During various periods in Germany, attitudes towards disability have ranged from disgust and fear, to acceptance and inclusion. Being disabled in Germany once meant certain isolation; at the hands of the Nazi regime, it was met with almost certain premature death. Since those darker days of Germany's history, the country has become one that now affords its disabled citizens with the same rights as the non-disabled population and seeks to create a barrier-free environment. This study examines these perceptions of disability in Germany from the 1920s through the first decade of the 21st century. In order to accomplish this goal, cinema is used to provide insights into contemporaneous ideas about disability. By drawing upon analyses of six films that span the course of nearly 80 years, careful examination of disability portrayals reveal philosophical shifts in how the German people interpret disability. When analyzing these films, aspects of physical and mental disability are brought to the surface and discussed in terms of their sociopolitical and philosophical implications. To provide a social and cultural framework that gives significance to the changes in these cinematic roles, a historical survey of the German disability rights movement is folded into the discussion. The films explored in this study serve as culturally important visual aids that illustrate positive changes for the disabled living in Germany. Although not directly influencing cinematic portrayals of disability, the German disability rights movement that arose in the postwar period shaped ideas about disability and allowed disabled Germans to be accepted and included in society. With these rights now available disabled Germans are able to lead a self-determined life and portray themselves as equals.