Gretel Raibeck ’03 and Peter Totev ’04 Will Work for German Companies this Summer

Two Lafayette students will serve paid internships in Germany this summer through a new program established by the department of foreign languages and literatures and the University for Applied Sciences in Zittau/Görlitz.

Peter Totev ’04, a civil engineering major from Oberursel, Germany, will work for Bombadier Transport, a company that builds locomotives and trains. Gretel Raibeck ’03, a chemical engineering major from Albrightsville, Pa., will work for FIT, a soap and detergent manufacturer.

Both students are minoring in German. Totev recently was inducted into Delta Pi Alpha, the German honor society.

Totev has worked as an EXCEL Scholar with Ed Saliklis, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, on a study of the Pennsylvania Skating Club Arena near Ardmore, Pa., which was designed by Antod Tedesko using his revolutionary, and yet no longer popular, thin-shell concrete method. A program director at campus radio station WJRH, Totev is a member of the International Affairs Club and the Lafayette team that came within one point of winning a regional championship last month in the 2002 National Concrete Canoe Competition.

Since this past January’s interim session, Raibeck has been working on two computer-simulation projects as an EXCEL Scholar with Kenneth Haug, assistant professor of chemistry. The work could help scientists understand the biology that keeps human hearts beating regularly and have applications in the manufacture of semiconductor and magnetic devices. This January, she participated in Lafayette’s alumni externship program, shadowing Richard Coleman ’71, an environmental chemist at Hawk Mountain Labs, West Hazleton, Pa., an independent laboratory specializing in a variety of environmental testing and related services. Raibeck worked two summers ago on an environmental management system for Blue Ridge Pressure Castings, Lehighton, Pa.. She is a WJRH program director, a sister in Alpha Gamma Delta sorority, and a member of the student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. She plays trumpet in the Pep Band as well.

Jutta Blin, vice president of the University for Applied Sciences, has expressed interest in enhancing the Lafayette internship program next year with a study component at the university. Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, associate professor and assistant head of foreign languages and literatures, made contact with the university through Lafayette’s three-week interdisciplinary course, “Green Europe,” held during the May interim session last year. She and Javad Tavakoli, professor and head of chemical engineering, traveled to the region and also south to the Austrian Alps and to Vienna with nine Lafayette students.

Der Standard, an Austrian national daily newspaper, reported on the course, which covers the recent environmental movement in Europe and initiatives that the European Union has taken toward the goal of a sustainable Europe in the third millennium. The focus is on renewable energy sources and how European countries are incorporating them into their energy grids. Technical, social, and environmental benefits and drawbacks of renewable alternatives are examined.

“For the nine students, the extremes of Austria’s landscapes — from the rocky 10,000 ft. peaks of the Alps with their glaciers and pristine mountain lakes to the Puszta of the Hungarian flatlands and Lake Neusiedler — left powerful impressions,” the newspaper reported. “In Vienna, representatives of the Vienna Woods forest service guided them through the 250-year-old Lainzer Park to the Jubiläumswarte from where they could overlook the entire city and see Hungary and Slovakia at the horizon to the east and the Czech Republic to the north

“The students had the opportunity to engage in discussions and conversations with many experts who are not available to the everyday tourist. The success of the course is attributed to the two professors who created this course, namely Javad Tavakoli, a chemical engineering professor, and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, a German professor. Both used their many professional and personal connections to provide their students with access to Austrian and German environmental experts.

“‘This course is only a drop in the big ocean,’ asserts Adienne Needham ’02 enthusiastically, ‘but even a drop can create ripples.'”

Lamb-Faffelberger’s also has attracted the attention of Austria’s government and media through her work. The professor accepted an invitation by Austria Secretary of Education Elisabeth Gehrer to join a “think tank” focusing on sweeping reforms of the country’s university system.

“The secretary and her ministry are particularly interested in the Lafayette faculty’s strong relationship with students, our advising and mentoring programs, and our EXCEL Scholars program, as well as our special relationship with alumni and our success in raising funds for the institution,” says Lamb-Faffelberger.

In January, the German newspaper Sachsiche Zeitung featured Lamb-Faffelberger in an article on her study of socio-cultural development and the search for identity in the Euroregion Neisse, a region that stretches across parts of Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. A third of the area is within the European Union (the German side along the west bank of the river Neisse) and the rest (Poland in the east and the Czech Republic in the south) lies on the other side of the Schengener outer border between the European Union and the Eastern European countries — members of NATO but not of the EU.

“Having grown up in the border region of Austria’s Waldviertel along the Czech Republic — a region that once was at the center of the Habsburg Empire but was divided by the Iron Curtain after WWII — Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger brings a particular sensitivity toward the need for enhanced crossborder relations to her project,” stated Sachsiche Zeitung. “She studies the written word as it was and still is used for fostering identity formation, namely literary texts and the media.”

In October, the professor’s commentary, “Für die Würde des menschlichen Lebens” (“For the Dignity and Sanctity of Humanity”), was featered in the tri-lingual journal SODA, a cultural magazine for readers in the Neisse region.

In other work, Lamb-Faffelberger used an Integrating Computing into the Curriculum grant from Lafayette to create materials the course Contemporary Society in German-Speaking Countries as Reflected in the Media. The project involved four separate software applications for a computer-based enrichment program that students use to improve listening comprehension, assist in vocabulary building, review grammar and spelling, and refine their writing skills.

In October, Lamb-Faffelberger hosted 35 scholars from 11 countries at Lafayette for the sixth Annual Conference of Austrian Literature and Culture, “Visions and Visionaries in Literature and Film of Modern Austria.” She served as one of two co-organizers of the conference.

The professor also was part of a three-person group that in the last academic year formed an international organization exclusively dedicated to the research and teaching of Austrian literature and culture studies. The trio established the constitution and by-laws for the Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association, which elected its first board members this spring.

Lamb-Faffelberger has actively involved students in her research. Marc Ampaw ’02, a double major in International Affairs and economics and business from Accra, Ghana, improved his language skills by helping her translate scholarly articles from German to English. Ampaw translated articles about Austrian theater and culture submitted for two volumes that will be published within the next few weeks, Post-War Austrian Theater: Text and Performance and Literature, Film and the Culture Industry in Modern Austria.

She also serves as a mentor for students like Robert Georg Murray ’02, a double major in International Affairs and German, who is writing an honors thesis on Stefan Zweig and Paul Frischauer, Jewish writers who fled the Nazis during World War II. According to Murray, Lamb-Faffelberger suggested that he examine the life and work of Frischauer, a journalist who gathered information about Nazi influence in southern Brazil for the British Joint Broadcasting Committee (later the BBC) and wrote a biography of Brazil’s then-leader, Presidente Getulio Vargas.

“She helped me incorporate the two worlds that I knew,” says Murray, who grew up in Sao Paulo, Brazil, speaks both Portuguese and German, and has studied in Vienna, Austria. “She is very experienced with the Austrian writers and literature. I think that together, we will be able to combine experiences from our countries to result in a good final project.”

Lamb-Faffelberger joined the Lafayette faculty in 1992. She holds a Ph.D. from Rice University and master’s from the University of Illinois.
Her research interests include 19th and 20th century German literature and culture; modern Austrian literature and film; Austrian theater; feminist and minority discourse; and multi-media for foreign-language teaching.

Lamb-Faffelberger co-edited and wrote an introduction for Modern Austrian Theater: Text and Performance, scheduled for publication by Ariadne Press this year, as well as Out from the Shadows. A Collection of Articles on Austrian Literature and Film by Women since 1945, published by Ariadne in 1997. She also edited Literature, Film, and the Culture Industry in Modern Austria, set for publication this year by Peter Lang.

Lamb-Faffelberger authored the book Valie Export und Elfriede Jelinek im Spiegel der Presse. Zur Rezeption der feministischen Avantgarde Österreichs in the Austrian Culture Series, published by Peter Lang in 1992.

Lamb-Faffelberger also has written numerous articles in scholarly journals and other publications, including “Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness: Interweaving Fact and Fiction into a Postmodern Narrative,” in Modern Austrian Literature: Interpretations and Insights, published last year by Ariadne Press, and “Aus eigener Sicht: Überlegungen zur Zukunft von Austrian Studies in der amerikanischen Germanistik,” published in German Quarterly last year.

Last year, Lamb-Faffelberger was named general editor of the Austria Culture Series produced by Peter Lang Publishing, N.Y. She was keynote speaker at the “Cultural Identities” lecture series at the University of New Brunswick in March 2001 and at the annual Conference of the Association for German Studies in Southern Africa at the University of Witwatersrand in April 2001. She also spoke on “Issues of Cultural and National Identity: Case Study — Modern Austria” at Syracuse University in February that year.

Lamb-Faffelberger is a past winner of the Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Faculty Lecture Award, established at Lafayette in 1966 to recognize superior teaching and scholarship.

The study of German has a rich tradition at Lafayette. On Christmas Eve in 1824, a advertisement appeared in the local Easton Centinel, calling on the citizens of Easton to attend a meeting to initiate establishment of a college “in which, besides military science and tactics, the various branches of education, including the German language, shall be taught” Neither military science nor German was taught at any colleges at that time.

Lafayette’s German instructors — Lamb-Faffelberger, Ed McDonald, professor of foreign languages and literatures, and Rado Pribic, Oliver Edwin Williams Professor of Languages and chair of the International Affairs and Russian and Eastern European Studies programs — teach an average of 50 students each semester. Fifteen to 20 percent of Lafayette students enrolled in German also major in it, and many more declare German as their minor.

Peter Totev ’04 (right), double major in civil engineering and economics & business, researched the structure of the Pennsylvania Skating Club Arena in EXCEL Scholars research with Edmond Saliklis, assistant professor of civil & environmental engineering.