In a German Pension

In a German Pension, by Katherine Mansfield

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The same applies if your usual country of residence is Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland. A reduction can occur in some cases, if the already existing pension is based on the agreement with Poland and therefore the Polish periods are included in the German pension. If a delay occurs, the agreement mentioned can no longer be applied. If you are normally resident in a country with which Germany has signed a social security agreement, limitations may also apply. Normally in the agreement countries, there is also no eligibility for a pension because of a complete reduction in earning capacity when eligibility is based solely on the closed German part-time employment market and not based on your performance capacity.

Eligibility for complete reduction in earning capacity based on the closed Germany part-time employment market is only permitted in the agreement countries Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Kosovo, Morocco, Montenegro, Serbia and Tunisia. If you are normally resident in another country — apart from one in the European Union, or the countries Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland or one of the other countries with which Germany has signed a social security agreement — then the same limitations apply as with the agreement countries.

A pension based on a complete reduction in earning capacity may also not be paid when eligibility is based solely on the closed German part-time employment market. Added to this is the fact that periods in the territory of the former GDR East Germany that were evaluated according to west German standards owing to place of residence in the Federal Republic of Germany on In addition, pensions based on partial reduction in earning capacity in cases of being unfit for work and pensions for miners based on limited capacity for work in the mining industry can only be paid if eligibility already existed in Germany.

If you normally live outside Germany, your pension can be paid into your bank account from a German bank. Deutsche Rentenversicherung pays the transfer costs. In exceptional cases, it is possible for you to nominate a person of trust who has a bank account in Germany to receive the payment, as long as they forward the money to you. It is also possible to have your pension paid into your own bank account if the bank is one of the SEPA countries of the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway. Deutsche Rentenversicherung also pays the transfer costs in these cases.

Of course it is also possible for you to have the money transferred to your own bank account in a country other than those mentioned.

Introduction to In A German Pension | NZETC

In these cases, Deutsche Rentenversicherung, in cooperation with the pensions service of Deutsche Post AG, uses the standardised, most economical payment methods and converts the pension into the currency of the respective country. For myself, I do not understand how your women ever get married at all. Did you see it? If we did we would have had her long ago. Fairly light-hearted and jocular as long as the pension guests are concerned, the tone and themes of the stories gradually darken, and angst, even tragedy enter. The few stories that do not focus an on the pension guests but on the villagers convey pictures of quotidian domestic cruelty, reminding us that barbarism begins at home, touching upon the deplorable plight of womanhood, the discomfiture of childbirth, the imbalance of power in the institution of marriage and its subsequent violence and exploitation and the sexual and social oppression of women and girls.

Lofty musings on conformist femininity and love are exposed as fibbing and lampooned: As immature Mansfield might have considered this debut herself, a work of juvenilia that she refused to have republished during her lifetime, the stories are in spurts hilarious in their hyperbolism and razor-sharp observations, stunningly precise and incisive in its details, rich in themes and worded in effervescent and sensuous prose, full of life.

Some of the stories might be less subtle and slightly more predictable than what she will write later in her so brief a life, or have not the delightful open-endedness that will characterize later stories, to me this collection was sheer delight. At the head of the centre table sat the bride and bridegroom, she in a white dress trimmed with stripes and bows of coloured ribbon, giving her appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her, who wore a suit of white clothes much too large for him and a white silk tie that rose half-way up his collar.

View all 42 comments. There was a time when I had lost all interest in Jane Austen, resigned to accepting the self-assured utterances of a few male acquaintances who still continue to believe that she wrote nothing other than classical 'chick-lit'. A female voice with a dignified sense of humor and impeccable comic timing is a rarity in the hallowed halls of literature still ; a female voice with the ability to comment on the power imbalance in gender relations and small quotidian societal injustices under the veneer of wry humor even more so.

Katherine Mansfield, who put together this excellent collection of short stories nearly a century after the publication of Pride and Prejudice , reminds me of Austen in the sense that her mockery of stiff-upper-lipped high society German ladies and barons is a throwback to Austen's keen talent of zeroing in on individual character quirks and highlighting the constant need for validation through assertion of material prosperity.

But this is where the parallels end. The last few short stories in this collection astonish with their thematic depth despite their brevity. Issues of rabid sexism, domestic disharmony, marital rape, thwarted attempts at sexual assault, the bodily violence of childbirth, abuse of young children employed as servants are touched on in the subtlest of ways. These grim realities were, perhaps, not unknown to JA but who, nonetheless, steered clear of them in her romantic comedies.

The fact that Mansfield wrote these stories while quietly living out the ignominy of childbearing out of wedlock in a foreign country should be kept in mind while dissecting the rather no-holds-barred approach she adopts while exposing human foibles. But then there's the consolation that she wrote at all. View all 24 comments. Mar 28, Duane rated it really liked it Shelves: This is Mansfield's first published collection of short stories, and it comes from her experiences during her short time in Germany prior to She called it "immature", but you can see the promise of things to come in this collection.

One story alone, The child who was tired , makes it worth reading. Was it worth it, Katherine - http: Ladies, beware of men who have more consonants in their names that seems reasonable. I know all that from the introduction to my Penguin edition written by Anne Fernihough — an introduction that was rather dense and scholarly. Her semi-autobiographical narrator is stuck in the pension where she is surrounded by crass idiots. She vents her anger by writing sharply satirical portraits of them. This all is something I could very much relate to because I am, also, often angry and surrounded by idiots.

The stories, of course, touch on bigger problems than being annoyed by a dinner companion who picks his teeth and cleans his ears at the table, while talking absolute bollocks.

The stories start off light and satirical but get progressively darker. I know, how embarrassing! Why would I even admit to that in public?

Mansfield was slightly embarrassed by those stories she wrote when she was She called them immature and rolled her eyes at how obsessed she was with bodily functions there is a lot of detailed bodily functions here. View all 19 comments. As everybody knows 24 is the highest number, and in the same spirit there are only two women writers, Jane Austen is one, and then there is the other one. That other one though is multifaceted. Mansfield herself apparently regarded this collection as immature, which I suppose we can understand in many different ways.

In a German Pension: 13 Stories

Everything from Mansfield saying 'pooh don't be impressed by these, kiddo because you ain't since anything yet, I've once started to write' before she cartwheeled down the street and As everybody knows 24 is the highest number, and in the same spirit there are only two women writers, Jane Austen is one, and then there is the other one. Everything from Mansfield saying 'pooh don't be impressed by these, kiddo because you ain't since anything yet, I've once started to write' before she cartwheeled down the street and black flipped into her publisher's office, down to feeling, as I did at first, that the stories were immature in the simpler sense of 'ew, other people talking about their bodies and bodily functions, totally gross and disgusting, I'm going to be alone in my room with my genius' as though she was some kind of turn of the century Adrian Mole.

I am curiously sapphic. And this is so remarkable - not only am I sapphic, I find in all the works of all the greatest writers, especially in their unedited letters, some touch, some sign of myself - some resemblance, some part of myself, like a thousand reflections of my own hands in a dark mirror.

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From the first quotation I felt that this collection was not so much about sensitive 'English' woman meets boorish Germans before the first world war so much as Mansfield confronts herself, I recalled Virgina Woolf writing in her diary that Mansfield stank like a civet cat from the perfume she wore , the women in these stories I felt more and more were facets of Mansfield herself, as she was, also as she might become, or have been.

From the second it seemed to me that this is Mansfield's anti-manifesto. You can't, she says, come to a conclusion about 'the Modern Woman' and it is impossible to present contemporary woman in a novel because the form of the novel tends to a message and a single viewpoint. No, instead you have to smash it to understand it. Once you've smashed the mirror into enough pieces then perhaps can you begin to get a sense of the many facets of the modern woman, says the young woman from New Zealand, pregnant and hiding from English social disapproval in deepest, darkest Bavaria.

And what does she show us?

Receiving a German Pension in Another Country

Artistic pretension, rivalries with the difficult Mother, illegitimacy, sexual violence, snobbery and social exclusion, abuse, marriage as a battleground of dominance and inherent abuse, marriage as a chain of childbirths none of which could never be personal concerns or worries for Mansfield herself, oh, no never. For Mansfield the experience of being a modern woman can not be expressed in a novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, but only in fragments, disconnected fragments offering foreboding, promise view spoiler [ and not necessarily the promise of anything good hide spoiler ] or both.

Some of these themes continue into her later fiction though with an over laying preoccupation with death, and I think, returning to the question of immaturity, with a more sophisticated use of setting, imagery and incident. But there is an intensity and sharpness here. Her child was stillborn, the stories live. View all 12 comments. I read this sometime in the last few years. It's an interesting collection.

I dislike Virginia Woolf. Pretentious babble is what I hear in my head when I read Woolf. I readily admit my mind is neither subtle nor nuanced enough to appreciate the delicate English rose that is Virginia Woolf. Okay, if you want the truth, I had mildly positive feelings about Woolf until a girlfriend dragged me to see The Hours and I spent the whole time swallowing my own sick.

Why this apparently random and senseless attack on the grande dame of the English novel? Because I always had a preconception that Katherine Mansfield was in the same tradition of gauzy, water-coloured impressionism. Her prose is so astringent and vinegary you could pickle a fetus in it or, you know, something inoffensive.

According to impeccable scholarly sources Wikipedia , In a German Pension is largely autobiographical. And fuck you, mom. But clearly I need to get out more. Somehow this rebellious, messed-up Kiwi chick turned herself into a modernist before there was any modernism to write home about. Just goes to show you how far a little talent and a shitload of anger can carry a person.

View all comments. Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis at the age of That just puts a whole lot of shit in a whole lot of perspective. I was going through one of those phases where I'm reading a really big book at home but currently don't have anything tiny enough to carry with me on the bus to and from work, so I'm in a major funk, so I spent a good part of last night opening books from my shelves, reading a page or two, and then putting it back.

Nothing was speaking to me. This slight little c Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis at the age of This slight little collection of Mansfield's writing spoke to me from the beginning. The stories in this collection were inspired by her time spend in Bavaria where she was sent to recuperate after a miscarriage. Mansfield was an observer of the best quality - she took what she saw and heard and applied it to her writing.

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And here are those stories. I fell in love with Mansfield when I read her Journals. Even in some of her random thoughts, I could tell she had a strength in her writing that made me want to know more about her. She was known as one of the modernists and was friendly with other modernist-types like D. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf , and like so many other writers who died too fucking young, I wonder what she could have accomplished had she not contracted tuberculosis.

She wrote about women in a way that most writers were, but more importantly she wrote about people in a way that not many people of her time were.

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These stories are satirical, cutting, and often leaves the reader feeling unsettled. To think that Mansfield was so young when this collection was published leaves me feeling pretty lazy. And unfortunately I couldn't stop reading this, so now it's back to the drawing board in regards to finding something else to read this week during my commute. It's no tuberculosis, but that's what I've got going on - reading funk.

At least this little collection helped me remember there's good literature out there, sometimes even in small packages. Mar 04, Paul rated it really liked it Shelves: An excellent set of short stories; brief with abrupt and unsettling endings and sharp, dry humour.

These are early stories by Katherine Mansfield, written when she was barely over She was recuperating from a miscarraige in Germany and from a short unpleasant marraige. The stories analyse the German middle class and their habits, prejudices and loves. They also look at the more difficult lives of the servants. Mansfield was in the vanguard of the modernist movement acquainted with Virginia Wo An excellent set of short stories; brief with abrupt and unsettling endings and sharp, dry humour. Mansfield was in the vanguard of the modernist movement acquainted with Virginia Woolf and D H Lawrence and the like.

There is a focus on the role of women as wives, mothers, lovers, put upon servants the wives as well as the servants and there is a sense of injustice and even rage underneath. Some are very funny, some tragic. One in particular has a jaw dropping ending The Child-who-was-tired that stays with you , the horror of it gradually seeping in. Mansfield was influenced by Chekov and became an increasingly good short story writer brfore her early death. Mansfield referred to these stories as immature as she developed her craft; but they are fresh, sharply humourous and do feel very modern.

View all 4 comments. Sep 15, Kathleen rated it really liked it Shelves: Have you ever walked past windows along the street and wondered about the dramas going on behind each one? This was like that, only with a witty and insightful storyteller to fill you in. View all 5 comments. A frequent theme of the latter is the social and sexual oppression of women.

They, however, believe themselves he stories in this collection are divided between vignettes of guests staying at the Pension, which are gently mocking in tone, and much darker stories that often have a sting in the tail. They, however, believe themselves superior to the English, particularly when they learn the narrator does not know what kind of meat her husband likes and, worse still, admits to being vegetarian.

The doctor told me this morning that the more fruit I could eat the better. Anecdotes of the High Born were poured out, sweetened and sipped: She did not hear. There is a sense of violence underpinning the story which is realised in the final sentence. Although Mansfield later came to regard this early collection of stories as having little merit, I enjoyed the precision of the writing and their dark humour. Jul 27, Lisa rated it really liked it Shelves: When I belatedly realised that I had been neglecting New Zealand fiction on this blog, the first author I thought of to redress this neglect was Katherine Mansfield She died very young of TB but she left behind some unforgettable short stories, of which In a German Pension was the first collection to be published.

I read it in December , and this edited a little after this re-reading is what I wrote in my journal at the time: This author has a barbed pen indeed! View all 9 comments. Mar 27, Leslie rated it really liked it Shelves: Feb 08, Griselda rated it it was amazing. I read these stories just after leaving school and have only recently returned to them. Mansfield herself famously said that they were 'not good enough'; for me, they are perfect.

With the brevity of Chekhov, the lyrical style of James Joyce, the cynical observation of Guy de Maupassant and the twist in the tail of Roald Dahl, they are all a reader could wish for. Feb 01, Henry rated it it was amazing Shelves: The first published work of an English author who died young, a collection of short stories, which Penguin Modern Classics describe as "Checkovian".

Written when very young, years old, whilst in Germany "recovering" from an unplanned pregnancy ending in miscarriage, many carry a bitter edge, and the introduction proclaims her as disowning these stories as unworthy as she moved on.

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