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The article discusses the highlights of the Roads to Paradise: Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam conference at the University of Göttingen in Germany from May 27-31, 2009. The event was attended by more than 60 Islamicists and Islam scholars coming from Europe, North America and the Middle East. One of the topics discussed was the development of the martyrdom cult in Islamic thought.

Hermann Kantorowicz was a great legal scholar, who taught not only in Germany, but also in the United States, at Oxford and at Cambridge. His work bridges the intellectual divide between the common and civil laws not just because of his cosmopolitan biography, but also because of the exceptional breadth of his academic interests. In Germany, Kantorowicz has always been known best as a leading figure of the free law movement (Freirechtsbewegung). This paper focuses instead on Kantorowicz' idea of legal science. There are at least two reasons why Kantorowicz' contributions to the issue are worth re-reading today. On the one hand, he discussed these questions in a manner which engages deeply with philosophical scholarship, relying primarily on concepts developed by Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband, and Max Weber. On the other hand, Kantorowicz developed his ideas of legal science wholly independently of nineteenth century (or contemporary) programmes to re-construct the law in the form of a fully rational, internally coherent system. In this respect Kantorowicz' ideas fit in well with modern, more fluid and complex notions of law and multi-layered legal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1968, the British government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson lobbied behind the scenes for Rhodesia's exclusion from the Mexico City Olympics. Three years earlier, the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia had seceded from the British Empire under white minority rule and faced isolation from international sporting events. With the election of Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1970, British foreign policy shifted more heavily to Europe rather than the former British colonies of the Commonwealth, and Heath sought to allow Rhodesia to compete in the 1972 Munich Games lest it isolate West Germany and create a controversy similar to South Africa's expulsion from the Olympics. With the help of Foreign Minister Alec Douglas-Home, Heath manoeuvred Conservative Party factionalism on the issue of Rhodesian sanctions and the Party's traditionally ambiguous relationship with Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith. The merger between the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office coincided with this increased emphasis on European foreign policy matters, the Foreign Office's traditional expertise. Ultimately, Rhodesia was excluded from the Olympics despite Heath's hesitation, and the threatened African boycott movement proved to be a critical episode toward the development of the Gleneagles Agreement, which ultimately led to the sporting isolation of South Africa in 1978. Relying on documents in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Archives, the International Olympic Committee Archives, the Avery Brundage papers at the University of Illinois, and microfilm of African newspapers, this paper reconstructs the pressures on Heath and the International Olympic Committee to expel Rhodesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of a conference on British film held at the University of Mainz at Germersheim, Germany in February 2010. The conference focused on several themes and problems of British cinema from 2000 to 2010. Andrew Higson presented a summary of major trends in British filmmaking which emphasized the role of the Film Council. Film critic and screenwriter Simon Rose presented his arguments regarding the lack of funding and quality in British films.

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Ja ger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these boob, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These boob thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminalfigure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jager and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud's theory is primarily concerned with memory, about the present contained within the past. It is also rooted to the past in another way; Freud's reception of the Greek classical tradition played a vital role in the genesis of his oeuvre. Winckelmann's revival of 'Greece' dominated German culture up to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, yet besides the importance of Bildung in shaping Freud's early Gymnasium experience, his influence upon Freud is often neglected. While Freud's debt to German Hellenism is clearly demonstrated in his library of classical literature and his collection of Greco-Roman antiquities, the afterlife of Winckelmann's legacy is more subtly inscribed upon psychoanalysis. This paper focuses on Winckelmann's aesthetic reconstruction of classical Greece which made beauty, self-restraint and repression a cultural ideal to be imitated and admired. It is argued that hysteria provided one of the most powerful challenges to this ideal. Psychoanalysis can thus be seen as developing out of a milieu that was still overshadowed by Winckelmann's idealization of Greece. Further, it is argued that Winckelmann advanced a homoerotic tradition in German culture and the sedimentation of this tradition can be discerned in Freud's response to hysteria, his privileging of the masculine and his theory of bisexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how psychoanalytic ideas were brought to bear in the Allied struggle against the Third Reich and explores some of the claims that were made about this endeavour. It shows how a variety of studies of Fascist psychopathology, centred on the concept of superego, were mobilized in military intelligence, post-war planning and policy recommendations for ‘denazification’. Freud's ideas were sometimes championed by particular army doctors and government planners; at other times they were combined with, or displaced by, competing, psychiatric and psychological forms of treatment and diverse studies of the Fascist ‘personality’. This is illustrated through a discussion of the treatment and interpretation of the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess, after his arrival in Britain in 1941. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper we relate linguistic, geographic and social distances to each other in order to get a better understanding of the impact the Dutch-German state border has had on the linguistic characteristics of a sub-area of the Kleverlandish dialect area. This area used to be a perfect dialect continuum. We test three models for explaining today's pattern of linguistic variation in the area. In each model another variable is used as the determinant of linguistic variation: geographic distance (continuum model), the state border (gap model) and social distance (social model). For the social model we use perceptual data for friends, relatives and shopping locations. Testing the three models reveals that nowadays the dialect variation in the research area is closely related to the existence of the state border and to the social structure of the area. The geographic spatial configuration hardly plays a role anymore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of a method, and thus also of a methodology, is very widely regarded as essential for an academic discipline. In Germany, law is, and has always been, an academic discipline. It is the object of what is referred to as Rechtswissenschaft (literally: legal "science"; less literally: scholarship relating to the law), characterized by a specifically legal methodology. Legal methodology is a foundational subject taught in German law faculties and set out in a rich body of legal literature. The present essay attempts to assess, on the basis of that literature, how lawyers are conceived (or perhaps rather: supposed) to operate in Germany. A specificity of the German discourse is the conceptual distinction between statutory interpretation and judicial development of the law. The essay provides an analysis of the various factors relevant within the enterprise of statutory interpretation, and of the prerequisites, the different levels, and the legitimacy of judicial development of the law. It also alerts the reader to the political experiences overshadowing the methodological discourse in Germany. The essay starts with five observations of a more general nature focusing on (i) methodological commonalities in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria; (ii) the normative character of the methodological discourse; (iii) (emerging) methodological differences between different fields of law; (iv) the place of Rechtsdogmatik (legal doctrine and the scholarship associated with its creation); and (v) the historical background of the German discourse. It is hoped that the essay's treatment of these themes will be relevant to non-German legal audiences in light of the overlapping methodological problems that all developed legal systems are forced nowadays to confront. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1704, Abraham Gugger of Augsburg published a 'Dance of Death', whose lengthy German title is best abbreviated as Sterb-Spiegel. Only five acknowledged copies exist. Originally the work of brothers Rudolph Theodor and Conrad Meyer of Zürich, the first iteration of the Sterb-Spiegel had appeared in 1650. The posthumous 1704 version, re-engraved by an unknown artist, differs in one essential regard: the clothing of Death's victims has been modernized to represent the fashions of the beginning of the eighteenth century. The illustrations show that death comes to everyone, represented by the different victims at work, home and play in appropriate settings. The Sterb-Spiegel thus depicts the clothing in context and in 'action', and further represents all levels of early eighteenth-century society, divided into the 'Ruling Class', and the 'General Home and Worldly Positions'. All are appropriately attired, and the Sterb-Spiegel accurately portrays non-elite garb and accessories. The Mercure Galant had ceased issuing regular fashion plates in the 1680s, and the Mercure de France resumed consistent publication of current styles only in the 1720s; the Sterb-Spiegel, even though it was not the original intention, provides contemporary insights into early eighteenth-century fashions when documentation is relatively sparse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

War furnishes a - perhaps the - classic case of 'black humour', which is understood here in the broad sense, not merely as the humour of the gallows or the cheating of death, but humour deriving from a confrontation with suffering or death, either as a victim or a perpetrator. War cartoons relied on the manipulation of images for comic effect, which - at least until the absurdist experiments of the Dada and Surrealist movements during and after the First World War - appeared impossible in photography, painting and cinematography. Caricature permitted artists simultaneously to conjure up, simplify and undermine reality. The selection and exaggeration of character traits and circumstantial detail, which was fundamental to caricature, revealed graphically how cartoonists perceived the social and political world in which they lived. This chapter examines how such selection and exaggeration worked in extreme conditions during wartime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Professor Jansen sets out the historical background and present state of unjustified enrichment theory in the German-speaking civilian legal systems, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The German law of unjustified enrichment has grown from two intellectually separate roots. These different legal ideas were interwoven during the 19th century by the German Pandectists. During the 20th century, it began to appear to many that these ideas did not fit well with one another. Professor Jansen thus argues that the modern civilian law of unjustified enrichment is increasingly characterised by a division into independent and distinct parts. In particular, the rules on the unwinding of contracts and on payments made in contemplation of future contracts no longer have much in common with claims based on an infringement of another person's property right. The conclusion drawn is that the Germanic systems should take their leave of the unifying idea of unjustified enrichment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first professional school for public libraries in Germany started in Leipzig in 1914, followed by schools in Berlin and Cologne. With the beginning of Nazi dictatorship it became apparent that the capacities of these three schools were not sufficient for the planned extension of the library network. Therefore in 1942 a fourth school was founded in Stuttgart for southern Germany, including occupied Austria and Sudetenland. The archives of the Stuttgart Media University hold the official teaching diary (1942-52) of its predecessor, the Stuttgart Library School. It documents early conditions, lecturers' political backgrounds, staffing, problems during the Second World War, and difficulties encountered in the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gilles Deleuze and Hannah Arendt are two thinkers who have theorised the exceptionalism of the revolutionary moment. For Deleuze, it is the moment of the people to come. For Arendt, it is the moment of the freedom of political action. In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall there has been extensive debate on how to remember the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and how to understand the events leading up to its demise. Arendt's analyses of totalitarianism, natality and the public sphere provide points of orientation in an attempt to clarify the nature of the DDR, the dishonesty of its evaluation in the West as well as the transitory purchase of its legitimating discourse on later generations of its citizens. Deleuze's reinvigoration of the revolutionary sense of the term 'people' sets it in defiance of prevalent notions of popular sovereignty and therefore facilitates a different reading of the protests against the so-called people's republic of the DDR: something else was at issue besides the substitution of one state form for another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article turns its attention to the accounts that Foucault and Derrida made following their encounters with archives, and it relates these accounts to the files of the former East German secret police. Derrick and Foucault located differing qualities of authority in the archives that they consulted, yet they are shown here to converge around a problem of non-integrity in the structuration of the archive as supposed guarantor of epistemological sovereignty. A terminology of sovereign integrity dominates the Stasis files, so that they sit in stark contrast with the literary and cinematic texts that grapple with the Stasis legacy - texts that are beset with images of inconsistency and perforation. When read in dialogue with the poststructuralist accounts of the archive, these spy files and the cultural works that emerged after their opening enable new reflection on the ethics of visiting archives, as an act of doing justice that nonetheless risks collapsing the fragments of complex pasts into the narrative wholes of the political present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Western Europe in the late eighteenth century, complaints were rife about the disorganization of libraries and the character of their librarians. Not only from the perspective of library users, but also from within librarians' own ranks, the sentiment became more widespread that librarians should strive to be more industrious and effective, and that libraries should aim to be better organized in order to promote use and access. The strong 'public service' orientation to nineteenth-century European library theory lay at the heart of the major practical or 'technical' innovations - notably in the fields of classification and cataloguing - which transformed librarianship into a profession towards the end of the century. This article aims to explore the impact of these innovations on the role and image of the librarian in the nineteenth century, with particular reference to academic libraries and librarians in England, France, and Germany. It is suggested that as a characteristic set of 'librarianly' virtues - prime among these being love of order, conscientiousness, selflessness, and the willingness to serve - rose to pre-eminence against the background of technical innovations in the field (and also, incidentally, as a reaction against the 'scholar librarians' of an earlier era), the seeds were sown of a crisis in the librarian's professional image and self-image with implications which may even reach into the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the characteristics of Scottish philosophy and its differences with the German. The Scottish philosophy used the inner sense or consciousness in observing the operations of the mind. It follows the inductive method while the German uses the critical method. It starts with facts while the German starts with phenomena. The key attribute of Scottish philosophy over the German is that it does not claim having discovered all truth and all about God, nature and man.

The main goal of this article is to outline a new approach to syncretism in optimality theory, one that does not rely on the concept of underspecification taken over from grammatical theories which do not recognize constraint ranking and constraint violability. The analysis is based on a concept of morphological exponents as leading forms. Instances of syncretism can be traced back to the selection of unfaithful leading forms as a last resort to avoid paradigmatic gaps: The minimally unfaithful leading form exponent spreads to an empty paradigm cell. Three well-studied empirical domains figure in the analysis: (i) determiner inflection in German (Bierwisch 1967, Wiese 1999), (ii) Italian object clitics (Grimshaw 2001), and (iii) animacy effects with noun inflection in Russian (Wunderlich 2004). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers chronology of the journey of writer Samuel Beckett to Germany from 1936-1937. On September 28, 1936, Beckett traveled from Dublin to Cobh in Ireland via Cork to visit the grave of Father Prout. Beckett visited to Kunsthalle to inspect Dutch collection on October 6, 1936. On October 9, 1936, he visited churches such as Michaeliskirche, Nikolaikirche, and Katharinenkirche.

An essay is presented on the implications literary movement of German Romanticism on the backdrop of Samuel Beckett's poetics. It emphasizes that there are various correspondences between the explicit poetic programme of the Early Romantics around Friedrich Schlegel. It also compares and differentiates the goals of the Romantic and the Beckettian quest to ascertain the respective characteristics of the two approaches.

In this article, the author discusses the modernism of German detective films. He examines several parameters in examining German cinema, including the treatment of film space, the generation of suspense and narrative point of view. He reviews the influence of German avant-garde films in the 1920s on modern cinema. The influence of the work of film director D. W. Griffith on Germany cinema is also explored.

This article discusses the representation of modernism in the work of motion picture director Alfred Hitchcock. It cites the film "The Lodger" that shows the consequences of experiment in French and German cinema. It also explores the influence of modernist writings on the director's work. In addition, the article examines the work of Hitchcock as the instrument of sensationalism.

German post-war psychoanalysis was marked for many years by a strong narrative that assured its professional identity: psychoanalysis in Germany had been liquidated by National Socialism and had been rebuilt from scratch after 1945. The psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich was both an integral part of this narrative and its most important propagator. The author analyses the genesis of this narrative, its moral and political function and finally its demise. In doing so he gives a short account of the first years of the reconstruction of psychoanalytic life in Germany after 1945. He draws on new research on Alexander Mitscherlich to describe his relationship with organized psychoanalysis. He explains why the biography of Mitscherlich and the history of German post-war analysis became interrelated to the point where both provided an integral part of each other's self-understanding. Finally, he documents how the narrative was gradually deconstructed after the death of Mitscherlich in 1982. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Historical Geographic Information System (HGIS) Germany, which is based on the development of states and territories in Germany during the nineteenth century. The HGIS also includes data on the adjacent countries of Germany. It is powered by a GIS engine that enables the user to select specific territorial units and provides geographical and contextual information such as names and locations of the administrative and political divisions. It is stated that the HGIS also provides dynastic information and historical statistics depicting Germany's transition from a primarily agrarian to an industrial society. An online book series has been made available that has information regarding the background research that was done to input the GIS data.

The article discusses the use of geographic information system (GIS) for examining the area of the Celtic oppidum Hunnenring in the northern Saarland in Germany. Various archaeological prospection methods and approaches of applied geoinformatics and surveying technology are used to obtain high-resolution digital terrain models (DTMs) with the use of airborne laser scanning (ALS) data and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data. As a result, landscape archaeology information is obtained, which reconstructs the pre- and protohistoric habitat. The results show multiplicity of anthropogenic changes which lead to the hypothesis of an ancient pathway connecting the Hunnenring to an ancient Roman settlement.

This article examines the role played by Ernest Jones in saving psychoanalysts from Germany and Austria during the 1930s, and, in particular, in the case of Drs Otto and Salomea Isakower from Vienna. Archives from the Library of Congress and the British Psychoanalytical Society are used to document how Jones navigated the considerable difficulties presented in both Europe and London as well as by colleagues and was able to help the Isakowers emigrate to Liverpool where they worked and began the 'North of England' training group with others and emigrated to the USA in 1940. As President of the International Psychoanalytical Association and of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Jones had responsibilities with psychoanalyst refugees, which he performed with care, commitment and political competence. Although Jones did not succeed in saving psychoanalysis in Europe, he played a crucial role in saving psychoanalysts. He helped to spread the world-wide standing and influence of psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various issues related to the ecumenical spirit of African Christians living in a German context from the beginnings up to the twenty-first century. The 1st part of this article sets out an overview of the presence of African Christians in Germany since the time of the Prussian ascendancy. The 2nd part addresses the question of how they organize themselves and the part played by African communication and church structures. The 3rd part considers the differences amongst these congregations and churches on a linguistic and confessional level. The 4th part provides an overview of this ecumenical development. The 5th and final part describes the ecumenical spirit of Christians coming from different cultures and traditions.

Focuses on the advent of data analysis during the central middle ages of German prosopography. Accessibility of middle ages to data analysis; Assessment of computer use; Facilitation of ‘lemmatisation’; Consideration of data analysis in terms of a direct application to the sources.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the history of film music, German film industry, and interactive sound design.