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Achtsam Wissen schaffen
(2020)
The German Sonderweg thesis has been discarded in most research fields. Yet in regards to the military, things differ: all conflicts before the Second World War are interpreted as prelude to the war of extermination between 1939-1945. This article specifically looks at the Franco-Prussian War 1870-71 and German behaviour vis-a-vis regular combatants, civilians and irregular guerrilla fighters, the so-called francs-tireurs. The author argues that the counter-measures were not exceptional for nineteenth century warfare and also shows how selective reading of the existing secondary literature has distorted our view on the war.
Sängers Glück
(2020)
The German singer-songwriter Reinhard Mey, although not pretending to be a second Orpheus, nevertheless appears to be very familiar with classical myth.
„An Herrn Prof. A. Wlosok“
(2020)
In contrast to other European countries, female professors of Classical Philology have been severely underrepresented in Germany. This article wants to shed light on Antonie Wlosok (1930–2013), the first or second woman to hold a Chair of Classical Philology in Germany. How can Wlosok’s work at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz be described, considering especially the very male-dominated academic world? Based on testimonials from the university archives and selected publications, this essay aims to give insights to this question, highlighting current debates about women in academia.
Lotte Eisner
(2020)
Lotte Eisner (1896–1983) is without doubt one of the most important early film critics and pioneers of film history. In the history of Classical Studies, however, she plays no role. She is not even mentioned in the relevant scholarly books or articles, although she received a doctorate degree in Classical Archaeology. But it is worth taking a closer look at this relatively short phase of her life. The following lines are to be understood as a sketch of her specific ‘archaeological’ view of German Expressionist silent films. Lotte Eisner herself comments on this in her autobiography.
This article analyses, as an example of the advertising of cosmetic products, a campaign launched by the US-American company “Johnson Soap” for their product, the facial soap “Palmolive”. Examining its ads of 1911 in which certain ancient exempla are employed, it becomes clear that the Palmyrene queen Zenobia and with her the semi-historical Semiramis and the more mythical Dido are aligned to the “1001 Nights” character Scheherazade. Since they are jointly labelled as “historically famous oriental queens” and because of the reference to Zenobia’s white skin, they fall into the fantasy of fair-skinned harem women and evoke thoughts of all the pleasures and comforts of the luxurious Orient. To the modern female customer of 1900 (well steeped in the knowledge of those ancient characters) Zenobia and the other exempla should serve as celebrities worth emulating. Above all they are deemed to be beautiful, and experts in cosmetics which would guarantee the effect of the product they are standing for. A finding that proves to be valid even in an advertising concept of today for the Syrian-German “Zhenobya-soap”.
Träume statt Theurgie
(2020)
In his work De insomniis (On Dreams), Synesios adopts a rather critical view of theurgy, resembling Porphyry’s attitude; his wording shows polemical exaggeration. His insistence on the usefulness of dream revelation for hunting might be read as a (not too serious) claim to the divine inspiration of his work κυνηγετικαί.
Epistula 46 is an invitation, written under the name of Paula and Eustochium, for Marcella to go to Bethlehem, by all means with the aim to stimulate positive interest in the Holy Land for a wider public and to inspire the urge to travel and sojourn. The narrative defines pilgrimage not only through biblical references but also familiarizes it through references to ancient pagan practices and pagan literature and makes it compatible with the lifestyle of Rome’s urban elites. While biblical references predominantly propagate Palestine’s spiritual appeal as a site of centuries-long salvation events, references to the classics – often combined with the expression or the stimulation of emotions – put the region’s social and intellectual appeal to the fore. The use of pagan literature, in which the traditions of educational travel of a cosmopolitan elite, the social utopia of aristocratic recessus, and not least the pleasure of otium aestheticised through literature are prefigurated, shapes Palestine in particular fashion as a place of longing. Especially the appeal of Bethlehem thus only forms through the combination of spiritual-intellectual visio and emotionally attractive social utopia, through conjunction of spelunca Christi and bucolic idyll.
In Martial’s epigrams Silius Italicus is portrayed as a man of learning, author of the Punica and admirer of Vergil’s works, but also as a public figure and a former consul of Rome. My paper focuses on the epigrams devoted to the ‘political’ Silius, and suggests to relate them mainly to a certain stage in Silius Italicus’ life and to a specific communication strategy.
This paper analyzes a specific section of Martial’s Apophoreta (Book 14), the ‘list’ of fourteen literary works that the poet-persona suggests to the reader as potentially suitable presents to give to friends on the occasion of the Saturnalia. It focuses strictly on the literary aspects of the poems and their underlying carnivalesque poetics. This includes an assessment of the logic of the poems’ arrangement and alleged inconsistencies. It is suggested that the section be read as a complex statement of Martial’s on various works and genres of Greek and Roman literature. The last couplet of the section (14.196), a certain Calvus’ work ‘On the use of cold water’ (De aquae frigidae usu), which is unidentifiable, receives particular attention, for previous scholarship has wasted a lot of ink on guessing what kind of work this may have been, thereby losing touch with the rich (meta-)poetics the couplet actually conveys.
Caesar’s visit to the ruins of ancient Troy in Lucan’s Bellum Civile book IX is an invented story which deals with important metaliterary themes such as poetic fama and the poetry’s eternalizing function. Lucan’s narrative also reveals the instrumental nature of Caesarean and Augustan propaganda: the Neronian poet highlights some contradictions of the Aeneid, showing the failure of the political project celebrated by Vergil.
Roms Metamorphosen im Exil
(2020)
In this article, we want to elucidate and contrast the exilic fates rendered in Ovid’s exilic elegies and in Lucan’s Bellum Civile. While Ovid’s persona undergoes a slow development towards acceptance of the exilic condition by ‘refounding’ a second Rome in Tomi, Lucan’s Pompey gradually severs himself from Rome, culminating in him dying far from home apparently without regrets. Both characters try to transfer the concept of Rome to new entities. However, they are not able to escape Rome’s grasp: Pompey is killed by a Roman mercenary in Egypt, Naso’s Roma secunda is in the end only a reproduction of the exul’s irrevocably Roman fate.
This article analyses the eroticized power dynamics that Ovid stages in the Metamorphoses. It argues that 1) erotic desire functions in Ovid as a synonym of the desire for power; 2) that the transformations of gods can be read as a metaphor of the powerful subjecting the powerless to their will; 3) that metamorphosed humans can be regarded as notional monuments to divine power; and 4) that, by parading the self-evident fictionality of his transformation tales (including, most notably, the story of Julius Caesar’s apotheosis in Book 15), Ovid allows his readers, at least for the duration of the reading process, to experience a modicum of freedom.
Etymologie und Erotik
(2020)
Taking its cue from the portrayal of Hercules as muscleman in both films and ancient sculpture this article turns to poetry as a verbal art and examines when and how the hero's body comes into focus in Roman epic and elegy. It is argued that moments of crisis contrasting Hercules’ state in a given situation to his former heroic achievements give rise to representations of his body, while epic fight scenes rather draw attention to the bodies of his inferior opponents. The body is described through references to different body parts, qualified by attributes as masculine in elegiac contexts. A somewhat exotic word as tori suffices to highlight the hero’s muscular body.
Theocritus’ id. 4 has been considered by some scholars as an example of rural mime; the fact that the poem, a unique case in the Corpus Theocriteum, does not contain any pastoral song or contest contributes to the impression of ‘realism’. This lack could be an obstacle for the poetological approach to the bucolic genre in antiquity, which considers metapoetry as its main feature. Our reading of the idyll shows that this limitation is only apparent.
Vorwort: tessellae
(2020)
A particularly dark chapter in the history of European-Jewish relations during the "Third Reich" involves the cooperation of individual Jewish Community leaders and functionaries with Nazi authorities, in particular the cooperation between a few single Jewish Community leaders and the Gestapo. This "cooperation" was partially born of the overall coercion, but in some cases was also marked by denunciation and betrayal. In order to avoid being deported themselves and to save their own skins, there were isolated cases of Jewish men and women who agreed to track down other Jews and hand them over to the authorities, knowing full well what they were doing.
Come si crea l'antisemitismo
(2020)
Zwischen den Weltkriegen
(2020)
Gipfeltreffen am Grab
(2018)
Hilfe für Erez Israel
(2020)
Preface
(2020)
Since 2004 a giant portrait of the ancient Dacian king Decebalus can be seen by people visiting the Đerdap national park in Serbia or sailing along the Danube. The location is carefully chosen: the ancient king is located on the other side of the river, within the Romanian Parcul Natural Porțile de Fier, but is carved in the rock so to look in the direction from where, at the beginning of the 2nd century CE, the Romans came to move war to him and his people. Not by chance, on the Serbian side of the river and not far away from the sculpture is the Tabula Traiana, a Roman inscription celebrating the opening of the Roman road leading here in 100 CE. This article moves from the role of ancient Rome in the historical cultures and national identities of the two countries facing each other here, Serbia and Romania, in order to explain how the Romans represented a ‘contested identity’ and therefore why, at the end of the 20th century, the Romanian nationalistic millionaire G. C. Drăgan decided to invest a humongous quantity of money in the realization of the sculpture of Decebalus.
Zum Hundertsten nichts Neues
(2016)
The dispute between social versus religious interpretations of anti-Semitism pervaded the whole history of scholarly research. Whereas socio-historical interpretations had underlined the social aspects, current studies on anti-Semitism focus on religious motifs. The thesis that anti-Semitism was a result of a religious conflict, however, is far more alleged than substantially proved by the sources. So it seems necessary to go back to the sources. Therefore this paper analyzes the language of the Venetian Catholic newspaper Il Veneto Cattolico/La Difesa from the foundation of the newspaper in 1867 up to the First World War. Just a few years before the term anti-Semitism was coined, Catholic journalists of Venice had created the new semantic of secular anti-Semitism. They turned back to religious issues when they tried to systematize their anti-Jewish sentiments. Thus one can observe in the coverage of the Venetian Catholic journals the invention of an anti-Semitic tradition.
This essay aims at discussing the new literature on Franco-German relations during the period 1918-1930. It highlights how many works now question the idea that the Treaty of Versailles and the European order that ensued inevitably wore within themselves the seeds of a new war. On the contrary, by examining in particular the detente efforts of the Twenties, the most recent historiography often emphasizes how the inevitability of the authoritarian turn of Twenties and Thirties, which led to the Second World War, has often been exaggerated by historians and that different paths could have been undertaken.
The Social War (91-88 BCE) is one of the most significant episodes in Roman history: from this war, in which Rome fought against her Italic allies, emerged the elite that would lead the Republic in the last decades of its existence and that would provide the senatorial aristocracy of the early imperial age. The Italic rebels were defeated militarily, yet they achieved their political aims. As such, this war – and its elaboration and memorialization in Roman cultural memory – provides a very interesting case study about how "victory" and "defeat" are constructed discursively after a disruptive war, and how its narration is "functionalized" for a re-foundation of the civic body.
Der Artikel fragt nach einem möglichen Geltungsbereich heutiger Konzeptualisierungen der literarischen Transkulturalität für die polnische(n) Literatur(en). Der Hintergrund der Überlegungen ist die ‚monokulturelle‘ Kondition der polnischen Gesellschaft nach den Katastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts, die u.a. in den literarischen Rückgriffen auf die vergangene kulturelle Pluralität in den letzten drei Dekaden kritisch reflektiert wurde, heute aber wieder – in der populistisch-nationalistischen Politik – affirmiert wird. Dabei ermöglicht eine historische Perspektive auf die kulturellen Verflechtungen des literarischen Schreibens in der polnischen Sprache einen Einblick in die historisch heterogenen Formen literarischer Transkulturalität, die von den jeweiligen politischen und sozialen Kontexten abhängen. Eine umfassende Behandlung des Schreibens in der polnischen Sprache unter Bedingungen des Sprachwechsels bzw. der Mehrsprachigkeit seit der frühen Neuzeit bis zum 20. Jh. bleibt ein Desiderat. Den Höhepunkt einer auf diese Art gedachten Literaturgeschichte bildet – so die These des Artikels – die spezifische Ausprägung der polnisch-jüdischen Literatur in der Zwischenkriegszeit, in welcher Konzepte einer hybriden Doppelzugehörigkeit in linguistischen und topographischen Chiasmen dramatisch auf die Spitze getrieben werden und somit die ungelösten Probleme der Zeit spiegeln.
Das Dorf als Erinnerungsraum
(2019)
Im Rahmen eines interdisziplinären studentischen Projekts wurde ein Framework für mobile pervasive Lernspiele entwickelt. Am Beispiel des historischen Lernortes Park Sanssouci wurde auf dieser Grundlage ein Lernspiel für Schülerinnen und Schüler implementiert. Die geplante Evaluation soll die Lernwirksamkeit von geobasierten mobilen Lernspielen messen. Dazu wird die Intensität des Flow-Erlebens mit einer ortsgebundenen alternativen Umsetzung verglichen.
Vorwort
(2019)
Fontanes Postkarten
(2019)
Erinnerung als Argument
(2018)
Although claiming the authority of an eye-witness account, frater Simon’s letter is almost certainly a ficticious description of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. This presumed lack of authenticity has obviously prompted modern scholarship for a long time to be oblivious to this contemporary and exclusive source on the events, preferring well-known and reliable sources such as Leonard of Chios and Isidore of Kiev. However, since frater Simon’s letter has survived in two different versions and ten manuscripts from the 15th century, it is clearly more than a marginal note. Rather is it a remarkable contribution to the literary treatment of the Turkish threat and timeless moral instruction.With his portrayal of the pagan Mehmed II as a just ruler, the recurring moral instructions and the lack of a call to arms. Simon’s text stands out against themyriad of more or less contemporary depictions. In preparation for a critical edition the paper gives an analysis of the text and an overview of the extant manuscripts.
Einleitung zu Georg Lukács
(2015)
Two short typescripts by G. Lukacs from the archive, dating from 1941/42, shed light on his appraisal of the cultural ‘inner reserves’ of Germany and the ‘moral reserves’ of the democracies involved in the Second World War, as well as on Lukacs’s political philosophy at that time. The conception of an intrinsic interrelation of a humanist philosophical anthropology and rationalist epistemology elucidates his egalitarian and democratic account. Both texts are located within the intellectual development of the author in an introduction by the editor, which sketches the historical background and indicates relevant contemporaneous theoretical and political debates, such as the controversies over realism and humanism and also a dispute with K. Jaspers on German collective guilt.
Die Debatte geht weiter: Gab es 1930/31 ernst zu nehmende Kreditangebote der französischen Regierung an das Deutsche Reich? Versäumte es die Reichsregierung unter Kanzler Heinrich Brüning aus politisch- revisionistischem Kalkül heraus bewusst, diese Angebote auszuloten? War die eiserne Sparpolitik der ersten beiden Präsidialkabinette also nicht die alternativlose Konsequenz ökonomischer Zwänge, sondern die logische Folge davon unabhängiger außen- und gesellschaftspolitischer Prämissen? Paul Köppen, der diese Debatte im Juli 2014 in den Vierteljahrsheften für Zeitgeschichte eröffnet hat, antwortet seinen Kritikern, präzisiert seine Argumentation und stellt seine Thesen in den weiteren Kontext der aktuellen Diskussion um die Chancen und Belastungen der Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen.
Zwischen Schah und Khomeini
(2015)
1978/79 fegte eine Revolution das Regime von Schah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi im Iran hinweg - eine islamische Revolution, an deren Ende ein Gottesstaat unter Führung der Geistlichkeit stand, mit Ayatollah Khomeini an der Spitze. Die Bundesregierung unter Kanzler Helmut Schmidt und Außenminister Hans-Dietrich Genscher befand sich in einer Zwickmühle: Einerseits war der Iran ein wichtiger Erdöllieferant und Handelspartner, andererseits verstörte die Gewalt gegen politische Gegner und Vertreter der westlichen Staatengemeinschaft, die in der Besetzung der amerikanischen Botschaft in Teheran gipfelte. Frank Bösch zeigt auf der Basis neuer Quellen, wie die Bundesregierung auf die islamische Revolution reagierte, zwischen interessengeleitetem Pragmatismus und außenpolitisch gebotener Bündnistreue zu den USA lavierte und so hinter den Kulissen als Vermittler zwischen Teheran und Washington fungieren konnte.
Einleitung
(2017)
Beworbene Vergangenheit
(2017)
After Action Reports
(2017)
Age of Empires 3
(2017)
A Case for Serious Play
(2017)
The article describes the history of Jews in Europe from the end of the Middle Ages until the aftermath of the Second World War as a sequence of migrational processes. It thereby demonstrates how the migration paradigm can contribute to a comprehensive understanding of European Jewish history during the given period by better explaining the various types of settlement, as well as other central phenomena of Jewish existence, such as inclusion/exclusion, assimilation/acculturation, and anti-Semitism. The article tries to assess the significance of the "religious factor" within the complex interdependencies between so-called "push" and "pull" factors that determined the individual migrations. In most cases, religious motives played only a minor role, while economic factors tended to dominate, particularly in regard to the functions Jews, as members of a minority, were permitted to carry out in the context of non-Jewish majority societies.
As an example of migration of the Franciscans, this article pursues the effects of their idea of mission: acquisition and transfer of knowledge concerning non-Christians in the communication of missionaries, using the examples of journeys to Mongolia or the encounter with indigenous peoples in the New World (Aztecs).
These friars wanted to teach non-Christians rather than subjugate them. The context of religion and migration resulted in a "boom" of inculturation. And the same context shows the way the Franciscans claimed their identity as well as their struggle, how Franciscans connected pastoral care with recognition of the cultural and religious plurality of Christendom. They embodied what it could mean to say: "our monastery is the world".
Had Hitler still managed to win at the End? Europe's Jews between Shoa Restructuring and new Dangers
(2015)
Introduction to Georg Lukacs: Why Democracies are superior to Autocracies? and The real Germany
(2015)
Two short typescripts by G. Lukacs from the archive, dating from 1941/42, shed light on his appraisal of the cultural 'inner reserves' of Germany and the 'moral reserves' of the democracies involved in the Second World War, as well as on Lukacs's political philosophy at that time. The conception of an intrinsic interrelation of a humanist philosophical anthropology and rationalist epistemology elucidates his egalitarian and democratic account. Both texts are located within the intellectual development of the author in an introduction by the editor, which sketches the historical background and indicates relevant contemporaneous theoretical and political debates, such as the controversies over realism and humanism and also a dispute with K. Jaspers on German collective guilt.
Sociability and Hugo Grotius
(2015)
Grotius has a rudimentary theory of sociability. Only with hindsight has a remark about appetitus societatis been promoted to the starting point of a theory that flourished in the writings of later natural jurists. In this article, I address the issue of the appearance in Grotius's natural law of sociability [as the 1715/38 English translation of John Morrice renders appetitus societatis, following Barbeyrac's sociabilite]. Writing in the just war tradition, Grotius is first of all interested in finding out the conditions for peace, and although injustice is a condition of war, it is not per se true that injustice is a perversion of society. Apparently, not all societies are perfect and the violence of war and the legal actions of peace are both instruments for achieving a greater modicum of justice in this world. Yet appetitus et custodia societatis is called the foundation of justice. Grotius achieved this context for sociability in phases, through a series of writings from c. 1600 until De iure belli ac pacis of 1625, and its revision of 1631. In this development the notion of fides plays an intriguing role, through which we can obtain a better understanding of the meaning of appetitus societatis in the later work. The present article is a sequel to a previous publication, on fides in De iure praedae (Ms. 1604/5). Analysing the genesis of appetitus societatis in De iure belli ac pacis, I argue that Grotius was changing his strategy over the years, without however arriving at a definitive solution to the question of what commits men to the pursuit of justice.
This article offers a theoretical overview of transnational history in relation to the history of ideas, a field that certain specialists of transnational history have singled out as a promising field of future transnational research. Recent historiographical discussions within Enlightenment studies are offered to throw light about the actual novelty that a transnational perspective would offer for the history of ideas. Rather than being an entirely new outlook, transnational types of analysis can be understood as lying at the heart of classical, universalistic Enlightened scholarship, a perspective that was challenged according to the fundamental problem of context.
In this article, entangled media history is presented as an approach to combine recent methodological developments towards an international turn in intellectual history on the one hand with the social history of ideas on the other. By concentrating on press networks, publishers, and media formats the various processes of constitutionalization and nationalization in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period can be reconstructed as part of an emerging European public sphere. This is exemplified by the example of the political discourse of that time in Germany. In a first step, the international networks around the two most important German publishers, Johann Friedrich Cotta and Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, are reconstructed. In the second part, the crucial role of translations and adaptations of political articles in two decisive media formats of the political discourse, the historical-political journals and the "Conversationslexikon" is examined. And finally in a third step, the specific significance of the reception of the Spanish revolution of the "trienio liberal" for the development of a constitutional vocabulary in Germany is sketched.
This article interrogates the application of a transnational perspective to the study of exile in the Age of Revolutions. The purpose is two-fold: 1) to acknowledge the benefits of the transnational approach for studying the phenomenon of exile in Europe and the Americas in this period, especially in order to understand the parallel formation of international liberalism and European counterrevolution; 2) to question some of the limitations of this approach, especially if it means neglecting the national framework in a context of intense nation-building, like the late 18th- and early 19th-centuries. An interpretation that understands exiles merely as transnational agents misses how important for them the nation was, for it shaped both their politics and their identities.
This article develops a comprehensive critique of historical research focussing on the mutual relations between social power and violence. According to the methodological initial hypothesis, due to the inadequate distinction between indigenious concept (from sources) and heuristic (from reseach) in the historical sciences, there have been very few valuable insights into these relations to date. In order to expand the research focus which is the objective of this article, the analysis draws on the two actor-centric reference systems of "certainty" and "order". The key idea behind this, operationalizing certainty/uncertainty by means of order/disorder, is a promising way of programmatically combining a vertical and horizontal network of relationships of power, violence, certainty, and order.
For the eschatology of socialism. Hendrik de Man's contribution to the concept of "secular Religion"
(2011)
Advanced mechatronic systems have to integrate existing technologies from mechanical, electrical and software engineering. They must be able to adapt their structure and behavior at runtime by reconfiguration to react flexibly to changes in the environment. Therefore, a tight integration of structural and behavioral models of the different domains is required. This integration results in complex reconfigurable hybrid systems, the execution logic of which cannot be addressed directly with existing standard modeling, simulation, and code-generation techniques. We present in this paper how our component-based approach for reconfigurable mechatronic systems, MECHATRONIC UML, efficiently handles the complex interplay of discrete behavior and continuous behavior in a modular manner. In addition, its extension to even more flexible reconfiguration cases is presented.