englischIn June 2009, US president Barack Obama travelled to Cairo to seek a ‘new beginning’ in the Middle East. Beyond people’s hopes and disappointments, Nils E. Lukacs takes the Obama’s historical idea under the magnifying glass. Asking what was ‘new’, what was ‘old’, and how the ‘new beginning’ [...]

englischThe poet Rainer Maria Gerhardt (1927–1954), who died young, was a solitaire. At a time when West German literature was only hesitantly discovering the new, he revealed unknown horizons. His translations and publishing projects presented post-war Germans with poetry from all parts of the [...]

englischFrom its discovery in the mid-18th century onwards, the black-glazed pottery of ancient Greece set several trends in the history of taste in Europe. This was also especially true in the Victorian era, which took a systematic interest in copying not only shapes and décors of the pots but also [...]

englischThis first introduction to cultural semiotics presents culture as a symbol-based program with which a society (re)shapes its living environment. It becomes clear how the respective objectives of shaping the world emerge from the purposeful use of its central figures of thought. Illustrative [...]

englischThe study of ancient heroes in film provides an eminent contribution to our understanding of the present by identifying the upheavals, conflicts, crises and resolution strategies that manifest themselves in heroic figures. This volume approaches heroizations by examining political leadership [...]

englischThe subject Islamic theology, which was founded eleven years ago, was politically expected to train imams who promote integration. The author empirically investigates how students of Islamic theology deal with these expectations. The book shows that the actors' attributions of meaning is [...]

englischThis is the first-ever biography of the Victorian journalist, newspaper editor and travel writer Andrew Wilson (1830–1881). Born in Bombay, he was educated in the universities of Edinburgh and Tübingen, subsequently editing various newspapers in Bombay, Karachi and Hongkong. A prolific [...]

englischDiscover the groundbreaking insights of a visionary thought leader in the age of data-driven civilization. In this experimental essay, the author presents a radical innovation ethic of combining human creativity and artificial intelligence, whose complex interplay he explores herein. [...]

englischProvincial theatres have so far been largely ignored by researchers, although they were cultural centres of entire regions in the 19th century: In these theatres, the population could meet, engage in social activities such as gambling and exchange views on socio-political events. This [...]