Featured Topics: Spring 2025Non-Fiction

There is a great deal of speculation about the relationship between China and Russia. While many observers fear the formation of an authoritarian alliance between these two great powers, the...

At first glance, progress in artificial intelligence, waves of infection, and the climate crisis may seem to have little to do with each other, but they are often interrelated. And they follow a similar, exponential pattern: one variable – computing power, people infected with COVID19, or CO2 molecules in the atmosphere – increases by a constant factor over a set unit of time. At first, these...

Everyone in our society wants to be seen and understood, but very few want to see and understand – a glaring imbalance. Everyone claims to be »unique«, but society is not founded on self-realisation but on the creation of relationships.

In his new book, Wilhelm Schmid explores the question of what values society needs. What holds it (delicately) together? Does it need an...

The rotating elements on kitchen hobs that allow you to conveniently regulate the temperature are called »knobs«. Of course, anyone who buys an induction hob nowadays will find themselves fumbling around with fickle touch controls. Gabriel Yoran calls such things – which in certain respects are worse than what preceded them – »junk«. Why do these things even exist? Shouldn’t the evolution of...

Modern management models exhibit surprising parallels with the ideals of national socialism. In his new book, sociologist Stefan Kühl argues that these similarities are not a result of the fact that many of the key figures from the Nazi regime went on to shape the development of West German society. Indeed, many of the prominent national socialists who had a major influence on the leadership...

When it comes to understanding the ontology of individual existence—that is, the everyday behaviors that we all perform and hardly ever think about—the voice has a particularly complicated status....

When Isabelle Van Groeningen took up her first job with the National Trust, she moved to the countryside, to the picturesque village of Coleshill. There, she not only took over a charming cottage, but also the unkempt garden that went with it. Using the knowledge she had acquired during her training, she transformed it into a lush, blooming, buzzing paradise that not only delighted visitors,...

With programs such as ChatGTP, artificial intelligence has reached a level at which it is now scarcely possible to distinguish a text written by a computer from one written by a human being. For example, can you be certain that the text you are reading right now was not written by an algorithm?

This represents a real turning point in the way we read the written word. If we are...

A psychoanalytical perspective on anti-Semitism

The Frankfurt School concepts of the authoritarian personality and of Schuldabwehr (whereby postwar Germans developed resentment towards Jews precisely because of the crimes that were committed against them, which foisted a feeling of guilt upon them) have dominated the discourse on anti-Semitism in Germany...

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875 in Prague and passed away in 1926 in Montreux, Switzerland, making 2025 the 150th anniversary of this remarkable author’s birth, and 2026 the 100th anniversary...

Considering the well-being of all people when making moral and political decisions – for many people today, this is at least seen as an ideal. But such a humanist ethics was not always a given, and is still not universally valued. So when and where did it emerge – and why? Is it a peculiarity of the Judeo-Christian or Western Enlightenment tradition? And how is its emergence linked to the...

Whether in the city or in the countryside, in the forest or by the lake: we are surrounded by birds. We usually only pay attention to them when they become particularly loud, clamouring, calling out to each other – or singing. In the morning, the blackbird outside our window wakes us up, on the way to work we hear the starlings and sparrows, and late in the evening the queen of all songbirds,...

Not far from the East Prussian town of Rastenburg – Kętrzyn in today’s Poland – one of the central locations of the Second World War was hidden deep among the forest: the »Wolf’s Lair«. After...