Search

Ommo Grupe (1930–2015) was referred to as the 'Nestor of German sport pedagogy and sport science' in various obituaries. The paper considers the life and work of Ommo Grupe, which he dedicated to sports and sport science in West Germany against the background of the development of West Germany until the German reunification of 1989/1990. Grupe represented a common knowledge and sense in West Germany concerning sport and physical education. Sport should be free, human and democratic, united in this spirit, independent of the state and based on fundamental principles as recorded in the Olympic Charter, and on the traditions of European enlightenment and New Humanism. Physical education and sport science as a 'Querschnittswissenschaft' (cross-sectional science) should be taught, researched and established as an interdisciplinary subject in the cultural and academic contexts of life at universities and in schools. This paper considers the development of West German sport(s), sport(s) science(s) and physical education, reflected in the life and work of Ommo Grupe. It is based both on Grupe's books and writings, on original documents, and not least on experiences and knowledge deriving from my own joint work with Ommo Grupe in Tuebingen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the preliminary results of a research project (supported by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank) about Austrian economists under the Nazi regime from 1938 to 1945. The biographies of nearly 200 economists were collected who had close relations to Austria and who were affected in some way or another by the politics of the Third Reich: some as perpetrators, followers or opportunists, others as victims who were persecuted, forced to emigrate or who even lost their lives. To illustrate the diverse fate of Austrian economists after the Anschluss, a brief account is given of three economists who belonged to different economic "schools" and who were affected by the Nazi regime in very different ways: Friedrich Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, an NS party member and adherent of the German Historical School; Friedrich Otto Hertz, a sociologist and economist, who was forced into emigration twice; and Karl Schlesinger, a banker with remarkable theoretical contributions to economics who committed suicide on the day the German Wehrmacht invaded Austria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Caring for terminally ill patients with minor children can be very stressful. The perceived quality of life is significantly influenced by the Meaning in Life (MiL). No studies were found that focus on the prioritized special needs of this patient group. Objectives: The aim is to compare and contrast terminally ill parents with minor children and palliative care patients in Germany, in order to provide appropriate support beyond medical, nursing or therapeutic interventions. Methods: Terminally ill parents diagnosed were surveyed using a validated instrument 'Schedule for Meaning in Life Evaluation (SMiLE)'. The study listed various areas that contribute to the MiL, followed by an evaluation of their importance and satisfaction levels. The researchers then compared these findings with data collected from palliative care patients. Results: In Germany, 54 patients, mostly female and with a mean age of 43, were included in this study between February 2017 and September 2020. The median age of the 96 children during the survey phase was 7 years. The comparison group consists of 100 palliative care patients in Germany; mostly aged 50 years and older. For terminally ill patients most important areas were in decreasing order family (100%), social relations (80%), leisure time (61%), nature/animals (39%) and home/garden (30%). Although the overall indices are close between both groups, there are significant and highly correlated differences between them. Parents felt limited by their illness in being a mother or father, as they wanted to be. Conclusion: The involvement with SMiLE led patients to consider their coping resources. The areas relevant to terminally ill parents differed from those relevant to palliative care patients. All participants identified family as the most important factor for MiL. The results suggest that evaluating MiL can serve as a coping strategy and help terminally ill parents with minor children. Plain language summary: A comparison of answers to the meaning in life from seriously ill parents with young children with the answers of other seriously ill patients Background: Caring for seriously ill patients with young children can be very stressful. The quality of life depends on meaning in life. No studies were found that focus on the needs of this patients. Objectives: The aim was to explore similarities and differences between seriously ill parents with young children and palliative care patients in Germany to find the best way to support them. Methods: The Meaning in Life questions were used to find this out. Two researchers asked seriously ill parents about different things that make their lives meaningful. The researchers then compared the results with data from other seriously ill patients in need of palliative care. In Germany, 54 seriously ill parents with young children were interviewed between February 2017 and September 2020. The children were usually seven years old. The compared group consisted of 100 palliative care patients and was mostly older than 49 years. For seriously ill patients most important were family, social relations, leisure time, nature/animals, and home/garden. The values seemed similar, but there are clear differences between the groups. Parents felt their illness limited them in being a mother or a father. Conclusion: The questions helped patients helped to remember meaning in life and set goals. The things that mattered to seriously ill parents were different from those that mattered to palliative care patients. All participants said that family was the most important thing for meaning in life. The results show that thinking about meaning in life can help. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The erosion of internal labor markets, together with the rise of flexible forms of work such as projects, increases uncertainty regarding the coordination of work and labor market transactions, and it makes employment, income and career perspectives less predictable. This paper addresses the questions of what, if any, kinds of institutional and social-structural conditions are able to provide stability in the absence of the open-ended employment relationship, and which individual certainty strategies are used. On the basis of qualitative, semi-structured interviews with experts and project workers in the German television and film industry, it is argued that the institutional and social-structural context matters crucially for individual strategies to reduce uncertainty. More specifically, this paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the interrelationship between networks and biographies, and of the interaction between networking and other forms of coping with risks and uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nomadas (01217550) is the property of Universidad Central and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Prof. Dr. Fuat Sezgin (1924-2018), a renowned Turkish orientalist and historian of science, was the founder and long-term director of the Institute of the History of the Arab-Islamic Sciences at J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany since 1982. With respect to medical sciences, he outlined the historical development of medical literature in Islamic civilizations by introducing the works and contributions of many medical authors of the Islamic Golden Age. Among them, the third (1970) and fourth (1971) volumes of his voluminous work Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (History of Arabic Writings), a systematically organized bio-bibliographical reference on the history of science and technology in the Islamic world, are of particular importance. He also established Frankfurt's (1983) and Istanbul's (2008) Museum for the History of Science and Technology in Islam, bringing together nearly 800 ingenious replicas of historical scientific instruments and medical tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dr Hans Kimmel was a Viennese Jewish lawyer born in Galicia who fled from Europe to Australia after the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria in March 1938, arriving in Australia in 1939 with his family. His memoir titled 'Twice a New Citizen', located in the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, provides the basis for this article. The 180-page document details his life as a child and teenager in Galicia and Vienna, highlights antisemitism, the rise of Nazism and his early bouts of depression, a condition which severely a)ected the trajectory of his life over the subsequent sixty years. His years in Australia are well documented by Professor Suzanne Rutland, but through his own words, we can gain a better knowledge of his early years and a better understanding of his severe mental illness, enabling a fuller exploration of his life's story and contributions to Sydney Jewry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: E. Kraepelin begins, in Germany, his psychiatric formation in 1877. Pupil of Wundt and von Gudden, he becomes professor at Dorpat (Estonia) in 1886 and then at Heidelberg (1891) and at Munich (1903), where he founds in 1917 the first autonomous psychiatric research institute. His works consist in his textbook and 200 articles on social, legal and comparative (cross-cultural) psychiatry and on experimental psychology. He also wrote an historical book on “Hundred years of psychiatry” (1918), some poems and political papers subject to controversy after the 1st World War. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This essay sets out a curious anecdote about Leibniz's life, which, according to his secretary and first biographer Johann Georg Eckhardt, the German thinker often told. The anecdote in question is analogous to an episode in Descartes's youth, related by Adrien Baillet in his Vie de M. Descartes (1691). The resemblance of the two stories has never been considered by Cartesian scholars, by Leibniz's biographers, or by scholars who, like Hans Blumenberg, have focused particularly on the use of anecdote in the history of philosophy, including Leibniz's story. If the analogies between the stories told by the two philosophers are not coincidental, then Leibniz's must be a fabrication. It is thus worth investigating the circumstances in which Leibniz told it and analyze its elements, in order to throw light on the philosopher's intellectual imagination and his way of approaching the work of other great thinkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a biography and obituary of the German Democratic Republic palynologist Dr Eberhard Schulz (1931–2017). A pioneer in Mesozoic palynology, he established, together with other important palynologists of that time, the basis of today's palynological research, especially in the Triassic and Jurassic of Eastern Germany. His comprehensive range charts, numerous new type descriptions, and beautiful and informative illustrations were and still are a valuable contribution to our field. In addition, his professional life and heritage not only illustrate an important period of advances in palynology during the 1950s to 1970s, but also give us an insight in German history, and the restrictions and challenges that scientists faced in the German Democratic Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay challenges the 'methodological territorialism' and 'methodological nationalism' prevalent in recent studies of imperial biographies, examining the role of the German Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (1801–1851) in establishing a transnational form of free-trade imperialism in China. A native of Prussia and a missionary by training, Gützlaff was first posted in the Netherlands East Indies before associating himself with British interests on the China coast. However, his loyalty was not limited to one imperialist power. In the 1840s, Gützlaff promoted German trade with China, and at certain points of time he also supported American as well as Scandinavian interests. In addition to making a name for himself as a cultural broker and promoter of free trade and diplomatic representation, he also became involved with various forms of imperialism, from the more fluid commercial variant to the more formalised power structures of territorial rule. The case of Gützlaff therefore lends itself to a reflection about the permeable and shifting boundaries of empires. Moreover, it calls for a reassessment of German imperialism in the period before 1871, showing how Germany's involvement with 'Western' global expansion was palpable and not merely confined to the realm of colonial fantasy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of his continuing political and cultural currency in Germany and beyond, this article endeavours to understand the widespread and singular interest in sexologist and sex reformer Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) as a historical figure. To this end, it analyses four book-length biographies, two in English and two in German, written between the mid-1980s and the early 2010s. By highlighting repeated themes, claims and assertions, the article demonstrates how the dominant representation of Magnus Hirschfeld that emerges across all of his biographies is that of a tireless humanitarian doctor who dedicated his life to fulfilling the spirit of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee's motto: Per scientiam ad justitiam, 'Through Science to Justice'. Based on this framing, his biographers mobilize Hirschfeld's legacy to defend the Enlightenment tradition and champion a liberal approach to sexual politics. This article considers the consequences of these representational choices by examining how biographers suppress or mitigate the more troubling aspects of Hirschfeld's life in order to sustain a narrative that can bear the weight of these political investments. By way of conclusion, it explores the narrative and analytical possibilities afforded by a more ambivalent reading of Hirschfeld's life and legacy, and maintains that a less certain and less heroic view of Hirschfeld may ultimately provide more insight into both the past and the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the biography of the activist and Green Party co-founder Petra Kelly in order to rethink the Greens' founding process and to articulate a new conception of charismatic political leadership. It shows how Kelly used her activism in the new social movements as the basis for her leadership role in the Greens, and how her ongoing work in the peace movement provided her a means of maintaining power within the nascent party during the early 1980s. By examining Kelly's contributions to the Greens' approach to politics, the article shows that she was more than just a figurehead for the new party. Most importantly, the article shows that throughout her career as an activist and politician, Kelly used her biography to establish credibility and to support her unique style of charismatic leadership. The German public's response to Kelly reveals the influence of this charismatic leadership and shows how her movement-driven and biographically informed approach, which brought personal experiences and emotions into politics, was part of a larger transformation of the political in West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Das dritte Buch über Achim, Uwe Johnson describes the attempt by his protagonist, the West German journalist Karsch, to fuse the writing of a biography of Achim T., a sports celebrity on the road to political prominence, with an analysis, and ultimately a criticism of his hero's political context, the former German Democratic Republic. Karsch adopts the view that his hero stands to his political environment in a synecdochic relationship. To underpin this interpretation, Karsch's initial method is to approach Achim's career teleologically, implying an ultimate harmony between the private and public sphere. Karsch's method, and the enterprise as as whole, fail. This article analyzes the specific difficulties of Karsch's initiative, and the deeper reasons for its failure. Johnson's working methods and his politically ambivalent stance vis-à-vis both the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany are investigated. Insights of a general nature are gained concerning the process of writing biographies, beyond the immediate circumstances of the text under consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a study of apprentices in England and Germany designed to explore young people's learner identities over time and in relation to particular learning environments. The research adopts a multi-method ethnographic approach, combining biographical interviews with multi-site participant observation. The article problematises the notion of participant observation and the possibility of obtaining meaningful data in short-term observations as part of a broader research design. It highlights the importance of the researcher role and the opportunities different roles entail for developing shared understanding and co-constructing meaning. It concludes that the observations yield important findings about the construction of identity in different sites and thus complement the interview data in enabling the researcher to reconstruct the apprentices' learner biographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]