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Dr. Bert Sakmann (b. 1942) studied at the Universities of Tuebingen, Freiburg, Berlin, Paris, and Munich, graduating in 1967. Much of his professional life has been spent in various institutes of the Max Planck Society. In 1971, a British Council Fellowship took him to the Department of Biophysics of University College London to work with Bernard Katz (1911-2003). In 1974, he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Goettingen and, with Erwin Neher (b. 1944) at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, began work that would transform cellular biology and neuroscience, resulting in the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. In 2008, Dr. Sakmann returned to Munich, where he headed the research group "Cortical Columns in Silico" at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried. Here, their group discovered the cell-type specific sensory activation patterns in different layers of a column in the vibrissal area of rodents' somatosensory cortices.

Specific developments in reproductive health occurred in Eastern Europe, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. During state socialism, it was experts, not social movements, who furthered the agenda of women’s health and sexuality. New analyses from the region and written mostly by authors who speak the local languages attest to the wealth of histories, highlighting different timelines of reproductive health developments, the unexpected causes behind them, and the social actors and institutions which played decisive roles.

Dr. Wolf Singer (b. 1943) is one of Germany's most renowned brain researchers and neurophysiologists. His accomplishments in the creation of new research centers for neuroscience as well as his commitment to European scientific organizations for integrative brain research are highly valued as significant moments of advancement in the neurosciences. Before his appointment as a scientific member of the Max Planck Society and director at the Frankfurt Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, he gained deep insight into the chances and pitfalls of translational initiatives at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. From the late 1950s onward, the institute adapted to emerging international trends and successfully integrated neurochemistry, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy into the fledgling interdisciplinary field of neuroscience. This agenda of reorientation was an undertaking of Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt, Detlev Ploog, Gerd Peters, and Horst Jatzkewitz, among others. In the 1970s, Munich's laboratories attracted scientists from several countries in Europe and abroad. This article examines whether specific styles of conducting (neuro)science research existed in the Max Planck Society.

The article presents little-known facts about the achievements of the winners of the Olympic Games of Luhansk region in the second half of the twentieth century. Historical data provided an opportunity to fully explore sports traditions and in the historical context to mention the famous names of participants and winners of the Olympic Games of Luhansk region. In the course of the research it was established that the starting point for the Luhansk region at the Olympic Games can be considered Rome, where Valery Brumel won the first medal. It is proved that Luhansk region is famous for its ancient sports traditions. The names of participants and prize-winners of the Olympic Games of our region are known all over the world. They won gold, silver and bronze medals at the Olympic Games. It is established that the golden pages in the annals of sports of the Luhansk region were written by participants and prize-winners of the Olympic Games. Most of our compatriots continued their sports activities as coaches. It was found that Luhansk region actively involves the younger generation in the implementation of all-Ukrainian NOC projects and implements its own activities, such as «Brain Ring – Luhansk Olympic» or cognitive quiz «Sports Country» among preschools in the region. Despite all the difficulties – the difficult situation in Luhansk region and around the world, Luhansk region has a glorious Olympic tradition. The training base in Kreminna is described, where many Olympic champions and sports stars have been preparing and continue to train for their Olympic triumphs in different years. It is established that now the representatives of Luhansk region have won 3 Olympic licenses to participate in the XXXII Olympic Games in Tokyo – two in diving and one in gymnastics.

Historische Bildungsforschung hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten zu einem Forschungs- und Arbeitsgebiet entwickelt, das in seinen Themen, Methoden und theoretischen Bezügen vielseitig aufgestellt und interdisziplinär anschlussfähig ist. Auch Methoden, Arbeitstechniken und Tools der Digital Humanities, die viele Bereiche der Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften heute beeinflussen, finden dort bereits in vielfältiger Weise Anwendung. Dies zeigt der vorliegende Band anhand konkreter Beispiele aus aktuellen Forschungsprojekten und Arbeitsgruppen mit Bezug zur historischen Bildungsforschung. Die Beiträge geben Anwendungsbeispiele für ausgewählte digitale Werkzeuge und Forschungsmethoden und stellen forschungspraktische wie auch epistemologische Fragen zur Diskussion. (DIPF/Orig.)

Die Autoren zeigen in ihrem Projekt, wie die Möglichkeiten der georeferentiellen Visualisierung eingesetzt werden können, um Erinnerungsorte und -zeichen an den Terror und die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus erschließen und sichtbar machen zu können. Im Beitrag wird hierfür, auf Basis von Konzepten des deep und digital mapping, beispielhaft auf das Dokumentations- und Vermittlungsprojekt „Digitale Erinnerungslandkarte Österreich“ (DERLA) verwiesen. (DIPF/Orig.)

Commenting on Christopher Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 is a bittersweet exercise. My assignment for this forum is to consider Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 from the vantage point of China studies. I will do so by framing my remarks with respect to some of the ways this major South Asia historian took his expertise into larger projects, the last of which is the volume under discussion.

In his play Duell an der Havel (1954), the German playwright Fritz von Unruh took the liberty to imagine a fictional encounter between historic figures like Frederick the Great of Prussia and President George Washington. In his play, Unruh attempts a difficult mediation between opposing models of Enlightenment governance and the opposition of freedom and duty. Although historic events in Unruh’s play are completely invented and staged, the author argues that the play holds up as a way of thinking about the complex history of the transatlantic relationship between Germany and the United States, from Washington and Fredrick the Great to Trump and Merkel. (DIPF/Orig.)

Historical images originally meant for one national audience can nevertheless influence audiences worldwide. In this contribution, the transatlantic transfer of historical images at the microlevel is analyzed. The author explores how John Ford’s depiction of the American West profoundly influenced Austrian writer Peter Handke, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature. Handke’s work is full of direct and indirect references to John Ford’s life and work. Ford was a pioneer of the Western genre and greatly contributed to cementing the West as the American epic myth. Handke’s ideas about America and the West, as well as many aspects of his artistic life, can be directly traced to the cinema of John Ford, which is characterized by everyday people, the epic landscapes of Monument Valley, and the bonds that hold communities together. For Handke, John Ford served as his teacher; watching Ford’s films was an educational experience about both American history and life itself. Ford’s depictions of the American West imbued Handke with a “prosthetic memory” of the American West without having experienced it firsthand. By examining John Ford’s reception at the microlevel, the author illustrates the power historical images can have over diverse audiences. (DIPF/Orig.)

The author shows how Feuchtwanger’s attitude towards educational aspirations changed through his experience with the rise of fascism in Germany. Feuchtwanger’s play Waffen für Amerika (1946), which he wrote after he fled from Nazi Germany to the USA, deals with the Franco-American military alliance of 1778 against the British in the War of Independence. At the same time, he implies certain parallels to current events. For Feuchtwanger, the forging of a military alliance of Britain, the USA, and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany was a callback to this earlier European-American cooperation in transatlantic history. The lesson Feuchtwanger wants his audience to learn from this history is to find confidence in the human progress achieved through the European-American alliance and that despite all chauvinistic abuses, both sides of the Atlantic will in the end prevail. (DIPF/Orig.)

In this essay, I argue that radical economics innovated in the communication of economic ideas, engendering new idioms and print formats to intervene in circuits of progressive activism. The essay mentions the pamphlet work of the Union for Radical Political Economics’ various public engagement projects of the early 1970s but at its heart is the 1974 founding of the mass distribution monthly Dollars & Sense. It looks at the positions taken by the periodical over the years and asks, “What kind of print object was it?” It places the publication within a twentieth century history of left political economy periodicals and compares it with its closest contemporaries in the cultures of print of the American Left, notably Monthly Review and Radical America. The attention to the print ventures of radical economics in the 1970s is a contribution to a new kind of historiography that takes an expanded and extra-curricular outlook of economics.

Scientization of the Social - Politization of Knowledge? On a Narrative of the History of the Twentieth Century. The spread of scientific methods and expert cultures in the social, political and economic fields represents a key aspect of twentieth century history. In German-speaking historiography, the "scientization of the social" (Lutz Raphael) has advanced to an influential concept for research into the role of social and human sciences within this development. Exploring this analytical framework against the background of methodological debates, this paper raises the question of how the relationship between the academic and the political spheres in modern societies can be theoretically conceived.

This article suggests that by breaking away from the couples-centric lens normally deployed by historians of intimacy, and instead focusing on the experience of single people, historians gain fresh insight into a key transition point in the late twentieth century history of relationships. Singles, particularly those actively seeking partners, were particularly hard-pressed to digest the implications of a decade of sexual rights campaigns, because, more explicitly than couples, they had to articulate what they wanted out of the opposite sex. In paying close attention to the articulations and experiences of singles, we gain fresh purchase on how the sexual legacies of the 1970s began to be digested, resisted and repurposed. This article makes a case for doing so through Singles, a magazine that brought together the experiences of a cross-section of mostly heterosexual, unmarried Britons at a moment of significant sexual reordering. Examination of the Singles debates around dating and gender suggests that the contemporaneous efforts of ordinary people to process the new sexual languages of the 1970s were more intense and conflicted than the existing historiography has yet allowed, and that much of the sexual antagonism felt by men and women facing each other across the lonely hearts pages stemmed from gendered anxieties about economic standing.

This article explores the work by Bernard Katz (1911-2003), Stephen W. Kuffler (1913-1980), and John C. Eccles (1903-1997) on the nerve-muscle junction as a milestone in twentieth-century neurophysiology with wider scientific implications. The historical question is approached from two perspectives: (a) an investigation of twentieth-century solutions to a longer physiological dispute and (b) an examination of a new kind of laboratory and academic cooperation. From this vantage point, the work pursued in Sydney by Sir John Carew Eccles' team on the neuromuscular junction is particularly valuable, since it contributed a central functional element to modern physiological understanding regarding the function and structure of the human and animal nervous system. The reflex model of neuromuscular action had already been advanced by neuroanatomists such as Georg Prochaska (1749-1820) in Bohemia since the eighteenth century. It became a major component of neurophysiological theories during the nineteenth century, based on the law associated with the names of François Magendie (1783-1855) in France and Charles Bell (1774-1842) in Britain regarding the functional differences of the sensory and motor spinal nerves. Yet, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that both the histological and the neurophysiological understanding of the nerve-muscle connection became entirely understood and the chemical versus electrical transmission further elicited as the mechanisms of inhibition. John C. Eccles, Bernard Katz, and Stephen W. Kuffler helped to provide some of the missing links for modern neurophysiology. The current article explores several of their scientific contributions and investigates how the context of forced migration contributed to these interactions in contingently new ways.

Interest in the history of psychiatry in the social sciences manifested itself in the sixties and seventies at a moment when concepts such as marginality and deviance appeared as a thought-provoking path to rewrite the history of Western societies. This history of madness faces a turning point. Material culture, as this paper’s line of argument expounds, allows one to remain faithful to the critical heritage of the sixties and seventies while still opening up the field to alternative questions by integrating new actors and themes hitherto largely ignored. It allows nuanced narratives that take into account the structural imbalances of power while at the same time being attentive to the agencies of all the actors, as well as the failures of the institutional utopias. This article is part of the special issue 'Blurring Boundaries: Towards a Medical History of the Twentieth Century'.Materiële objecten in de twintigste eeuwse geschiedenis van psychiatrieDe belangstelling voor de geschiedenis van de psychiatrie in de sociale wetenschappen manifesteerde zich in de jaren zestig en zeventig op een moment dat begrippen als marginaliteit en afwijkend gedrag veelvuldig werden gebruikt om de geschiedenis van de westerse samenlevingen te herschrijven. De geschiedschrijving over krankzinnigheid staat nu op een keerpunt. Door het bestuderen van materiële cultuur, zoals in dit artikel wordt betoogd, maakt het mogelijk om de erfenis van de jaren zestig en zeventig te behouden, maar tegelijkertijd het vakgebied te confronteren met alternatieve vragen door actoren en thema’s te integreren die tot nu toe grotendeels buiten beschouwing gebleven zijn. Dit maakt het mogelijk een genuanceerd betoog te schrijven, daarbij rekening houdend met structurele machtsverschillen, recht te doen aan de verschillende actoren, en tegelijkertijd het falen van de institutionele utopia’s in ogenschouw te nemen. Dit artikel maakt deel uit van het themanummer 'Blurring Boundaries: Towards a Medical History of the Twentieth Century'.

The venerable Canadian intellectual of Africa’s liberation movements, John Saul, has delivered another text on this important era in twentieth century history. In Saul’s words, “the regional war in...

The author presents various theoretical and practical approaches from the US and Germany that tackle the question of how people and societies deal with their histories. He identifies similarities and differences between concepts like public history, popular history, and historical culture and asks whether they reflect on the educational dimension of historical representations in popular media. He also addresses research desiderata, hints at possibilities of interdisciplinary research, and describes the history of historical cultures as a neglected subject for the History of Education field. (DIPF/Orig.)

In this chapter we provide an overview of the extraterrestrial life debate since 1900, drawing largely on the major histories of the subject during this period, The Biological Universe, Life on Other Worlds, and The Living Universe, as well as other published works. We outline the major components of the debate, including (1) the role of planetary science, (2) the search for planets beyond the Solar System, (3) research on the origins of life, and (4) the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). We describe the birth of exobiology/astrobiology as a new discipline, emphasize the discovery of cosmic evolution as the proper context for the debate, and suggest that it is best seen as a worldview comparable to the great worldviews of the past.

Demonstrating, representing, or showing is at the heart of every educational action. Historical representations on screen and stage do not "teach" us history but rather influence our ideas and interpretations of it. The contributions to this volume explore the depiction of history in theater and film from the intersection of historical scholarship, aesthetics, memory studies, and education. They examine the creation of historical images, film production and reception, the scriptwriting process, educational programming, and depictions of German-American encounters. Above all else, they explore how various theatrical and filmic productions show history rather than tell it. (DIPF/Orig.)

Even commercial theaters now offer a variety of educational programs for their historical theater productions which provide historical backgrounds and contexts for the plays and enrich regular theater experiences with aspects of historical learning. The author presents a variety of techniques for teaching complicated histories in conjunction with the current playbill. For example, for the stage play adaptations of The Diary of Anne Frank or Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, the Stratford Festival arranged post-show chats, workshops, and prologues. She talks about her experiences with this educational framework program and reflects on the impact it had on the audiences. (DIPF/Orig.)

The final contribution examines the production history of Conspiracy (2001), a dramatization of the 1942 Wannsee Conference. The author uses archival sources such as script drafts, meeting minutes, and correspondence in order to trace just how filmmakers create historical images. This piece critically assesses Conspiracy as a case study for how filmmakers responsibly make complex and difficult histories accessible to wide audiences while largely avoiding cliché and sentimentality. Furthermore, as an Anglo-American production, Conspiracy also serves as an example of how Americans have depicted a key event from “German” history that had global impact. (DIPF/Orig.)

In addition to documentary theater, performances that reenact historical events with amateur actors prove to be a form of historical theater that keeps memories alive. Looking at the historical re-enactments at the Offenburger Freedom Festival in Germany or Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, the author draws attention to the entangled German-American history of the Civil War and discusses the limits and possibilities offered by historical reenactments for history and civic education. He argues that besides the accepted forms of experimental archeology and living history programs in openair museums, historical theater – with students both as actors and audiences in live-action roleplay – can create positive effects for school curriculum-based learning processes. (DIPF/Orig.)

The author discusses the concept of historical images and how storytelling conventions pioneered in early twentieth-century Hollywood became global practices. His contribution uses the film Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer (2015) as a case study for the creation and transmission of historical images on film. The film, a dramatization of Fritz Bauer’s involvement with the capture of Adolf Eichmann, explores the Attorney General’s life before he served as lead prosecutor at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (1963-1965). He analyzes the ways that Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer utilizes storytelling techniques pioneered in Hollywood to construct historical images of the Hessian Attorney General while simultaneously perpetuating well-worn myths about Bauer’s private life. For the author, the film exemplifies our current globalized film culture, where differences in national filmmaking styles have largely fallen by the wayside in favor of films that appeal to more global, transnational audiences connected to streaming services and no longer dependent on the theatrical distribution model. (DIPF/Orig.)

Demonstrating, representing, or showing is at the heart of every educational action. Historical representations on screen and stage do not "teach" us history but rather influence our ideas and interpretations of it. The contributions to this volume explore the depiction of history in theater and film from the intersection of historical scholarship, aesthetics, memory studies, and education. They examine the creation of historical images, film production and reception, the scriptwriting process, educational programming, and depictions of German-American encounters. Above all else, they explore how various theatrical and filmic productions show history rather than tell it. (DIPF/Orig.)