Monographs

This volume shows why it is misleading to view time as an object, exploring the insights that can be gained from analogies between sequences and by comparing event timings. Incorporating extensive references to music and, more broadly, to the act of listening provides illuminating glimpses into these fundamental structural properties of reality.

The almost constantly recurring crises of the democratic order and relations between humans and nature in our age of the Capitalocene are currently reviving debates on economic models beyond the capitalist market economy.

This book provides an analysis of the forms and functions of Holocaust memorialisation in human rights museums by asking about the impact of global memory politics on how we imagine the present and the future. It compares three human rights museums and their respective emplotment of the Holocaust and seeks to illuminate how, in this specific setting, memory politics simultaneously function as future politics because they delineate a normative ideal of the citizen-subject, its set of values and aspirations for the future: that of the historically aware human rights advocate.

The Research Training Group 2686 Contradiction Studies researches the formation, negotiation and explanatory limits of contradiction.
The point of departure is the assumption that the ordering figure of contradiction with the imperative to resolve contradictions is often in tension with everyday experiences of contradictions in living together. Constellations of contradiction, contradiction avoidance, contradictions and practices of contradiction are therefore systematically researched and established as objects of investigation in the humanities, social sciences and law. The research group combines discourse-, narrative- and text-centred approaches with ethnographic and other qualitative-empirical methods. On the basis of case studies and genealogically or analytically orientated projects, the Centre carries out conceptual and theoretical work. This aims to re-evaluate contradiction, contradictions and contestation in their empirical constellations, heuristic functions and ontological dimensions – also in response to post- and decolonial discussions on the cosmopolitanisation of knowledge production.

This book extends the contemporary debate on the global concept of religion, conducted in the context of religious studies, to the field of the theology of religions. In applying poststructuralist and postcolonial perspectives, it seeks to deconstruct central categories such as truth, universality, or religion, in order to contextualize them by making transparent their historical genealogy and entanglement with political, social, and scientific discourses. Further, it aims to outline new areas of thinking, which can serve as the experimental basis of an alternative, non-essentialist form of theology (of religions).

After the revolutions of 1917 and a bloody civil war, the Soviet Union was founded on December 30, 1922. It dissolved on December 21, 1991. In between lay 69 years in which it left its mark on the world – through Stalinist terror, through its victory over the armies of Hitler’s Germany, as a nuclear power in the Cold War and with Gorbachev’s policy of détente. Its legacy still weighs heavily on the post-Soviet space today. Internally, under Stalin, it brought famine, deportations, the Gulag and arbitrary executions. But at the same time, the country underwent a fundamental modernization and the first man in space was a Soviet man. Susanne Schattenberg traces the years under the Soviet star and shows how they still have an impact today.

This volume offers a systematic and generally understandable introduction to philosophical questions in physics and its historical development. It begins with a presentation of important stages in the history of physics in antiquity, the early modern period and the past two centuries, and uses them to illustrate central epistemological features of physics. It discusses typical explanatory strategies, the role of experiments and predictions, the procedure for forming concepts and theories and the importance of mathematics.

Leonid Brezhnev was Chairman of the CPSU from 1964 to 1982 and shaped the development of the Soviet Union for almost two decades. Contrary to what had long been claimed in the West, Brezhnev was not a hardliner or restalinizer, but had himself suffered under Stalin and seen so much suffering that he declared prosperity for all to be the general line of the party. The horrors he had experienced in the Second World War led him to seek a balance with the West. Brezhnev mimicked the Western statesman and was accepted by his partners as one of their own. But when Georges Pompidou died in 1974 and Willy Brandt and Richard Nixon resigned, Brezhnev found himself faced with the ruins of his policy of détente. For, as no one in the West suspected, there was no change of policy in the Kremlin. Stress and insomnia led Brezhnev into a pill addiction that further ruined his peace efforts: the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet troops in 1979 was decided by a Politburo troika without him.
A man in his time: Based on numerous previously inaccessible sources, Eastern European historian Susanne Schattenberg presents the first academic biography of Leonid Brezhnev on the 35th anniversary of his death in November 2017.

How do dominant political language and thought patterns emerge and how are they related to social power relations? This volume aims to get to the bottom of these questions about the functioning of discursive hegemonies by linking political science and discourse studies. The political-discursive characteristics and strategies of successful hegemonies are reconstructed on the basis of an examination of the hegemonic project “social market economy”. In addition, the exemplary analysis of the West German economic policy discourse of the post-war years illustrates how political science can benefit from discourse studies research.