Der Blick auf bisher wenig beachtete Dichter des späten 13. Jahrhunderts, als Konrad von Würzburg ganz die literarische Szene zu beherrschen schien, lohnt sich durchaus, wenn man ihre Texte genauer auf die Aussagen hin abklopft und die Überlegungen in Betracht zieht, die dort formuliert worden sind. Dieser Beitrag bemüht sich darum, speziell das Werk des südwestdeutschen Dichters Boppe neu zu beurteilen und darauf hin zu überprüfen, ob nicht innovative Gedanken und Vorstellungen, die sich allenthalben in seinen Strophen finden, es rechtfertigen wenn nicht gar erfordern, unser Bild vom Spätmittelalter um einiges zu modifizieren. Boppe mag nicht zur allerersten Garnitur seiner Generation gehört haben, aber wir können eine Reihe von sehr bemerkenswerten Aussagen identifizieren, die uns ermutigen, diesen Dichter stärker ins Augenlicht zu rücken und als einen eigenständigen Poeten anzuerkennen, der idiosynkratisch und gedankentief didaktische Überlegungen anstellte, was wir von vielen seiner literarischen Zeitgenossen nicht behaupten können.

Wolfgang Becker’s film Goodbye Lenin (2003) is set at the centre of big changes after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. At the fulcrum there is an East Berlin mother Christiane, a devout communist, who has a heart attack just before the big changes take place in East Germany. She remains in a coma for eight months. When she wakes up, doctors warn that she needs to have a peaceful life, and she should not get excited about anything, otherwise she would have another heart attack. Then, her children pretend that the GDR still exists, the wall has never come down in order to protect their mother from any kinds of excitement. they restore an isolated inner space, in order not only to maintain the socialist past within the present, but also to lengthen their mother’s life. The shift is not only in ideological space, but also in private and public spaces. This paper analyses Goodbye Lenin in terms of private and public space, and argue how individualised body space empowers both ideology and personal life to prolong ideology.

In ”Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Herman Melville presents a character whose passive refusal, encapsulated in the repeated phrase “I would prefer not to,” challenges power, agency, and social norms. This essay examines how Bartleby’s refrain acts as both an assertion of autonomy and a critique of the violence inherent in language. By rejecting his employer’s commands, Bartleby disrupts the rational, efficiency-driven logic of the workplace, exposing the violence embedded in linguistic norms. Slavoj Žižek’s concept of language as inherently violent—through its imposition of norms and standards— illuminates how Bartleby’s refusal goes beyond protest, creating a space of resistance that defies interpretation and subverts power dynamics. Bartleby’s language, neither a clear denial nor an expression of desire, becomes a radical negation that questions the very nature of meaning. Ultimately, Bartleby’s refusal does not propose a new order but disrupts the structures of meaning and authority, forcing us to confront the limits of language itself.

Dieser Forschungsartikel untersucht die Rolle der pädagogischen Übersetzung mit Hilfe der künstlichen Intelligenz im Übersetzungsunterricht. Die pädagogische Übersetzung spielt im Deutsch-als-Fremdsprache-Unterricht eine bedeutende didaktische Rolle. Durch das Übersetzen können syntaktische, semantische und lexikalische Kompetenzen geübt und zur Ausbildung im Sprachpaar Deutsch-Türkisch beigetragen werden. Ihre Funktion als Lernmethode und Hilfsmittel zur Förderung der Sprachfertigkeiten ist unumstritten. Im digitalen Zeitalter unterzieht sich die Übersetzung als Medium einen technologischen Wandel. Künstliche-Intelligenz-basierte Übersetzungsprogramme wie Chat GPT, DeepL und Google Translate haben zunehmend die Rolle von Wörterbüchern und Grammatiken im Übersetzungsunterricht übernommen. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, anhand unterschiedlicher Übersetzungsaufgaben, sowohl aus Gebrauchstexten als auch aus literarischen Texten, die Vor- und Nachteile dieser KI-Tools im Deutsch-Türkischen Übersetzungsunterricht zu analysieren. Durch die Integration dieser neuen Technologien sollen die Sprachkompetenzen der Deutschlernenden gefördert und alternative Lernmöglichkeiten angeboten werden. Mit dem Einsatz dieser KI-basierten Übersetzungsprogramme wird angestrebt, den Genauigkeitsgrad der Ergebnisse zu vergleichen, den Wortschatz zu erweitern und durch kontrastive Gegenüberstellungen grammatischer Strukturen die semantischen und syntaktischen Fähigkeiten der Lernenden weiterzuentwickeln. Darüber hinaus wird aufgezeigt, wie Lehrkräfte, indem sie diese neuen Technologien ebenso gut wie digitale Natives beherrschen, ihre alltägliche Arbeit erleichtern und bereichern können.

This article examines photographs of the sick from colonial Cameroon (1884– 1918), which were taken as part of ethnographic collections around 1914. The essay explores the extent to which ethnographic photographs from the colonial context of the early 20th century already reveal efforts to visualise geographically distant human suffering and to make possible acts of assistance visible. Based on an image analysis of pathologised bodies, the ambivalent character of these photographs between humanitarian aid rhetoric and invective devaluation is worked out. On the one hand, the photographs appear as visual evidence of medical care that supported colonial self-legitimisation as a civilising mission. On the other hand, by staging illness and physical deviance,they reproduce racist stereotypes that stabilise the colonial order of domination. The essay highlights how the aesthetics of representation - for example through poses, image details and accompanying texts - caused the perception of those depicted to oscillate between empathy and dehumanisation. The focus here is on the function of the images in a colonial discourse of knowledge and power that instrumentalises bodies as projection surfaces for the European construction of illness, inferiority and ‘otherness’. Colonial image archives on the subject of illness raise questions of a general ethical nature (human dignity) as well as the protection of victims and personal rights.

This paper examines Nick Joaquin’s short story The Legend of the Dying Wanton through the lens of cultural identity, historical recovery, and magical realism. Often misunderstood for its invocation of Spanish Catholic imagery, Joaquin’s narrative instead offers a subtle form of postcolonial resistance by reviving a repressed legend from early seventeenth-century Manila. Building on contemporary interpretations of Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identity and Homi Bhabha’s concept of the third space, this paper contends that Joaquin’s incorporation of miraculous elements, Gothic motifs, and symbolic relics serves a deeper purpose. Rather than romanticizing the past, these features operate as instruments for recovering cultural memory. Through the characters of Currito Lopez and Doña Ana de Vera, Joaquin portrays the layered complexities of colonial identity, voicelessness, and the burden of unresolved history. The miraculous survival of a dying soldier and the mud-stained robes of the Virgin Mary become mnemonic devices that challenge dominant nationalist and colonial narratives alike. Furthermore, Joaquin’s deliberate silences and focus on spectral presences reflect the historiographic gaps of the colonial archive. By reanimating forgotten myths through magical realism, Joaquin not only retrieves suppressed narratives but redefines Filipino identity as something shaped by entanglement, trauma, and continuous reinterpretation. This paper positions Joaquin’s work as a literary intervention into the politics of memory, offering new ways to understand the intersections of faith, history, and postcolonial resistance.

In Vincent van Gogh’s paintings, the flame-like cypresses tower, as he described them, “tall and massive”. Enlarged beyond their natural size, they dominate the scene, forming a vivid bridge between earth and sky, the tangible and the eternal. The earth represents the material world, while the sky, linked by van Gogh to dreams, suggests infinite imagination. Thus, the cypresses signify more than a vertical thrust; they trace a passage from outward reality to inner articulation, from objective depiction to subjective expression.

In van Gogh’s artwork, objects transcended their original meanings and became allegories or symbols. The cypresses painted by van Gogh were not only trees but also a projection of van Gogh himself. “Tall and massive” in comparison to their surroundings, they are different but, at the same time, lonely. Today, van Gogh is recognized as a “giant” and a pioneer in art history. During his lifetime, however, his work received little recognition and was often considered incomprehensible, causing the artist great mental distress. For van Gogh, art — like true love — was “lofty” and “sacred.” He often visualized it as a starry sky, a realm he linked to religion and dreams. Notably, he rarely placed cypresses at the center of his canvases; instead, they stand to one side or the other, alone or in clusters, as if guarding that shimmering heaven imbued with divine significance. It was a love he pursued but perhaps never fully fulfilled. On 27th July 1890, van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver; two days later he died at the age of 37, leaving over 850 paintings and 1300 works on paper behind.

My short essay focuses on the history of the Italian concession of Tianjin, China, granted to Italy in 1901 and ceded back to China in 1947, and how it contributed to the relationship between Italy and China in the following years.

The Italian concession in Tianjin is part of the Italian colonial past although, differently from the other colonies which were totally subjected to the Italian government, Tianjin was an example of “informal imperialism”, a sort of rented territory that the foreign powers had the right to treat as a national area and rule according to their own national laws. The foreign citizens living in the concessions were not supposed to respect the Chinese law, rather their own national legislation.

The concessions of the nine foreign powers in Tianjin, including the Italian one, had always represented a defeat for China that had to kneel to the military superiority of the West in the context of the Opium and Boxer Wars. This is why what was built by the foreigners was modified over the years, and many buildings and roads were given different names mirroring the various ideologies of the following historical times. Nevertheless, after China’s opening to the free market, in the late 1970s, the past foreign presence in China was reinterpreted and transformed into an opportunity to intensify the internationalization of the country, boosting exchanges with the West, economic activities and tourism.

Literature, through metaphor, mirrors the thought systems of a people. One such metaphor, the animal metaphor, is significant in framing human relationships with the environment. This paper examines cat metaphors in three Igbo literary texts. Using Jonathan Charteris-Black’s Critical Metaphor Analysis, this qualitative study identifies instances of cat metaphors; explores and interprets their mappings onto human behaviours using the characters and contexts in the study texts. The findings reveal four cases of cat metaphors. It notes that the cat is primarily used alongside the rat to illustrate power dynamics. The dominant is portrayed as the cat, while the subordinate is depicted as the rat. The cat’s stealthiness and relationship with the rat are domains for mapping human behaviours. Although the cat metaphor is not extensively used in the studied texts, its usage reflects the Igbo people’s perception of the cat as a domestic animal in their geographical enclave. This study contributes to understanding Igbo literature and culture, highlighting the significance of metaphor in shaping societal values and power dynamics.

This essay examines how literature and popular music documented and shaped Britain's transformation from military empire to cultural soft power in the post-World War II era. Through analysis of three pivotal cultural moments—Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956), the Beatles' Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000)—the study traces Britain's evolution from imperial certainty through post-colonial anxiety to multicultural complexity. Selvon's novel exposes the gap between Britain's self-image as a tolerant Commonwealth and the lived reality of Caribbean immigrants facing what Moses calls "the old English diplomacy" of polite exclusion. The Beatles' revolutionary albums capture a nation learning to project global influence through cultural innovation rather than military force, transforming imperial imagery into psychedelic spectacle. Smith's millennial novel presents the multicultural Britain that emerged from these transformations while diagnosing tensions that would culminate in Brexit. Together, these works reveal how artistic production actively participated in constructing new narratives of British identity, using linguistic innovation and formal experimentation to challenge imperial hierarchies. The analysis demonstrates that Britain's transformation remains unfinished, with imperial structures persisting beneath multicultural celebrations, revealing fundamental contradictions about belonging, identity, and national mythology that continue to shape contemporary Britain.

Scholars of the new, suburban burial grounds constructed in the nineteenth century have long imagined a tension between the monumental and ephemeral in the design and use of these sites. Ephemerality, in this framing, challenges the permanence of the monumental both in the construction of intentionally temporary public monuments and when architectural features designed to endure are destroyed. Navigating through interdisciplinary methodologies, including practice theory and spatial analysis, this chapter illuminates pivotal moments in the evolution of San Juan's first general cemetery. From clashes between imperial projects and local implementations to midcentury conflicts and substantial 1860s redesigns, the narrative uncovers a dance between permanence and transience. Embracing overlooked sources, innovative techniques, and experiential engagement with material spaces beyond traditional archival approaches, this methodological journey enriches our comprehension of 19th-century burial practices. Providing a captivating lens for understanding meaning-making processes, the fusion of materiality and practice theory not only revolutionizes our understanding of historical actors' choices but also offers a methodological roadmap for researchers navigating the complexities of historical cemetery studies. This paper emphasizes the importance of blending traditional and unconventional strategies for a holistic understanding of spatial dynamics and cultural practices, contributing not only to the exploration of 19th-century burial practices but also to methodological advancements in historical research.