The war-generation dealt with the Holocaust as a part of the spectrum of crimes inflicted by the Hitler regime on humanity. The postwar generation, which bore no responsibility, even as neutral witnesses or accomplices, saw it as a special monstrosity; Auschwitz has been integrated into their cultural heritage. In education this means that an obligation of remembrance can provoke reactions of boredom, irritation or worse, since youth is confronted daily with other problems. But remembrance should not be marginal in school history.

The early modern books on Ambonese natural history by G.E. Rumphius have mostly been analysed for their aesthetic form and scientific content. However, with the concept of contact zones as introduced by M.L. Pratt, these texts can also be read as historical sources about colonialism and slavery in the late seventeenth-century Moluccas. This article explores the traces of colonialism and slavery in Rumphius’ Ambonese Herbal (1740ff.) and the Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet (1705).

In February 2006, talks began in Vienna to decide the status of Kosovo. The solution was forecast in several statements: instead of officially remaining a province of Serbia, considering that 90% of the population of the area is Albanian, mostly Muslim, and want independence, independent statehood might be granted to Kosovo. Kosovo enjoyed an autonomous status under Tito (abolished by Milošević) and thus has the legal right to decide on independence.

Serbia wants to keep its authority over the province, which is considered to be the ‘cradle of Serbia,’ a sacrosanct place in Serbian history. However, the Serb population has gradually decreased and become a small minority. This happened due to a huge Serb emigration after the Ottoman conquest of the region, a spontaneous, sometimes forced emigration, which gained special impetus during the Second World War, when the region became part of ‘Great Albania,’ and Serbs were killed and chased out of the province. The tension and violence of the post-war decades made emigration advisable for Serbs. Milošević's Kosovo war-and-rape campaign made the Kosovars victims of exalted Serb nationalism in the late 1990s. The NATO bombing stopped this but the Serb minority declined into an unbearable situation. The Kosovo Liberation Army's violent actions, killing Serbs, burning their houses, shooting at school buses, continued until recently and led to the flight of half of the remaining Serb population, and ‘cleansed’ Kosovo of 80% of the Roma population.

The purpose of the article is to determine the degree of influence of international migration issues on the process of transformation of European identity and to assess the prospects for applying this experience in the countries of Central Asia. The methodological base of the study was built on the basis of a combination of methods of structural-functional, comparative, institutional analysis and forecasting with elements of a descriptive method. The results of the scientific work consist of characterizing the concept of European identity and the main problems of its development in connection with the intensification of migration processes in the world, formulating the features of the incorporation and integration of foreign citizens in the EU states, as well as highlighting the principles and norms used by members of the Commonwealth to regulate migration flows. The materials of this work can be applied in research and applied fields: the article can be useful for scientists whose interests include the formation and development of regional identity in a globalized world, as well as the topics of migration processes and linguistic, cultural and social adaptation of immigrants.

Globally connected and commodified digital means of communication offer a wealth of information across age-bands and across formal and informal sites of learning, yet few students obtain systematic training in transforming this information to knowledge that is tailored to their level of understanding and to the settings of learning. This gap between access to unsorted and often unsolicited information across boundaries of space, learning and generation and training in the formation of valid knowledge poses a threat to democratic societies that are based on informed citizens’ joint debate and decision-making. This article addresses the gap between students’ information access and their knowledge formation and discusses the challenges and possible solutions with empirical focus on the transition between upper-secondary and tertiary education. Globally connected social network sites (‘social media’) are key information sources for many students. Owing to their commodified, algorithmic and non-transparent character, these sites offer little guidance in terms of validation and verification of claims. I propose Media and Information Literacy (MIL) as an important means of minimizing the gap between information access and sound knowledge formation. This is because MIL goes beyond training of access to digital technologies and information search and retrieval. It also trains skills in applying communication technologies for validation, critique and knowledge production. I discuss the challenges posed to education to apply (MIL) as a key pathway to minimizing the gap in order to advance public value and societal resilience and suggest that educational systems shift their focus from teaching to learning in tandem with more inclusive approaches to where learning takes place.

Many of the nations of Europe have at some time traced their origins to barbarian tribes that settled inside the Roman Empire in the 5th and 6th centuries. In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries the Early Middle Ages were, as a result, manipulated to racist ends. Not surprisingly, scholars who have worked on the period since 1945 have been concerned to undermine earlier interpretations. In this they have been helped by increasing archaeological evidence and by changes in methodology. The current interpretation of the period is one that emphasizes variety – an emphasis which itself reflects present concerns in Europe.

This article is a small part of a research project dealing with the presence of Hebrew poetry from al-Andalus in Israeli culture in general and in Israeli poetry in particular. In spite of its indisputably canonic status and 800-year history as a central model for the writing of poetry, this magnificent corpus is quite unknown to today’s readers, and its genres are obsolete. It is, as I shall explain, a ‘dinosaur-like’ canonic entity. The article contains some explanatory references to the historical trajectory of the poetry in question, from a central and active position to a marginal and passive presence – dealing with both the particular beneficial conditions in al-Andalus and current internal and external political situations. However, the paper is not about literary history or cultural politics. Rather, it focuses on the ways ‘dinosaur-like’ canonic status is revealed in the writing of contemporary poetry and in its readings. I begin with a short introduction concerned both with the poetry of al-Andalus and with the cognitive and inter-textual aspects related to the ‘dinosaur-like’ existence of texts and models. Owing to lack of space, I then deal with only three of the many characteristic features of this phenomenon: cognitive accessibility (illustrated by two readings of a Palestinian poem by Sami al-Kilani), manifested distancing (illustrated by Amnon Shamosh’s poem that converses with Yehuda Halevi), and modes of alluding (illustrated by a poem of Yehuda Amichai).

In this paper – given as a lecture at Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the summer of 2003 – I survey the remarkable renaissance of museums – national and regional, public and private – in Britain in recent years, largely made possible with the financial support of the Heritage Lottery Fund. I look in detail at four non-national museum projects of particular interest: the Horniman Museum in South London, a remarkable and idiosyncratic collection of anthropological, natural history and musical material which has recently been re-housed and redisplayed; secondly, the nearby Dulwich Picture Gallery, famous for its 17th- and 18th-century Old Master paintings, a masterpiece of 19th-century architecture by Sir John Soane, which has been restored, and modern museum services provided. The third is the New Art Gallery, Walsall, where the Garman Ryan collection of early 20th-century painting and sculpture form the centrepiece of a new building with fine galleries and the forum is the Manchester Art Gallery, where the former City Art Gallery and the Athenaeum have been combined in a single building in which to display the city's rich art collections. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, of which I am Director, is the most important museum of art and archaeology in England outside London and the greatest University Museum in the world. Its astonishingly rich collections are introduced and the transformational plan for the museum is described. In July 2005 the Heritage Lottery Fund announced a grant of £15 million and the renovation of the Museum is now underway.

This paper traces the presence of fin de siècle Wilde in the postmodernist fin de millénaire a century after his death. He is still alive, not only with scholars and critics but, more importantly, with a wider public and with writers and film makers who keep re-inventing him in their novels, plays and films, radicalizing him into a postmodernist avant la lettre. This ‘wilder’ Wilde is studied here in recent biopics, bioplays and biofictions, such as Peter Ackroyd's The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde or Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, as well as in re-writings of his texts, such as in Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw or Mark Ravenhill's Handbag.

We still have much to learn about the morphologies of natural and synthetic polymers crystallized in bulk. Nevertheless, conventional X-ray and thermodynamic studies of crystallinity in polymeric materials over the past 60 years have given us a clear picture of the concept of crystallinity and the molecular features which promote crystallinity in these substances. Apart from issues of chain connectivity, the science of conventional molecules proved adequate for the task!

There is plenty of stuff out there that looks like science, sounds like science and yet which is no more science than the ‘cargo cult’ aircraft and landing strips constructed by Pacific Islanders in the 1940s and 1950s were functional technology. My talk is not so much about the usual suspects – homeopathy, crystal healing, UFOs and the like – but other areas of cargo-cult science that sit far closer to the high altar of respectability. We take far too much for granted in science, and this can be seen in the replicability (or otherwise) of peer-reviewed studies, the phenomenon of publication bias, the so-called Decline Effect and the persistence of folk myths such as the one that describes how aeroplanes fly.

Last year, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration announced the first detection of a gravitational wave. A century after the fundamental predictions of Einstein, the first direct observation of a binary black hole system merging to form a single black hole was made. The observations provide unique access to the properties of spacetime at extreme curvatures: the strong-field and high-velocity regime. It allows unprecedented tests of general relativity for the nonlinear dynamics of highly disturbed black holes. LIGO and Virgo realized a global interferometer network, and more detections were made, including a signal from a binary neutron star merger. The scientific impact of the various detections will be explained. In addition, key technological aspects will be addressed, such as the interferometric detection principle, optics, as well as sensors and actuators. Attention is paid to Advanced Virgo, the European detector near Pisa, which came online in 2017. We end with a discussion of the largest challenges in the field, including plans for the Einstein Telescope, a large underground observatory for gravitational-wave science.

The public debate about the consequences of Brexit in Britain follows certain predictable lines of established academic concepts in British constitutional law. This arguably overlooks the important constitutional complications of Brexit, including the position of Scotland in post-Brexit Britain. This article takes the unorthodox approach of focusing on legal and intellectual history rather than British constitutional law, because in this way one obtains a better understanding of the present British constitutional framework in the context of Europe. The discussion is from a continental European viewpoint and through the eyes of a private and commercial lawyer. The completely different understanding of Britain and Europe about the nature of a constitution and the structure of a state becomes more apparent with Britain’s departure from the EU, which may also influence the future national cohesion of the UK itself, particularly the relationship between England and Scotland after Brexit.

France was one of the main supporters of Solidarność. The events in August and September 1980 immediately gained the interest of the French media. Trade unionists started to collaborate with their Polish colleagues, for instance by setting up exchange programs or by introducing Solidarność to international trade unions. Organisations of solidarity were founded and started to collect food, clothes and drugs. After the proclamation of Martial Law in Poland, this grew into a mass movement, involving many layers of the French population. Both workers and intellectuals were drawn to the idea of a ‘second left’: an alternative to the old and radical socialism.

Transarea studies focus upon spaces as created by the movements that criss-cross them. From this point of view, from its very beginnings, literature is closely interrelated with a vectorial (and much less with a purely spatial) conception of history – and with urbanity, which plays a decisive role in Gilgamesh's travels through a (narrative) cosmos centered upon the city of Uruk. This article explores the city as a transareal space of movement in three examples of literature, with no fixed abode, around the turn of the millennium, i.e. Assia Djebar's Les Nuits de Strasbourg, Emine Sevgi Oezdamar's Istanbul-Berlin Trilogy, and Cécile Wajsbrot's L’île aux musées. These three writers project, in a very specific way, cities in motion as anagrammatic and fractal structures.

In this article, I claim that Wittgenstein was familiar with Hamann’s work, particularly with two of the latter’s original contributions: (a) the idea of transforming Luther’s concept of grammar into a critical philosophical and linguistic tool; and (b) Hamann’s use of a kenotic, impure style as a means to attain the humility his religious stance demands. I suggest that an understanding of Hamann’s style as a tool to achieve humility sheds light on Wittgenstein’s later refutation of the purity of the Tractarian style. As reflected in remarks published in collections such as Culture and Value and Public and Private Occasions, Wittgenstein – like Hamann – aspired to modesty not only in his private life, but also in his philosophical work, attributing it a religious significance. In this context, his later style of philosophizing, characterized by the use of everyday rather than metaphysical terms, the inclusion of impure concepts and humble examples, dialogue and fragmentariness, is a means to ‘dismantle one’s pride’, in the practice of philosophy conceived as ‘working on oneself’.

Inspired by the well-established trope of Eastern Europe’s in-betweenness, this article uses the notion of liminality to explore the images of Eastern Europe during the Cold War in the works of three American authors: John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth. Not only do these works map Eastern Europe as liminal in the imagological sense of the term, that is, as oscillating between competing narratives of otherness and familiarity; empathy and hostility; the East and the West, but also the very experience of venturing behind the Iron Curtain is charged with potentiality: the Eastern-European cityscape becomes the contact zone between cultures and the locus of self-discovery for the American characters. The resultant imaginative geography is at once contemporary and allochronic; political and personal, as it reiterates the Cold War balance of power while at the same time recycling existing representations of the area and reflecting the authors’ sensibilities.

The French noir tradition is supposed to dominate the French market of crime fiction, regardless of the growing success of French and non-French thrillers in France. Yet in the last two decades, the French literary crime fiction market has been marked by the arrival of non-French European authors. By combining a quantitative and qualitative approach to publishing series, translations, prizes and festivals, this article highlights the transnational dimension of the French market independently from a spontaneous methodological nationalism encouraged by the reception discourses.

Alexander Dugin (b. 1962) is one of the best-known philosophers and public intellectuals of post-Soviet Russia. While his geopolitical views are well-researched, his views on Russian history are less so. Still, they are important to understand his Weltanschauung and that of like-minded Russian intellectuals. For Dugin, the ‘Time of Troubles’ – the period of Russian history at the beginning of the seventeenth century marked by dynastic crisis and general chaos – constitutes an explanatory framework for the present. Dugin implicitly regarded the ‘Time of Troubles’ in broader philosophical terms. For him, the ‘Time of Troubles’ meant not purely political and social upheaval/dislocation, but a deep spiritual crisis that endangered the very existence of the Russian people. Russia, in his view, has undergone several crises during its long history. Each time, however, Russia has risen again and achieved even greater levels of spiritual wholeness. Dugin believed that Russia was going through a new ‘Time of Troubles’. In the early days of the post-Soviet era, he believed that it was the collapse of the USSR that had led to a new ‘Time of Troubles’. Later, he changed his mind and proclaimed that the Soviet regime was not legitimate at all and, consequently, that the ‘Time of Troubles’ started a century ago in 1917. Dugin holds a positive view of Putin in general. Still, his narrative implies that Putin has been unable to arrest the destructive process of a new Time of Trouble.