In the latest edition of Heidelberg University’s research magazine, Eike Wolgast of the Department of History looks into the question of the stance adopted vis-à-vis the immediate past by representatives of the churches, political parties and universities in Germany. What explanations were advanced for the Third Reich? Where did the search for the people behind the atrocities of the war focus? Wolgast reveals that next to no systematic research has yet been done on the way the Germans squared up to their immediate past while still reeling from the impact of the collapse of National Socialist rule. They were surrounded at every point by the material and ideological remnants of the shattered regime, the Third Reich still cast an awesome shadow on their everyday lives. Thus Germany had every reason to inquire into the causes for its present prostration. Among historians there appears to be a tacit assumption that after 1945 a certain degree of normality had to be achieved before there could be any explicit engagement with the recent past and the horrors perpetrated in the name of the Third Reich. The other articles in the new edition of Ruperto Carola range from the world of mathematics to the question of democratic structures in the penal system.
In the Editorial, rector Jürgen Siebke discusses the German Research Association’s first “official university ranking list” in which Heidelberg University got top marks for its research output. But Siebke insists that this must not lead to the university being drawn into the vortex of political debate on the buzzword “technology transfer” and everything it stands for. Siebke’s editorial is a passionate diatribe against the neglect of basic research.
New notions of space in mathematics are the subject of the title feature. What is theoretical mathematics actually goodfor? Little of its findings and successes ever penetrates into the world outside the university, hence the erroneous impression sometimes encountered that little progress is being made in mathematics, that everything really important is already known with the exception perhaps of a few stubborn problems like Fermat’s famous last theorem that was recently resolved. Paradoxically, one reason why the public hears so little about this field is the headlong pace at which progress is in fact being made and the huge success of mathematical methods. Mathematical techniques are so sophisticated that it is extremely difficult to give even an approximate explanation of them to a lay public. This in its turn is one of the reasons for the difficulty of explaining the “use” of mathematics, and “pure” mathematics in particular. Hence even in well-informed circles there is general uncertainty about the role played by present-day mathematics although ours is an age in which all areas of science and everyday life are permeated more and more by methods and approaches derived from mathematics. Joachim Cuntz of the Institute of Mathematics opens the door on this experimental laboratory of the mind.
Vaccines against endemic relapsing fever caused by tick bites are the speciality of Michael Kramer at the Institute of Immunology. In the transatlantic competition to find such a vaccine, the joint research offensive spearheaded by Kramer’s Institute research group and associated teams directed by Reinhard Wallich at the German Cancer Research Centre and Markus Simon at the Max Planck Immune Biology Institute in Freiburg has won the day. Their jointly masterminded vaccine against Lyme’s borreliosis has come up trumps in all clinical tests conducted on some 11,000 people in the United States and is about to be given the green light by the surgeon general’s office there. For the moment, the Americans are the only ones who will be profiting from this breakthrough. This side of the Atlantic, the spirochetes responsible for relapsing fever do not present such a unified picture as their relatives across the water. In Europe there are at least three varieties of Borreliae and they also differ with regard to the target structure the vaccine has to deal with. The active agent in the new vaccine is a protein molecule that sits on the surface of the Borreliae and has been given the name “OspA”. “We identified this substance as a possible basis for a vaccine in the late eighties,” Kramer writes. “Now we’ve been through all the animal experiments and we’re ready to put it to use on humans. OspA has proved its worth as a vaccine and lived up to all the hopes and expectations our group had pinned to it. A major British pharmaceutic company has acquired the licence for the patented vaccine. So in the minimum feasible time of 10 years for developing a vaccine, we’ve pipped a number of rival American research teams to the post.”
The next article discusses the prospects for the “just community”, i.e. democratic structures in the penal system. Obviously, it is not only the tabloid press that laments the increasing brutalization of the young. For a number of years now, citizens’ subjective impression of their own personal safety has been worsening, while serious studies show that although on the whole crime is on the decline, juvenile delinquency is in fact increasing. In the face of this situation, politicians across the board, from the United States to Britain and Germany, have been calling for tougher measures, higher sentences, curfews to restrict mobility and more community service work for delinquent or behaviourally conspicuous youths. However, there are as yet no criminological indications that heavier repression and tougher sentences actually have a dampening effect on crime. Micha Brumlik reports on a research project that takes a different line and pins its hopes on a democratization of the penal system.
The last feature article comes from the field of the humanities: “Schleiermacher – A Thinker For Tomorrow”. In 1799, Norwegian writer and philosopher Henrik Steffens had this to say about Berlin, the centre of German Enlightenment: “The churches were empty and deserved to be; the theatres were full to bursting and quite rightly so.” In 1802, a Prussian court edict registered the total decline of religious feeling in large and medium-sized towns. One Berlin newspaper prophesied: “In 20 years the Christian faith will have had its day in Germany.” But 100 years later theology and religiosity were to appear in a dramatically different light despite the fact that major critics of religion like Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud all penned their broadsides in a period subsequent to that Berlin newspaper’s prophecy of doom. As Bochum historian Johannes Wallmann rightly says: “The 19th century is the classical age of Protestant theology. Freed from the shackles of tradition by the Enlightenment distinction between theology and religion, richly and variously influenced by Romanticism, Idealism and Revivalism, 19th century theology brought forth a wealth of designs and systems unparalleled heretofore.” This development was most notably fuelled by Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher and his writings. The youthful Schleiermacher protested vehemently against the appropriation of religion by metaphysics and moral dogma. At first an apparent outsider rashly forfeiting the “ultimate props” of religion (notably the links with Kant’s moral philosophy), he finally gained public attention at the age of 30 with a brief programmatic publication entitled “On Religion. Speeches to its Cultured Despisers”. It made a crucial contribution to the renewal and consolidation of religiosity and theology in 19th century Germany. Michael Welker of the Department of Systematic Theology and Dogmatics, director of the International Scientific Forum and permanent member of the Consultation on Science and Theology (Princeton), makes clear just how pertinent and topical Schleiermacher’s thinking still is today.
In the “News and Views” section, Professor Peter Frankenberg, rector of Mannheim University, elucidates his stance with regard to the question of course concentration at the universities of Heidelberg and Mannheim.
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