Strange Bedfellows and Their Grandchildren: German Literature as Evidence and Confession of Reunification

From Hegel to Merkel, from Bismarck to BMW, German culture has defined and re-defined itself through a cycle of reaction; thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Modern Germany has certainly not escaped this pattern, existing in a very deep and surprisingly present way in reaction to the collapse of the East German state and the formation of a unified Germany. This paper examines the ways in which contemporary German authors evidence this reaction in their work. As a nation at the heart of the East/West divide throughout the Cold War, Germany provides an ideal lens through which to view the shifting cultural, economic, artistic and societal trends of the last three decades. Feelings of powerlessness, loss and nostalgia are evidenced within these trends. Even a small sampling of contemporary German sources sheds light on the ways in which national and personal trauma are internalized and digested—both in the individual and in society as a whole. Using the novels Simple Stories (Schultze, 2002), Berlin Blues (Regener, 2001), and the short stories Ubuville (1998) and German Lesson (Wondratschek, 1998) among others, this paper examines the ways in which contemporary German authors manifest this reaction in their work. This paper demonstrates that although the works vary in form and tone, they all display the feelings of disaffection and the omnipresence of the reunification as the great ,“elephant in the room” of modern Germany. The forceful merging of two nations, two political systems and two peoples, left behind a great and living trauma, one which is made manifest daily in the thoughts and actions of Germans (especially in the East) and in their creative output. As attention in the global West was focused unilaterally on the West Germans and the financial burden they bore as a result of reunification, the real plight of reunification and the true force of the trauma (that is, the trauma endured by East Germans) was largely ignored. This paper is thus useful in not only sounding the depths of modern German literature, but also in defining the effects of reunification on those that faced regionalist discrimination and financial pillaging at the hands of the global West. This paper demonstrates how, in the ever shifting maelstrom of an increasingly globalized world, post-unification Germans and particularly former East Germans are an ideal subject of study to increase our understanding of inter- and pan-generational trauma and the resultant processes of personal identification in which we all, to some degree, take part

Diaphragm spring gives clutch over-center toggle effect

Diaphragm spring clutch mechanism is used in testing the relative merits of eddy-current and hysteresis dampers. The dampers are alternately coupled to a single damping boom shaft. The floating clutch mechanism enables the inoperative damper to remain completely isolated from the damping boom shaft during test of the other damper

Wormhole Effect in a Strong Topological Insulator

An infinitely thin solenoid carrying magnetic flux Phi (a `Dirac string') inserted into an ordinary band insulator has no significant effect on the spectrum of electrons. In a strong topological insulator, remarkably, such a solenoid carries protected gapless one-dimensional fermionic modes when Phi=hc/2e. These modes are spin-filtered and represent a distinct bulk manifestation of the topologically non-trivial insulator. We establish this `wormhole' effect by both general qualitative considerations and by numerical calculations within a minimal lattice model. We also discuss the possibility of experimental observation of a closely related effect in artificially engineered nanostructures.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. For related work and info visit http://www.physics.ubc.ca/~fran

Half-space theorems for minimal surfaces in Nil_3 and Sol_3

We prove some half-space theorems for minimal surfaces in the Heisenberg group Nil_3 and the Lie group Sol_3 endowed with their left-invariant Riemannian metrics. If S is a properly immersed minimal surface in Nil_3 that lies on one side of some entire minimal graph G, then S is the image of G by a vertical translation. If S is a properly immersed minimal surface in Sol_3 that lies on one side of a special plane, then S is another special plane.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figure

Nd:Glass-Raman laser for water vapor dial

A tunable solid-state Raman shifted laser which was used in a water vapor Differential Absorption Lidar (DIAL) system at 9400 A is described. The DIAL transmitter is based on a tunable glass laser operating at 1.06 microns, a hydrogen Raman cell to shift the radiation to 1.88 microns, and a frequency doubling crystal. The results of measurements which characterize the output of the laser with respect to optimization of optical configuration and of Raman parameters were reported. The DIAL system was also described and preliminary atmospheric returns shown

Topological Anderson Insulator in Three Dimensions

Disorder, ubiquitously present in solids, is normally detrimental to the stability of ordered states of matter. In this letter we demonstrate that not only is the physics of a strong topological insulator robust to disorder but, remarkably, under certain conditions disorder can become fundamentally responsible for its existence. We show that disorder, when sufficiently strong, can transform an ordinary metal with strong spin-orbit coupling into a strong topological `Anderson' insulator, a new topological phase of quantum matter in three dimensions.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. For related work and info visit http://www.physics.ubc.ca/~franz

The topology, geometry and conformal structure of properly embedded minimal surfaces

This paper develops new tools for understanding surfaces with more than one end (and usually, of infinite topology) which properly minimally embed into Euclidean three-space. On such a surface, the set of ends forms a compact Hausdorff space, naturally ordered by the relative heights of the ends in space. One of our main results is that the middle ends of the surface have quadratic area growth, and are thus not limit ends. This implies, for instance, that the surface can have at most two limit ends (at the top and bottom of the ordering), which is a strong topological restriction. There are also restrictions on the asymptotic geometry and conformal structure of such a surface: for example, we prove that if the surface has exactly two limit ends (as do the classical Riemann Staircase examples), then it is recurrent (that is, almost all Brownian paths are dense in the surface, and in particular any positive harmonic function on the surface is constant). These results have played an important role in the proof of several recent advances in the theory, including the uniqueness of the helicoid, the invariance of flux for a coordinate function on a properly immersed minimal surface, and the topological classification of properly embedded minimal surfaces