Celebrants or Celebrities, Worship or Suicide

(Excerpt) The North American Roman Catholic bishops have suggested that our present age is one of supreme crises. If this be the state of things, then such a statement goes to reassert the challenging aspect that Christ presented to his hearers. He referred to the scribes and pharisees as hypocrites, that is under-thinkers or rather those who were concerned with the pseudo-crises, over and against the supreme crisis. Christ\u27s incarnation caused his hearers to make a judgment whether to live either the kingdom or history. If an age is faced with a similar Supreme Judgment, then part of that judgment goes into choosing between celebrant or celebrity, worship or suicide, being or non-being

German Unification and the Political Order - Thirty Years Later

The history of the post-war division of Germany marks an important point of reference for inter-Korean politics. Both, South Korean president Roh Tae-woo’s Nordpolitik starting in 1988 and South Korean president Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy (The Reconciliation and Cooperation Policy Towards the North) of 1998 seem to have been directly inspired by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s so-called Neue Ostpolitik (New Eastern Policy) based on Egon Bahr’s concept of Wandel durch Annäherung (change through rapproachment), an early and perhaps decisive step in the de-escalation of the Cold War. Today, the peaceful transition of East Germany toward democracy and the subsequent German unification continue to provide a hopeful historical example that peace and reconciliation on the Korean peninsula may be attainable

Looking Back on the Sonderweg

Central European History has opened its pages again and again to the controversial debate about the so-called German Sonderweg. With that in mind, and on the occasion of this important journal's fiftieth anniversary, the following essay presents some very selective and personal thoughts on this topic. Although discussed and promoted much less frequently now than in previous decades, and although there are understandable reasons why it has left the center stage of scholarly debate, the approach to modern German history signified by this problematic concept has not been disproven or become obsolete. But, confronted by severe criticism, it has been - and can be - rethought and revised