Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin

I NSTI TUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY

Kpfe und Ideen
2006
Robert A. ARONOWITZ Cristian BADILITA Mark
BEISSINGER Jos CASANOVA Gregory CLARK
Leo CORRY Ingolf Ulrich DALFERTH Cathrine
DAVID Horst DREIER Shmuel N. EISENSTADT
Augustin EMANE Jean-Louis FABIANI Judit FRI-
GYESI Gamal AL-GHITANI Luca GIULIANI David
GUGERLI John HAMILTON Carla HESSE Hans
JOAS Grazyna JURKOWLANIEC Irad KIMHI Paul
KLEIHUES Charlotte KLONK Mordechai KREM-
NITZER Susanne KCHLER Geert LOVINK Ashis
NANDY Patrizia NANZ Itay NEEMAN Dietrich
NIETHAMMER Horia-Roman PATAPIEVICI Susan
PEDERSEN Oliver PRIMAVESI Scheherazade
Qassim HASSAN Astrid REUTER Jaan ROSS
Robert SALAIS Willibald SAUERLNDER Samah
SELIM Abdolkarim SOROUSH Barbara STAF-
FORD John R. STEEL Rudolf STICHWEH Charles
TAYLOR Giuseppe TESTA Vadim VOLKOV
Monika WAGNER Paul WINDOLF Hans ZENDER
Fellows 2005/2006
1
Prelude
Dieter Grimm


Instead of the Wissenschaftkollegs usual News
(Nachrichten), you are looking at the first edition of
Heads and Ideas (Kpfe und Ideen). Of course, just as
our News presented heads and ideas, Heads and
Ideas will continue to bring you news. But we think
that this new format provides a better glimpse of
happenings at the Wissenschaftskolleg. Rather than an
overview of all our Fellows and activities in a necessarily
abbreviated form, more detail on a smaller number of
examples of Fellows projects. These are not typically
Fellows self-presentations, but reports on what Fellows
researched in their year at the Wissenschaftskolleg,
whether alone or in collaboration with others on a
thematic focus. But this will not exclude Fellows from
participation. In this edition, for example, you can read
how the unexpected sight of a certain type of apple
helped Carla Hesse, of California, discover that her
family roots lay in Berlin.
You can of course still consult the institutes website for
any information you do not find here.

2
Content
4 Network or Competition: How Does Capitalism Tick?
The economic sociologist Paul Windolf is exploring the ways
in which businesses and branches of industry are linked with one another Fellow 2005/2006
by Ralf Grtker
10 The Promise of Treatment
Robert A. Aronowitz, internist and medical historian, is working on a book entitled
Unnatural History: Breast Cancer, Risk, and American Society Fellow 2005/2006
Interview with Ralf Grtker
17 Model Footwork
Ansgar Bschges, Volker Drr, rjan Ekeberg, and Keir G. Pearson simulate
the neuronal processes in the musculoskeletal system of cats and stick insects Fellows 2001/2002
by Sonja Asal
21 Urban Spaces as Social Surfaces
Monika Wagner researches the tactility and opticity of urban spaces Fellow 2005/2006
by Ralf Grtker

3
25 On the Ariadnean Thread of the Cataglyphis Ants
Rdiger Wehner is a pioneer in the field of theoretical biology whose research
regularly takes him from his Zurich laboratory into the deserts of North Africa Permanent Fellow
by Sonja Asal
31 Secular Modernity? Revising a Self-Perception
Jos Casanova, Hans Joas, Astrid Reuter and Charles Taylor
investigate the different forms of religion in modern societies Fellow 2005/2006
by Sonja Asal
37 Letter from Berlin:
How it took 175 years to get from Mitte to Grunewald
A Fellow traces the footsteps of her great-great-grandparents through Berlin Fellow 2005/2006
by Carla Hesse
39 Masthead



4
Network or Competition: How Does Capitalism Tick?
The economic sociologist Paul Windolf is exploring the ways in which
businesses and branches of industry are linked with one another Fellow 2005/2006
by Ralf Grtker
A cooperative, a network or, as they say in the Rhine-
land, a Klngel (clique) these are all expressions
denoting the kind of nepotistic relationship in which
one hand washes the other and a system of reciprocity is
created based on obligations, assistance and favours. As
Konrad Adenauer put it, We know one another, we
help one another. Born and bred in Cologne, he was
certainly aware of how Rhineland capitalism func-
tioned.
Rainer Werner Fassbinders film Lola presents one
possible way of envisaging Rhineland capitalism. Rather
than engaging in a brutal competitive struggle, the peo-
ple in Fassbinders small-town world of the 1950s work
side by side for their own benefit and for the general
welfare. The mayor, the chief of police, the bank direc-
tor and the property developer do business and agree on
political policy, primarily in the Villa Fink the local
brothel. The sinecures are divided up and everyone is
happy.
With its moral ambivalence Lola, which was made at
the beginning of the 1980s, presents an image of the
mechanisms of German business and politics that was
ultimately not that far from reality. This system of in-
terwoven investment and overlapping board member-
ship was also referred to as Deutschland AG or
Germany Inc. and had a pronounced influence on the
nature of the German economy over several decades.
Deutschland AG, argues the economic sociologist Paul
Windolf, provided the basis for co-operation between
rational egoists by creating a system of institutional
control and regulating anarchic competitive relation-
ships. The result can either be seen as a clique or crony
economy and a self-enrichment club or as a form of
moderated market economy, as capitalism with a hu-
man face. Both interpretations are possible. Networks,
Windolf argues, are opportunity structures and as such
can be used for different purposes.

Paul Windolf has spent a number of years investigating
forms of corporate intertwinement such as cartels,
monopolies and networks linking economic elites. His
study Corporate Networks in Europe and the United States,
which was published in 2002, focuses on the question of
how such network structures differ across countries

5
such as the USA, Great Britain, Germany, France, the
Netherlands and Switzerland. Networks can emerge
from quite different relationships: through equity par-
ticipation, for instance, or through managers who take
up concurrent positions on the boards of several compa-
nies. This phenomenon of interlocking corporate direc-
torates has been relatively well investigated due to the
accessibility of relevant data. A further example can be
found in the system of loans that links banks and com-
panies with one another.
Paul Windolfs research at the Wissenschaftskolleg
concerns the question of how networks have formed in
the recent past and how Deutschland AG actually
emerged. For this purpose, he is studying connections
within economic elites and their relevance to the work-
ings of enterprises in the USA, Germany and France
between 1900 and 1938.

The business activities of these networks represent an
important key to understanding the way economies
have developed over recent years. They represent a
fundamental factor in the development of the emphasis
on shareholder value and financial market capitalism,
the title of an anthology recently published by Paul
Windolf and including contributions by a great number
of Germanys leading scholars in the field of economic
sociology.
A shareholder-value orientation means increased yields,
international competition and corporate takeovers. It is
shareholder value or financial market capitalism that
leads to phenomena such as Deutsche Bank aiming for a
25 per cent return on equity while at the same time
announcing that it is going to cut 6400 jobs, Siemens
closing its mobile phone operations, and the tyre manu-
facturer Continental intending to close a factory in
Stckern in Lower Saxony even though the facility
provides the company with a healthy profit.
The structure of the international economy has under-
gone a transformation. In the 1980s, explains Paul
Windolf, investment funds in the USA began to move
into the share market on a grand scale. The concentra-
tion of share ownership brought radical changes to the
balance of corporate power. Fund managers began to
wrest control from CEOs and to fire out if they did not
meet expectations. Since then, argues Windolf, enter-
prises that, although profitable, do not achieve the exor-
bitant yields which fund managers aim for have to be
sold or closed. This means that, in the age of share-
holder value, the increase in share value has become
more important than the growth of an enterprise. The
laws of the financial market have permeated those of the
commodity market. The investment funds, writes
Paul Windolf in Financial-market capitalism, are trans-
ferring the competitive pressure to which the financial
markets are exposed to enterprises.
The fact that the philosophy of shareholder value has
gained a foothold relatively late in Germany and other
countries in Continental Europe and is still not as perva-
sive as in the USA is closely connected with the net-
works referred to above.

6
The data collected by Paul Windolf for his current
research project show that the differences between
Germany and the USA with regard to corporate finance
date back to the late 19
th
century. While US corporations
placed more importance on attracting finance through
shares and bonds, German enterprises were financed to
a large extent through bank loans. This explains the fact
that banks in Germany more so than in the USA
were forced to closely monitor industrial enterprises, in
which they had a direct interest. In this context, banks
were not interested in seeing corporations adopt the
principle of shareholder value and strategies of profit
maximization involving high risks. Their concern was
rather that corporations retained their profitability so
that they would be able to repay long-term loans.
It is only in recent years that this situation has changed,
with dramatic results. Cries of breach of taboo, wild-
west manners and a lost balance were heard when it
became known that in 1997 Deutsche Bank had been
actively supporting the Krupp group behind the scenes
in the latters attempts to take over the far larger
Thyssen group. The process of change had begun.
Within a very short time, large private German banks
began to divest themselves of their equity participation,
give up their membership on boards and move from the
model of the house bank to that of the investment bank
in order to be able to have a free hand with regard to
corporate takeovers. The emphasis on personal knowl-
edge of the workings of corporations to which the bank
had provided loans was replaced by credit ratings gener-
ated by international agencies, which were based on
standardized methods and were accessible for all inter-
ested parties. This heralded the end of Deutschland
AG and the beginning of the new era of shareholder
value.

Such networks, as history shows, were more than mere
old boys networks devoted to mutual enrichment.
They also provided society with a form of protection
against the kind of anarchic competition that has now
become socially acceptable again with the rise of the
principle of shareholder value. This Janus-faced char-
acter also explains the curious political career of the type
of network that Paul Windolf describes as organised
capitalism.
The Social Democrat and political theorist Rudolf
Hilferding, author of Finance Capital, which was pub-
lished in 1910, first popularized the term organized
capitalism in speeches at party congresses and in essays.
At the time Hilferding predicted the emergence of a
general cartel. This, he believed, amounted to the
capitalist principle of free competition being replaced by
the socialist principle of the planned economy. Cartels,
according to Hilferding, not only gave the state greater
influence over the economy, but in the long term even
promised the nationalisation of the economy as a whole.

In light of the role of organised large-scale industry in
fascism and the Second World War, German Social
Democrats subsequently distanced themselves from a

7
preference for organised capitalism. And indeed, faced
with the choice of fostering either rampant markets or
uncontrollable cartels, it is the centre-left parties that
have opened the door to the introduction of the princi-
ple of shareholder value in Germany over recent years.
Nevertheless, argues Paul Windolf, Hilferdings analysis
has certain merits. Organisation had some advantages.
Mass production led to a sharp rise in fixed costs for
enterprises, which in turn made them vulnerable to
cyclical fluctuations. In times of crisis, explains
Windolf, large-scale enterprises react by lowering
prices in the hope that they can take advantage of the
crisis to increase their market share and to stabilize
production at a high level. Since all competitors find
themselves in the same situation, they react in a similar
way and the result is a ruinous price war. Mutual
agreements offer a way out of this predicament.
An analogous argument can be made in relation to the
banking sector. Here, too, competition weakens the
system because it drives banks to take higher risks on
loans. Unlimited competition between banks, argues
Paul Windolf, can lead to a dangerous accumulation of
non-performing loans, which destabilise the system as a
whole. Ultimately it was the forces of the free market
itself that led to organisation in the early 20
th
century.
Windolf emphasises that in the USA the political pref-
erence was to maintain competition, as it were, artifi-
cially. In the US, cartels, monopolies and trusts were
regarded as above all a limitation of economic freedom
and indeed on freedom in general. Louis Brandeis, a
Supreme Court judge from 1916 to 1939, even spoke out
in support of prohibiting trust agreements and recipro-
cal appointments of managers to boards of directors,
even if this restriction was inefficient. Brandeis believed
that economic and political freedoms were more
important than efficiency. This attitude was expressed
in the rigorous anti-monopoly legislation passed by the
US congress from the late 19
th
century onwards.
A series of indicators show how these anti-monopoly
laws have affected the corporate landscape in the USA.
Paul Windolf has compiled data that show how enter-
prises were not only linked by cartel agreements and
trusts, but also through interlocking directorates. Fur-
thermore, the data show that in the USA, for instance,
the level of this intertwinement steadily decreases from
1914 onwards. By contrast, in Germany this corporate
network which reached its peak around 1928 is
significantly denser than that found in the USA over the
same time period.
Windolf says that these structures can be compared to a
railway network. A visual representation of this net-
work would show which locations were linked with
one another and which enterprises were isolated. How-
ever, what is not shown is which trains moved along the
tracks. For this reason Windolf speaks of opportunity
structures and chances of control, possibilities that
emerge when managers make use of their membership
on boards to exercise control over corporations, of their
controlling functions as members of supervisory boards
to stand surety for one another and in the process risk

8
their reputations. The far greater density of corporate
networks in Germany compared with the USA from
1914 onwards, argues Windolf, can therefore be inter-
preted as an indication that, due to greater chances of
control, the opportunities for cooperation among ra-
tional egoists were greater in Germany than in the USA.

All this should not be regarded in purely historical
terms. The trajectories of historical development the
strengthening of Anglo-Saxon competitive capitalism
on the one hand and the Continental European devel-
opment of organised capitalism on the other can be
traced up until the present. The differences between the
two systems remained relatively stable until shortly
before the turn of the millennium. It is only at this point
that Deutschland AG clearly begins to crumble. Is it
possible to use the historical record to derive a concept of
the extent to which the relatively loose structures of a
network are actually able to strengthen a social order
and shared norms? Paul Windolf refers to the political
theorist Michael Taylor from the University of Wash-
ington, who in his book Community, Anarchy and Lib-
erty raises the question: How is social order possible
without a state? He arrives at the following conclusion:
a community must consist of members who see one
another constantly and know one another personally. In
addition, it is necessary that within the community there
is consensus regarding fundamental values. In my view
a number of the preconditions for the maintenance of
social order without the help of a state are to be found in
corporate networks at least as pertains to Germany.
But is this image also applicable to other forms of net-
work for instance those organized around the idea of
global responsibility such as the UN Global Compact
initiative, whose members have undertaken to observe a
voluntary code of conduct? I do not believe, says Paul
Windolf, that the concept of a network that in control-
ling itself assumes quasi-state functions can function at a
global level. On the one hand, the members of such a
network seldom see one another and do not have any
particularly close personal ties. On the other hand, there
is a lack of any connection to a legal obligation. Supervi-
sory boards have the legal task of controlling the enter-
prise. That shouldnt be overlooked.
The history of organised capitalism is also relevant to
another current debate concerning the Varieties of Capi-
talism, the title of an anthology edited by the American
political scientist Peter Hall a Fellow of the Wissen-
schaftskolleg in 2003/2004 and his colleague David
Soskice. In recent studies, Peter Hall has shown that
coordinated, organised markets as found typically in
Continental Europe are quite capable of competing with
the liberal systems based on the Anglo-Saxon model
given that the system comprising the financial market,
labour policy, education and economic legislation is
coherently structured within itself.
Even if economics scholars such as Peter Hall have
recently been able to retrospectively prove the competi


9
tiveness of what is often vilified as inefficient organised
capitalism, Paul Windolf believes that this system can
have a future only if it manages to reproduce itself at an
European level as Europe, Inc. so to speak, which by
means of cross-border corporate integration, transna-
tional shareholding and interlocking corporate leader-
ship will be able to stand up to Anglo-American corpo-
rate capitalism. Is this a realistic possibility? Sure, says
Paul Windolf, but with a question mark over it.

10
The Promise of Treatment
Robert A. Aronowitz, internist and medical historian, is working on a book
entitled Unnatural History: Breast Cancer, Risk, and American Society Fellow 2005/2006
Interview with Ralf Grtker
Ralf Grtker: Reports about new developments in the
field of cancer research are notable above all for the
sense of optimism and the dawn of a new era among
scientists. On the other hand, this is connected with the
admission that we are still very much at the beginning in
many respects. The focus is on the future. How does this
situation appear to someone who as a historian can look
back at the history of breast cancer?

Robert A. Aronowitz: There is a painting from the year
1889 hanging in my medical school at the University of
Pennsylvania. It shows the famous surgeon Hayes
Agnew in front of an audience in the auditorium
directing a breast operation involving the removal of a
tumour. This was conceived as a heroic portrait! But the
sad truth is that even a physician as successful and
sought-after as Agnew had to admit at the time that he
was not aware of a single case in which cancer had been
confirmed by pathology and the patient could be opera-
tively healed. Operations were sometimes performed
because a breast tumour was a painful, unsightly,
fungating mass that patients wanted removed and above
all because it was hoped that the life of the patient could
be extended. However, no one actually knew if this was
possible. Patients and their doctors have often made
decisions based more on the promise of surgery or other
means of treatment and prevention than the evidence at
hand. And it is precisely this phenomenon that
continues to characterize the field, from the campaigns
launched in the 1920s which aimed at early detection in
suspected cases of cancer up until the routine screening
of today.

RG: Up until the 1840s, you write, breast operations
were still being carried out without anaesthesia in
patients homes, in the kitchen or the living room.
Today such interventions are much more moderate and
targeted. In addition we now have chemotherapy and
new medications which act selectively against tumour-
specific qualities of cells. Doesnt this represent enor-
mous progress?

RAA: In many fields we are not a great deal better off
than before. Despite a century of public health cam-

11
paigns first aimed at women recognizing cancer them-
selves and later screening mammography, the death rate
from cancer (when adjusted for the age distribution in
the population) remained stable in the US until about
1990, when we began to see some reduction, probably
due to a wider use of hormonal therapy and aggressive
forms of treatment of some early stage cancers. But what
remains to be explained is that during the same time
interval the mortality rate remained unchanged yet the
registered incidences of breast cancer rose sharply.

RG: Why?

RAA: One explanation could be that our medical pre-
vention and treatment endeavours were just managing
to keep up with the increasing incidence of the disease.
However, I doubt this was the case, although there
probably had been some increase in the amount of real
that means destined to harm and kill if untreated
breast cancer and some progress in treatment. A more
economical explanation is that until quite recently
screening and changed definitions of disease had led us
to find more and more breast cancers that would not
have done serious harm if undetected. However, I am
actually interested in something else. Medical progress
or lack of it is only one side of the story. It is just as
important to look at how millions of women have
changed their habits that is to say, how a barely visible
disease about which no-one spoke has become a mass
disease and a central theme of health policy.
At the same time certain fundamental aspects of our
approach to breast cancer have remained the same over
many years. A historical example of this is provided by
the story of Susan Emlen, one of the patients whose
cases I describe in the book. Emlen noticed a breast
lump in 1813 and ultimately died of cancer in the
breast (this is how it was called at that time) in 1819.
She spent a whole year going from doctor to doctor and
getting different treatments until she decided to have an
operation. This is not to say that at the end of that year
she was in possession of better information. She ulti-
mately decided to have a breast amputation in her home
without anesthesia by her surgeon brother-in-law, who
like most other surgeons of the time, was extremely
pessimistic that surgery could cure cancer. But Emlen
told herself: I can approach my death much more
calmly if I know that Ive done everything I can possibly
do. Anticipated regret still remains an important rea-
son for people who decide to undergo treatment irre-
spective of what one knows about its efficacy.

RG: How has the disease itself changed over the last
hundred and fifty years? And what do we know about
breast cancer today that we didnt know then?

RAA: Without doubt social factors have played a part in
how often women fall ill with breast cancer. Better
living conditions and healthier diets have resulted in
women beginning to menstruate at a younger age and
reaching menopause later. In addition, the use of contra-

12
ceptives has meant that women are having fewer chil-
dren and are doing so later in life. All this has the conse-
quence that women are going through more menstrual
cycles in their lifetimes, during which the breast grows
and produces milk. During every menstrual cycle there
is a certain risk that a genetic mistake will occur, a cel-
lular change that can lead to cancer.
My work, however, is less concerned with social factors
of this kind and more with how the disease itself has
changed in the light of prevailing medical knowledge
and practices. For Susan Emlen, cancer was still an
unsightly growth on the surface of her body, a macro-
scopic disease that was treated surgically. For her and
her doctors, cancer was a tumour that progressed to
death. If a patient survived for years with a tumour,
with or without an operation, people generally believed
she did not have cancer. Today we define cancer in
terms of cellular and even biochemical, hormonal fea-
tures. We no longer see cancer as a disease that by defi-
nition inevitably leads to death.
Without wanting to be a relativist: in my opinion the
definition of cancer is enormously dependent on the
prevailing state of medical knowledge and technology.
Today we have better criteria for making an immediate
prognosis than were available a hundred and fifty years
ago. Nevertheless we still cannot reliably predict the
future for many patients.

RG: Yes, technology changes. We are constantly learn-
ing more. Perhaps in the future we will have to revise
things that today we regard as absolute certainties. Does
this mean that our current medical and biological
knowledge does not provide us with a sound basis for
making decisions regarding treatment strategies for
breast cancer?

RAA: Forty years ago researchers in the USA began to
measure the success of screening mammography. Of
course, prevention alone cannot save anyones life. It
depends on what happens afterwards. The study even-
tually showed that it was only in the group of women
over fifty that screening mammography led to a reduc-
tion in deaths caused by breast cancer. However, people
werent prepared to wait for the results of confirmatory
studies and a sober evaluation of risks and benefits. As a
result of pressure by the government and the American
Cancer Society, screening mammography was made
routine without a thorough evaluation. On the other
hand, studies of this kind are generally full of potential
traps. It is often difficult to determine if people live
longer after screening or have lived longer after being
informed of their disease at an earlier point without
this meaning that their lives were being extended over-
all. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Such effects can
be found everywhere, and they appear time and time
again.
Dont misunderstand me here. I am in no way against
checkups of this kind and evidence-based medicine.
This approach has enabled us to find out that contrary
to the medical opinion widely held for a time hormone

13
replacement does not safely prevent heart disease but in
fact causes heart disease and breast cancer. However,
evidence-based medicine has its limits and often we
have to make provisional judgements based on more
sociological grounds, such as considerations about who
is likely to gain or lose by the diffusion of particular
practices.

RG: How does the situation present itself for the indi-
vidual patient or physician? How can they reach a deci-
sion?

RAA: Most of what I have said to you relates above all to
the epidemiological use of cancer prevention measures
that is, to the situation as seen by someone who is mak-
ing health policy decisions for a large group of people.
From the point of view of the individual, things some-
times look quite different. In brief, the reason for this is
that the necessity of taking individual dispositions and
idiosyncrasies into account is central in this context.
Take the following case. Two men have colon cancer at
the same stage. It seems that one of the tumours has
developed quite recently, because the man has had
regular checkups. The other tumour seems to be older.
Many things besides the way the tumour looks under
the microscope suggest a different rate of growth
between the two tumours, and this difference should be
a relevant factor in deciding on a treatment. But
according to the standard prognosis criteria both cases
will nevertheless be put in the same cancer stage.
RG: Can such problems be solved by simply developing
better classification procedures?

RAA: The problem is not only due to the limitations of
the available technology. It is also not a result of mis-
communication between doctor and patient or of doc-
tors not being sensitive enough to the particularities of
individual patients. I think its much more the case that
a part of our problems and this is the part I am con-
cerned with as a historian is connected with how
medical knowledge is generated and communicated.
There is an argument that goes back to antiquity about
whether a disease exists, so to speak, in itself, as its own
being, or merely as the prevailing embodiment in the
patient. I think both points of view are justified. Accord-
ingly, one or the other of these points of view was more
or less popular at different times depending on which
diseases were prevalent and which were the focus of
attention. The notion of a disease as a thing existing in
itself fits to a disease such as plague, which exhibits a
clear clinical picture and has a specific pathogen. The
other concept often has a better fit to the sort of diseases
we are dealing with today that are chronic, have varied
prognoses and are often difficult to diagnose.

RG: To what extent could this be interesting for a doc-
tor or the patient?

RAA: There will always be pain and suffering for which
there is no available diagnosis. However, when the

14
model of a disease as an independent entity that exists
like a germ is presented as the only medically legitimate
one, then patients who are suffering from those more
indefinable diseases are damned to keep on searching
for the cause of their suffering mostly in vain. If
patients were to realize that their suffering can be
regarded just as legitimately in terms of individual
sickness, there would perhaps be less energy wasted on
the search for an ultimate diagnosis.
Idiosyncrasy of this kind is relevant to breast cancer as
well. In each medical generation, clinicians and patients
have re-discovered how varied the prognosis can be and
how difficult it is to predict who will do well and who
will not based on the physical qualities of the tumour.
Someday we may have better tests and ways of seeing
hidden metastases. But I doubt we will ever completely
banish the problem of idiosyncrasy.

RG: Nevertheless, as a patient I am interested in how
my situation compares with that of others. I would still
like to know how great the risk is of my becoming ill
or how great the chances are of my being successfully
treated.

RAA: Calculations of probability sometimes have limited
use for the individual with cancer and faced with a
difficult decision about treatment. A decision strategy
with which one aims to win as much as possible over
many rounds of a game does not necessarily have to be
the same as the strategy someone chooses who is only
playing a limited number of rounds. This is why people
play lotto. Even though they know that the game is not
worth it in the long run, they are hoping to be incredibly
lucky just once. Breast cancer patients sometimes find
themselves in a similar situation. If there is some way
that offers them even a tiny spark of hope then they
might want to choose it. For this reason, the approach
that makes sense from an epidemiological point of view
is not always the one most appropriate to the individual
and his or her specific situation.

RG: Surely the instrument of informed consent has
been introduced as a response to precisely these types of
cases: based on their knowledge of the degree of per-
sonal risk patients themselves decide whether they want
to submit to a specific intervention.

RAA: Informed consent is a very ambivalent area.
Research is often controversial, data is unclear and the
situation is resolved by handing the decision to the
patient. But as soon as the economic interests of phar-
maceutical firms come into play for example, a firm
that manufactures a product used for a particular
method of treatment or a hormone replacement prepa-
ration things begin to become extremely problematic.
It is all too easy for choices to be swayed in one direction
or another. Moreover, why should the layperson make a
decision that even the experts are not prepared to make.
I dont think that in such situations we should burden
the patient with our uncertainty.

15
RG: In your book you give a detailed account of the
story of Rachel Carson, the founder of the American
environmental movement. Her case seems to provide a
good illustration of what youve been talking about.

RAA: Rachel Carson believed that environmental
poisons and our modern lifestyle play a decisive role in
the development of cancer. Her image of the body and
her concepts were more holistic. And the doctor who
treated her, George Crile, was one of the greatest
sceptics of his time regarding cancer. Crile warned that
cancer phobia could cause more suffering than the
disease itself; he questioned the statistics that were
widely used at the time and spoke out against radical
surgery as opposed to softer methods of treatment
such as radiation and more limited surgery.
Nevertheless the story ended with Crile treating Carson
with very extreme measures when she was on the verge
of death. He even implanted radioactive materials into
the base of her brain.
In retrospect and to some of Carsons friends at the time,
this decision seemed wrong and against both Criles and
Carsons private and public positions. This whole story
is not only an example of playing against the odds in a
desperate situation, but also an example of how treat-
ment decisions can have symbolic value. They can
sometimes sustain hope for survival and show that doc-
tors are not giving up on the patient.

RG: But doesnt this story also show how difficult it is
for the individual to resist widely used medical practices
even when these contradict the patients own views?

RAA: No. I wouldnt say that Rachel Carson made a
mistake at all. Her story and many others in my book as
well as my clinical experiences make me sceptical in
regard to the idea of the good death. I am of course
not against the good death. But it is easy to ignore the
reasons that cause people to make decisions that in retro-
spect seem wrong. In my view, under present circum-
stances, providing care at the end of life is often tragic
and frustrating because the values involved are in con-
flict with one another. One cant be completely candid
with the patient all the time or follow the principle of
the good death and at the same time sustain the hope of
survival. There is often an amount of real medical
uncertainty about both the patients prognosis and the
effectiveness of interventions for particular patients that
contributes to the difficulty of the situation.

RG: How could we do better in treating breast-cancer
patients in terms of health policy?

RAA: If we were more aware of the historically condi-
tioned values, interests, and structures that shape medi-
cal knowledge and practice and we didnt sacrifice our
common sense to promise we perhaps could spare our



16
selves a number of bad decisions. In particular, we need
to step back from practices that oversell fear, which in
turn lead us to overestimate the efficacy of, and prema-
turely promote and deploy, putative means of preven-
tion.
A different, more pragmatic consideration would be to
give individual patients a stronger voice. This would
allow the inclusion in the discussion of opinions that are
otherwise represented by critics of contemporary culture
and which can only be inadequately translated into the
language of medical data.
Aside from this, I believe that history is not only impor-
tant for the purpose of deducing or proving something.
It is also meaningful and hopefully interesting in itself.
Thats why I am writing this book.




17
Model Footwork
Ansgar Bschges, Volker Drr, rjan Ekeberg, and Keir G. Pearson
simulate the neuronal processes in the musculoskeletal system
of cats and stick insects Fellows 2001/2002
by Sonja Asal
Our bones and muscles are not constructed for long
periods of motionless sitting. This is due to our biologi-
cal legacy. In contrast to plants, animals are reliant on
organic nourishment and for this reason very few spe-
cies can afford to remain still and wait for something
edible to pass by. All other species are constantly on the
move, hunting for prey or looking for sexual partners,
fleeing from predators or migrating to breeding areas.
Animals swim, crawl, run or fly and for this purpose set
in motion fins, wings, dozens of pairs of legs or the
entire body wall.
The question as to how movement is initiated and con-
trolled in a living organism has been an object of human
curiosity since antiquity. Studies in this area were
greatly helped by technological advances in the 19
th

century. The French animal physiologist tienne-Jules
Marey was one of the first to analyse the gait of animals
using the new technology of photography. In 1878,
inspired by Mareys work, the American photographer
Eadweard James Muybridge produced a sequence of
rapidly photographed images of a galloping horse,
thereby proving what had long been suspected, namely
that in the galloping action of a horse there is a phase in
which none of the hooves touch the ground. The deci-
sive step in explaining the control mechanisms of
movement was made by the physiologist Emil du Bois-
Reymond, who discovered bioelectricity in muscle
nerves.
Since this time, the science of movement has developed
into a lively and rapidly progressing field of biology.
From its beginnings it seems to have been pursued on
interdisciplinary lines and has always had to select a
theoretical approach that would enable it to bring
together numerous observations and measurements to
produce an explanation.
Ansgar Bschges and his colleagues Volker Drr, rjan
Ekeberg and Keir G. Pearson all specialists on the
science of locomotion came together at the Wissen-
schaftskolleg in the academic year 2001/2002 in the
project group Neural Control of Locomotion in order
to analyse the processes in the nervous system under-
lying movement. The group was able to profit from its

18
interdisciplinary composition, which brought together
biocybernetic, behavioural-biological and neurophysi-
ological expertise in the study of vertebrates and inver-
tebrates.
In contrast to the case of scholars from the humanities
and social sciences, a stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg by
researchers working in the natural sciences is sometimes
very difficult to integrate into their work programme
and for this reason often very difficult to organise. It
means being cut off from the research laboratory for a
long time. On the other hand, it offers the freedom to
prepare future research on a conceptual level or to theo-
retically evaluate data gained from laboratory experi-
ments. The Locomotion Group devoted itself to the
latter and, as Ansgar Bschges and Volker Drr empha-
size, the results far exceeded original expectations.
The research aim consisted in translating data gained
from years of laboratory experiments into a dynamic
three-dimensional computer simulation. This increases
both the level of detailed knowledge of individual
sequences and the amount of available data. In the
Cologne laboratory of Ansgar Bschges, research is
being conducted into the neural networks underlying
the locomotion of the river lamprey, one of the best
documented of all organisms, and into the stick insect,
which for Bschges represents almost the ideal protago-
nist for the research of movement because it allows for
quite different approaches to the complex form of loco-
motion employed in walking ranging from neurobio-
logical to behavioural-biological.
In general, explains Bschges, movement processes are
constructed cyclically and can be divided into a stance
phase and a swing phase. In the stance phase the limbs
exert force on the environment to propel the body for-
ward. In the swing phase they are then brought back to
the initial position, from where the cycle begins anew.
This process involves the alternative activation of
antagonistic extensor and flexor muscles. Whereas the
overall decision to engage in movement proceeds from
higher centres within the nervous system as a rule
from the brain the individual elements of movement
and their coordination are controlled at much lower
levels of neural organisation through rhythmic neuronal
patterns. However, in the course of further research,
ideas regarding the generation of this automatically
operating pattern had to be modified insofar as
researchers proved that the processing of sensory infor-
mation makes an elementary contribution to the plastic-
ity and flexibility of the movement apparatus, e.g.
information on the position of individual bones and
joints or on the forces working on individual muscle
groups. Above all the work of Keir Pearson and his
laboratory over the last twenty years, says Bschges,
has dramatically extended our knowledge of the role of
sensory feedback.
What is initially produced by all these laboratory
experiments is a vast amount of data, which has been
acquired by deriving the states of excitation of individ-
ual neurons, which in turn steer the muscle groups of
particular segments. Although a whole range of conclu-

19
sions can be drawn from these data, the scope for
experimentation and the formation of hypotheses with
regard to complex sequences of movement is very lim-
ited. Even in the case of a single insect leg, says Ansgar
Bschges, more than a dozen muscles control the four
larger leg segments. In many cases it is therefore not
even possible to subject the discovered mechanisms to
experimental checks in order to establish whether the
given description is sufficient or whether the data actu-
ally point to a different conclusion. As long as we can-
not formulate a model, we can never be sure, is Volker
Drrs credo.
The question the group asked itself at the beginning of
its time at the Wissenschaftskolleg was thus: Is it possi-
ble to generate a model of the locomotive pattern with
the help of the available data? The Berlin research
group was ideally equipped to answer this question
because one of its members, rjan Ekeberg, was not
only a physiologist but also a skilled mathematician with
years of experience in the field of computer simulations.
Such knowledge is immensely important, above all for
the conception of the programme, emphasizes Volker
Drr, since it has to be constructed in such a way that it
can be expanded at any time. Ekebergs most important
achievement was to construct a mathematical approach
to the deal with the noise inevitably associated with
900 available matrix elements, which involved concen-
trating on thirty matrix elements and including the
others only within narrow tolerances. The original
plan, according to Bschges, was to simulate a middle
leg of the stick insect and a hind leg of the cat in a three-
dimensional model. By the end of the process, the
group had produced the models of a four-legged and a
six-legged locomotor system, each featuring a dynamic
pair of legs. The capacity of this system significantly
exceeded the researchers expectations. Based on the
available data, a whole range of additional capacities was
generated for which no experimental data had been
previously obtained. For instance, if the cat in the simu-
lation is made to move uphill, the programme inde-
pendently calculates the changed bending angles and the
decreased length of step in the hind legs. The compari-
son of the locomotor systems of the cat and the stick
insect also proved highly interesting. Based on the great
difference in weight one could assume that these systems
would necessarily be very different. And yet it turned
out that, in spite of the great degree of physiological
difference, these systems were more similar than
expected.
The four researchers have continued the intensive
exchange of ideas begun during their time as Fellows of
the Wissenschaftskolleg in the context of ongoing
collaboration and an annual summer workshop held at
the Wissenschaftskolleg in which results are compared
and new research goals formulated. The development of
the initial models made it possible to systematically
analyse where gaps in knowledge need to be filled and
to refine the original model by integrating newly
acquired data. In this process, the integral role of simu-
lation in the work has become clear in that it forms an

20
interface between experiment and hypothesis formation.
The next question to be examined using this movement-
modelling technology concerns the neuronal mecha-
nisms responsible for coordination between the legs.
With their experience in the field of translating experi-
mental into mathematical algorithms, the biologists are
now often sought out by engineers looking into ways of
mechanically reproducing movement sequences. As yet,
androids with anything approaching fluid movements
can be found only in science fiction films. Yet in real life,
walking machines can already accomplish a great deal
for example, they can scan the surface they are moving
on for irregularities and adapt their movements appro-
priately. But it is still the case that the stick insect has a
far larger repertoire of movements than any artefact.
With the six-legged robot Tarry II, scientists have
already managed to translate algorithms gained from
computer simulations into movement. The knowledge
gained from this achievement is currently being applied
to the development of a two-legged model in a project
entitled Nature and Technology of Intelligent Walk-
ing and involving specialists in biomechanics, physics
and engineering from Jena and Munich. Lola is
expected to walk upright before the end of this year. She
will be equipped with a multitude of sensors and her
joints will be constructed using springs and cushioning
in order to maintain elasticity. When one uses the elas-
ticity of the musculoskeletal system, explains Bschges,
the complexity of neuronal regulation in jogging, for
example, can be reduced even below that employed in
walking.
It is probable that, as a type of second-order simulation,
Lola will help researchers to pose more precise questions
that will give rise to new experiments. This interaction
of experiment and model, of theoretical knowledge and
technological application, was already a feature of this
field of research from its beginnings. In order to be able
to analyse the movements of animals, tienne-Jules
Marey invented the chronophotographic gun, a pho-
tographic apparatus that could achieve twelve exposures
per second and that prefigured the film camera. It is
thus not only robots but also images that have learnt to
move with the help of biologists.



21
Urban Spaces as Social Surfaces
Monika Wagner researches the tactility and opticity of urban spaces Fellow 2005/2006
by Ralf Grtker
It is not difficult to see that the cathedrals in Cologne,
Reims and Strasbourg are all examples of the Gothic
style. But what is it that connects a towering sculpture
made of junk in Berlins Friedrichstadtpassagen, a spiral
of cracked clay on the otherwise spotless floor of the
Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and a spread-
out ensemble of artificial fruits held together with fruit
skins and remains?
Scrap-metal sculptures and art made of earth, clay and
garbage are found in shopping arcades and other semi-
public buildings all over the world. This is not the result
of abstruse artistic penchants on the part of investors and
building owners. Art made of junk and old industrial
or natural materials is used to give a sense of historicity
to places that are otherwise without history, explains
the art historian Monika Wagner. In monitored areas
such as shopping arcades and entertainment complexes,
these objects, which can be connected with the tradition
of Arte Povera, have the function of creating an illusion
of a public domain. The public space is a political uto-
pia, a place, as the aesthetician and parliamentarian
Theodor Vischer described in 1848, that is not only
accessible to everyone but that is also useful for every-
one. In this respect, adds Monika Wagner, it is also
a place of encounter and reconciliation of social differ-
ences. This political utopia finds its aesthetic counter-
part in the expectation connected with the public space.
It is the constantly possible encounter with the unex-
pected even a certain confusingness that constitute
the urban charm and attractiveness of public places
and streets. Junk art aims to integrate these elements on
the symbolic level in the closed worlds of the shopping
centre.
Monika Wagner describes her art-historical project in
terms of materials as social surfaces. During her time
at the Wissenschaftskolleg she intends to apply this basic
concept not only to art, but also to architecture. With
reference to spaces that were conceived of as public,
she is investigating how different forms of material and
surfaces give expression to different political ideals
regarding the public sphere.
Berlins Karl-Marx-Allee is one of the starting points for
this undertaking. The avenue links the eastern work-
ing-class area with the city centre of the former capital
of the GDR. The construction of this first socialist
street was begun in 1951 as the first large building
project of the National Development Programme
launched in the same year. Architectural historians tend

22
to interpret the monumentality of the avenue as
embodying the centralistic state aware of its own power.
Even the ornamental embellishment of the faades, the
so-called Zuckerbckerstil or wedding-cake style, is
commonly interpreted as a reference to Moscow rather
than as an element that counteracts this monumentality.
Monika Wagners view is somewhat different. She sees
Karl-Marx-Allee, or Stalin-Allee as it was once called, as
embodying a tactile building style even though it
was not described as such at the time. Drawing a
connection between a wide street lined by ten-storey
buildings, which was planned and used as a major traf-
fic axis, and the sense of touch seems a highly unusual
approach, to say the least. In order to be able to grasp
this idea, one needs to take the time to observe the
faades in detail. The tiles, the differently shaped
balcony areas, the marquetry and reliefs, the structures
making up the building complex, the pilaster strips, the
flutes in the travertine columns at the entrances these
features continually create new plasticity, explains
Monika Wagner. In the corner buildings at Frankfurter
Tor the almost Arabic ornaments above the stone
plinths and a feature that is almost postmodern the
extraordinarily thin small columns in the fascia and
above them the so-called running dog, i.e. a Greek
ornamental form here we can clearly see the desire to
create a rich surface.
Stalin-Allee was created as a socialist response to what
was declared in the East to be the capitalist architec-
ture that characterised reconstruction in the West and
that was orientated to the Neues Bauen (New Building)
style of the 1920s. Examples in Berlin included the soli-
tary high-rise structures of the Hansaviertel, Breit-
scheidplatz at Bahnhof Zoo and the Kulturforum on
Potsdamer Platz. Monika Wagner describes this type of
building, which features large expanses of glass, concrete
and rendered surfaces, as optical architecture a
streamlined architecture that absorbs the gaze of the
observer, as she puts it, like a gigantic crash barrier.
In the great age of the New Building style in the 1920s,
much was written about the New Seeing and the
optical as an underestimated form of spontaneous in-
sight. It was the age of the new auto-mobility, but also of
photography and above all of film. The approach of
architects such as Gropius, who expressly privileged the
visual sense, included a strategy of revaluing their own
work. Within the traditional hierarchy of the arts,
architecture, as we see in Hegel for example, was classi-
fied as a lower art form due to the fact that it was tied
to its materiality, explains Monika Wagner. The
architects of the New Building style now began to
design above all for the eye and attempted to overcome
this bond to material in optical terms.
While the category of the optical plays a significant role
in the history of art and of perception, it is strangely
underrepresented in architectural theory. Moreover, the
concept of tactility has been till now given very little
consideration in relation to architecture.
Stalin-Allee, like Alexanderplatz, was not conceived as a
playground for the rich and idle but as a place for the

23
leisure of the working people, wrote East Berlins chief
architect Joachim Nther in 1971. The Sixteen Princi-
ples of Urban Development of the GDR from 1950,
explains Monika Wagner, also give a high priority to
the fact that the socialist city was created for pedestri-
ans. The pedestrian referred to here is not the flneur
but more the demonstrator: the term used in the GDR
for those taking part in parades and processions. The
avenue was not conceived of simply for transit traffic,
but as a parade axis. Everything is therefore geared to
alternation and a multipartite character, not the visual
maelstrom that emerges in the process of driving by.
Apart from the figurative representations that can be
seen on the faade reliefs and the mosaics in the building
entrances, the language of the materials used for con-
struction refers to the socialist ideal of the working
individual. It was for this individuals needs that the
avenue was conceived of as a public space. The clay
reliefs and wrought-iron grills, the Meissen tiles on the
faade and also the mosaics represent products of tradi-
tional processes, explains Monika Wagner, even if at
the time all these things were already being manufac-
tured on a quasi-industrial basis. We see here the con-
scious display of a material plurality, one that was
intended to create an appearance of wealth. And this
was indicated by that which traditionally constituted
wealth in the society: the various craft professions and
their knowledge and abilities. This is quite different
from optical architecture, in which work as individual
activity completely disappears and functionally-aware
building is orientated to the industrial production that
had suppressed the traditional approach to architectural
design.
There is an extensive debate among building historians
as to the extent to which Hermann Henselmann, the
most important architect of Stalin-Allee, was forced by
the regime to adopt the ideas of Socialist Realism.
Henselmann himself originally came from the tradition
of the New Building. However, Monika Wagner is
more interested in the reasons why buildings were con-
structed at this time in a style she refers to as tactile
the extent to which the materials and surfaces with
which public space was formed can be read as symptoms
of societal self-images.
Wagner argues that the tactile concept was retained in
the redesign of Alexanderplatz in the mid-1960s. At
least up until the remodelling after 1989, this site fea-
tured a breadth of variation in surface textures equal to
that on Stalin-Allee a design quite different from
plans for the remodelling of the plaza produced by
modern architects in the Weimar period, which used
flowing forms geared to the travelling gaze and trans-
parent faades to create a visual space that optically
enclosed the observer.
Today we can see only a few remains of the tactile
design of Alexanderplatz. The Brunnen der Vlker-
freundschaft the Fountain of International Friend-
ship which spirals into the air in a series of seventeen
copper basins and ends in a five-pointed star, originally
formed the climax of a surface conceived as a spiral

24
composed of narrow strips of granite cobbles and differ-
ently coloured washed concrete plates. A row of trees
and an extremely long bench continued the spiral motif.
Today architectural policy both here and elsewhere is
not determined by the opposition between tactile and
optical construction that Monika Wagner is attempt-
ing to delineate in Berlin as not only exemplary for the
architecture of the post-war period, but also as a symp-
tom of societal structures in the industrial nations.
Locational factors, the generation of singularity, says
Wagner, play an important role today. And the crea-
tion of controlled zones worlds of marble, granite
and glass that are not embellished with representations
and surfaces that refer to the socialist world of work but
with aeruginous piles of metal, clay structures and pres-
entations of junk.

25
On the Ariadnean Thread of the Cataglyphis Ants
Rdiger Wehner is a pioneer in the field of theoretical biology
whose research regularly takes him from his Zurich laboratory
into the deserts of North Africa Permanent Fellow
by Sonja Asal
Along with around 40 Fellows who are invited to the
Wissenschaftskolleg each year, the Permanent Fellows
shape the scholarly profile of the centre, represent its
aims and, together with the Academic Advisory Board,
provide advice to the Rector on the appointment of the
annual Fellows. When working at the Wissen-
schaftskolleg, the Permanent Fellows pursue their own
specific research projects, like all Fellows of the centre.
Rdiger Wehner has been a Non-Resident Permanent
Fellow since 1990. He was responsible for initiating
theoretical biology as a field of study at the Wissen-
schaftskolleg, which has now been expanded to include
medical research and is referred to as theoretical life
sciences. The elaboration of the range of research
emphases within this field has increased the scholarly
appeal and reputation of the Wissenschaftskolleg, and
this owes much to the efforts of Rdiger Wehner.

It often only requires a small change in the way we look
at things to open up a whole new perspective. The
Zurich zoologist Rdiger Wehner is one of those schol-
ars whose attention is never exclusively tied to the
immediate field of research. This was already the case at
the beginning of his career. In the late 1960s he set out to
research the visual abilities of bees (and thus to deepen
his knowledge of the subject of an already completed
doctorate in the field). However, periods of fieldwork
are organized according to the academic year, and when
Wehner arrived on the Mediterranean coast during the
winter semester break with a VW van full of equip-
ment, the almond and orange trees were already in full
bloom. The bees, attracted by the beguiling scent, had
no interest in research equipment. On the other hand,
Wehner was immediately fascinated by another native
of the area: a slim, long-legged desert ant, which as he
later found out bore the sonorous Greek name of
Cataglyphis. The ant moves in a convoluted pattern over
a wide area to search for prey, but once successful is able
to head straight back to its nest.
Wehners research began with the behavioural biology
question: How does the ant know where its starting
point is and above all how does it find the shortest way

26
back? In its arid habitat, spending as little time as possi-
ble outside the underground nest is a matter of survival.
Cataglyphis has a particular ecological niche. As Rdi-
ger Wehner explains, Of all desert inhabitants, it is the
only one that is able to go out to look for food by day in
the summer. Ground temperatures of up to 70 C
inevitably kill nocturnally active insects that do not
manage to get back underground before the tempera-
ture rises. Their cadavers are then sought out and col-
lected over a wide area by Cataglyphis, which has an
enormous tolerance for heat due to what Wehner now
knows to be the particular expression of their heat shock
gene. The animals, which measure barely more than a
centimetre, cover hundreds of meters in the process.
Applied to human dimensions, Wehner reckons that
this would mean being able to determine the direction
and distance of the point of departure within seconds
after meandering over a distance of some 50 kilometres
in a landscape without any discernible structure.
Human navigators have access to a whole arsenal of
technical aids: compasses and maps to navigate solid
ground, sextants and complicated methods of computa-
tion to navigate the unstructured expanses of the ocean,
and most recently GPS satellite navigation. By contrast,
the ant has only a pair of compound eyes and a brain
that does not weigh more than one tenth of a milligram.
This means, says Wehner, that is has only one mil-
lionth of the number of nerve cells that the human brain
is thought to have. Nevertheless, the ant, as Wehner
enjoys explaining in vivid detail, is connected at all times
to its nest by a tightly stretched Ariadnean thread.
The arithmetic operation required for this can be de-
scribed as vector navigation; Cataglyphis has to integrate
the directions it has taken and the distances it has cov-
ered into a single vector. For this purpose the ant
requires three elementary systems: a type of compass, a
rangefinder and a steering system that coordinates the
measurement results. Wehner has been investigating
how these components function since the end of the
sixties together with students in his laboratory in Zurich
and at the field station he has established in southern
Tunisia. There, Wehner and his team conduct outdoor
tests using a network of channels laid out on the salt
pan. The results are then evaluated using the computer
facilities in the Zurich laboratories and provide the basis
for neuro-physiological investigations.
The Nobel Prize winning bee researcher Karl Ritter
von Frisch showed in the early part of the last century
that bees can use the pattern of polarized light to orien-
tate themselves. However, the question which sensory
and neurobiological capacities of the eye and the brain
are implicated in this process remained unresearched for
a long time. Wehner and his staff developed new meth-
ods involving, for instance, contact lenses or other
optical instruments to change the quality of light for
ants in the field and used the resulting mistakes the ants
made in navigation to determine what pattern of light
the ants detected. It was revealed, for example, that


27
Cataglyphis utilizes light only within the ultraviolet
range, which is invisible to us, a strategy that Wehner
characterizes as a very expedient achievement of evo-
lution from a physiological point of view.
Cataglyphis has still revealed only part of its secret. Its
compass shows only the direction leading to its home. In
order to find the entrance to its nest, which is a tiny hole
in the desert floor, it also has to be able to measure the
distances it has covered. As shown by recent experi-
ments in collaboration with a team in Ulm, the animals
have a kind of pedometer that presupposes naturally
constant step lengths. High-frequency photographs of
ants walking through narrow channels show that they
fulfil this condition. Cataglyphis can also gauge direc-
tion and distance in hilly dune areas. Experiments with
Berlin colleagues using an uphill-downhill channel
system which Wehner refers to as Toblerone experi-
ments showed that the animals project the routes
covered in a three-dimensional terrain onto a plane, i.e.
onto a virtual two-dimensional space.
Cataglyphis has now come to represent a model neuro-
ethological system, the study of which involves several
international research groups. Postgraduate students of
Wehner are today working in a wide range of areas all
over the world. Twelve of them hold professorships in
the USA, Germany and Switzerland; and one of them
has become Head of Research and Development at
Novartis.
Rdiger Wehner talks about his Cataglyphis with
such enthusiasm that his listeners cannot help but be
fascinated by this creatures astounding navigational
abilities. The focus of his research and reflections always
remains on the living organism in its natural environ-
ment. Despite the interrelations between his work and
closely or more distantly related disciplines, Wehner
always returns to the Cataglyphis desert ant with its
largely unknown species spectrum; and he has also
studied the evolution of this ant in the deserts of the Old
World. To this end he is researching Cataglyphis forms
using morphometric and molecular biological methods,
mapping the areas in which they are found by means of
detailed sampling in the countries of North Africa and
the Near and Middle East. Together with his wife one
of his first students and since then a constant contributor
to Cataglyphology he has established a unique col-
lection of species examples, which is soon to be pre-
sented to the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frank-
furt am Main. His fascination with the beauty of the
desert, whose labyrinthine paths he has followed for
decades, has brought him the prestigious Marcel-Benoist
Award, the highest Swiss award for science. The fact
that the Old World Cataglyphis is also a subject of inter-
est on the other side of the Atlantic is shown by his
recent selection as a Foreign Honorary Member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and his
appointment as Guest Professor at Harvard University
for the coming year.
However, in spite of all his enthusiasm for the desert
ants, it is clear that Wehner has only been able to achieve
so much in terms of understanding their behaviour and

28
the neurobiological processes underlying it because he
has approached them as a research object from different
yet converging scientific perspectives. This is illustrated
by the example of the ant compass. Field experiments in
behavioural biology form only a part of the analysis. In
Wehners Zurich laboratory, these are supplemented by
neuro-physiological and neuro-anatomical investiga-
tions that have shown, among other things, that
Cataglyphis perceives polarized, ultraviolet light with
only a special part of the eye, which is equipped with
specific photo-receptors which are in turn linked to
special nerve cells with enormous branching structures
and which transmit information to a set of compass
neurones. On the basis of the neuro-biological and
behavioural-biological data, Wehner postulates that
Cataglyphis ants do not possess an entire astronomical
almanac that stores all possible sky patterns with all
possible polarization directions, but that they proceed
quite differently, like physicists approaching a problem.
Here we encounter an area where we reach the limit of
what can be proved in neuro-biological experiments. It
was possible to predict the systematic mistakes in navi-
gation that occurred in the outdoor experiments when,
for example, the animals were deprived of a part of the
light spectrum. However, whether neuro-biological
processes actually occur in the way postulated by
behavioural biology cannot be derived in electro-
physiological terms at all levels. Either Wehner had to
accept that he could not prove the hypotheses he had
developed or he had to go beyond the neuro-biological
level. For the leading professors in the field at the time
Wehner began his career, his bio-cybernetic gurus, as he
likes to remember them, this was impossible. However,
Wehner joined forces with computer scientists, created
computer simulations of the processes of excitation in
the ants brain, and then used a robot to test the postu-
lated principles. The robotic device is called Sahabot and
is equipped with three macro-polarization analyzers and
a downstream electronic circuit whose construction is
based on the physiological data. It is a fascinating sight
when Sahabot rolls over the desert floor as a free agent
using a compass based on the polarization pattern of the
sky. This does not mean that the system implanted in
the robot fully corresponds to that of the ant, but it does
at least prove that the model, which is the result of col-
laboration between several disciplines, functions.
Rdiger Wehner is one of the pioneers of theoretical
biology, which although it has not yet become fully
integrated in all biological research institutions, is
increasingly establishing itself in part due to Wehners
own efforts as a member of numerous committees.
Wehner is convinced that progress in the acquisition of
knowledge cannot be based on the constant augmenta-
tion of observations and measurements. Without theo-
retical concepts pointing to new avenues of inquiry, he
argues, an increase in the volume of experimental data
in many fields cannot be expected to lead to an increase
in knowledge. This has certainly been my own experi-
ence. Put another way, new scientific knowledge of the
diversity of biological phenomena requires access to

29
theoretical frameworks that can be offered by related
disciplines.
Recognition of this necessity of an interdisciplinary
approach is certainly not new to a scholar like Rdiger
Wehner, who has studied the history of his own disci-
pline in detail. The phenomenon of model transfer
between disciplines has long been recognized within the
history of science. An historical example can be found in
the career of the French physiocrat and physician
Franois Quesnay, who in 1736, prior to developing his
famous model of the economic circulation of money and
goods, produced a work on blood circulation and the
harmfulness of bloodletting. Here medical knowledge
informed the origins of a theory of human economic
activity. Conversely, in the following century Charles
Darwin used not only his own extensive body of data
but also the insights of political economy in order to
derive the fundamental principles of his theory of evo-
lution. At present, processes developed in bioinformat-
ics, non-linear dynamics and game-theory approaches
are at the forefront of theoretical thinking. However,
warns Wehner, It is imperative that theoretical consid-
erations are constantly orientated to a concrete prob-
lem.
Wehners own concrete problem is called Cataglyphis
and his question is: How can such a small brain solve
complex problems such as navigation in a bare desert
landscape? The answer can only be: by means of a
combination of relatively simple neuronal networks
each of which is geared in evolutionary terms to the
solving of a quite specific task. Research on brain physi-
ology by the group in Switzerland confirms this
hypothesis. And behavioural experiments in both the
field and the laboratory show that Cataglyphis can call
up individual information systems in the brain as
required. If, for example, the compass fails and the path
integrator does not lead the ant to its target, it can
orientate itself using significant landmarks. Should
this possibility not be available, then a systematic search
program is activated, the information calculation mode
of which is surprisingly similar to that used by the US
navy when conducting searches at sea. The fallibility of
each of these systems is reduced to a minimum by the
capacity to combine all three.
Complexity, the combination of individual elements to
form a whole that is more effective than the sum of its
parts, not only provides an answer to the mode of
operation of the ant brain. Wehner sees the analysis of
complex systems as the greatest challenge facing con-
temporary biology, and he characterizes biology as a
science of the complex. In his more recent work,
Wehner draws parallels between the functioning of the
extremely simply insect brain and higher forms of intel-
ligence. Even in the human cerebrum, explains
Wehner, the different functions are distributed over a
large number of closely networked areas. Population
genetics, ecology and evolutionary biology and, for
example, the fascinating ways in which societies of
higher insects function reveal similar phenomena
based on processes that work in parallel without a cen-

30
tral controlling mechanism and yet which are highly
effective as a whole. For Rdiger Wehner, a collector of
modern art and a devotee of the minimalistic-repetitive
elements constituting the productions of the theatre
director Christoph Marthaler, comprehending these
systems in a bottom-up evolutionary sense is not
merely a theory.

31
Secular Modernity? Revising a Self-Perception
Jos Casanova, Hans Joas, Astrid Reuter and Charles Taylor
investigate the different forms of religion in modern societies Fellows 2005/2006
by Sonja Asal
Are we experiencing a return of religion? It seems
that every larger public display of religious feeling
most recently the surprising participation of hundreds of
thousands of above all young people in the ceremonies
following the death of the Pope is accompanied by
animated discussions of this issue in all areas of the
media. When confronted with this question, the sociolo-
gist Hans Joas gestures dismissively. It may seem to the
case, says the Director of the Max Weber Center in
Erfurt, because the public has directed its attention
more keenly to this area in recent years. However, Joas
points out, books with this or similar titles were already
on the market twenty years ago. In fact, religions as
active entities within the realm of civil society have
never disappeared. This was proved in the mid-1990s by
Jos Casanova, who teaches at the New York New
School for Social Research and has spent many years
studying the sociology of religion from a comparative
perspective, in a major study focusing on examples not
only from the USA and Brazil but also many European
countries. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor
complements the conclusions drawn by his fellow schol-
ars when he points out that, when one looks through
secularist glasses and no longer sees religions, then this
probably has little to do with the actual vitality of relig-
ions themselves and a great deal to do with the chosen
perspective. In Western European states, and above all
in Germany and France, the public domain is domi-
nated by a strong, secular self-awareness. It was in these
countries that, with the onset of modernity, rights to
individual freedom had to be asserted in major conflicts
with religiously legitimated political powers.
However, even in our secular societies, the boundary
between the political public domain and private religi-
osity cannot be absolutely determined. One hundred
years ago in France, a demarcation line was drawn by
the heavily contested law governing the separation of
Church and State, a demarcation that continues to prove
problematic most recently in relation to the question
of whether Muslim school pupils should be allowed to
wear headscarves in state schools. Up to what point is
religion a private matter and what form of public
articulation is allowed? According to the scholar of
religion Astrid Reuter, the institution of the school is

32
often the locus of attempts to clarify these issues because
it represents a particularly religion-sensitive space on
the threshold between the spheres of state and civil
society. At the same time, Reuter, who also does
research at the Max Weber Center in Erfurt, has
observed a change in the approach to religion within the
civic public sphere in recent years. For instance, when
Anne Will, the presenter of the Tagesthemen news
program, reflects in a Spiegel interview on why she
has remained a member of the Catholic Church, this
reflects an increasing general tendency among politi-
cians and well-known figures to speak publicly about
their relationship to religion. The theme of religion is
not only attracting the attention of intellectuals and
scholars, but also many people who otherwise tend to
keep it at a distance. In the many conversations that
Astrid Reuter has had about religion she has found it is
something that no-one is really indifferent to.
At the Wissenschaftskolleg, the four scholars are focus-
ing on the theme of Religion and Contingency and
inquiring into the possibilities and forms of religion in a
modern world. They are joined in regular discussions by
the Wrzburg-based philosopher of law, Horst Dreier,
and the Zurich-based theologian and philosopher, Ingolf
Dalferth, who are conducting research in similar the-
matic areas this year at the Wissenschaftskolleg. In
contrast to projects in the natural sciences, as the initia-
tor of the project Hans Joas explains, the members of
this working group are pursuing their collectively for-
mulated question in individual research projects.
Nevertheless, all participants share the conviction that
the development of modern society does not of necessity
lead to a situation in which religions are more or less
banished from the public sphere. This does not mean
that such a situation cannot be observed in several
countries, above all in Western Europe and countries
formerly within the communist sphere of influence. In
the former GDR, for instance, the number of people
who are members of a Church has fallen to an all-time
low. The ongoing, albeit highly uneven, secularisation
of Europe, according to Jos Casanova, is an indisput-
able fact. However, all four scholars question whether
the theories commonly seen as self-evident explanations
of this phenomenon might not in fact do far more to
obscure it than to explain it.
The theory of secularisation that has been advocated
since the 19th century in different variations by nearly
all social scientists basically argues that, with increasing
modernisation, religions not only lose their significance
for political life, but also become a purely private matter
and ultimately decline as institutional entities. If one
proceeds from this assumption, it follows that public
manifestations of religiosity will appear either inexplica-
ble or as atavistic echoes of an outmoded understanding
of the world. An alternative approach would be to inter-
rogate the fundamental theoretical assumption that
modernisation and secularisation inevitably condition
one another.
It is precisely this approach that the four participants are
taking. Their projects focus on alternative ways of

33
describing the public role of religion in the present. In
their view, an objective assessment of this role of relig-
ion is hindered above all by normative theories of mod-
ernisation. Rather than assuming modernity to be a
unitary and unambiguously identifiable process, Hans
Joas prefers to describe it as a totality of different and
variable processes that include bureaucratisation,
democratisation and economisation. But this is not to
say that all these elements have to be realised to the same
degree or even have a necessary relationship to one
another. There are ample examples of modern states
that are organised neither democratically nor on free
market lines. If we interpret such examples in terms of a
normatively charged concept of modernity that they do
not fulfil, then we find ourselves facing the predicament
of having to divide the present into modern and un-
modern phenomena and pursuing this distinction ad
absurdum. For Joas, the question with reference to
secularisation cannot be framed as: Are all criteria of
this exacting concept of modernity fulfilled? Rather, we
need to ask how secularisation relates to one of these
areas, for example: Does increasing economic prosperity
lead to a decline in the significance of religion?
The fact that this is not the case is revealed when we
look at the countries on the edge of Europe. Apart from
the need for a comparative approach, all the scholars
involved argue that a primary prerequisite for a differ-
entiated consideration of the problem is a globally ori-
entated perspective. A Eurocentric view of religious
questions, says Hans Joas, blocks important potential
avenues of insight. He explains this using the example
of European expansion in the 19
th
century, which was
accompanied by intensive missionary efforts. In terms of
economic and technological aspects, the effects of this
colonisation were manifold. However, one concept that
certainly does not apply here, points out Joas, is that of
secularisation. In Asia in contrast to the situation in
Africa Christian missionary efforts even tended to lead
to a strengthening of pre-existing religious identities in
some countries, and the innovations used by missionar-
ies to propagate their faith, such as printing and build-
ing churches, ultimately revolutionised the use of media
and construction techniques among the non-Christian
religions.
Interestingly, in many non-European countries, in
which traditional attitudes to religion continue to play
an important role in spite of advances in economic mod-
ernisation, the current situation has contributed to an
expansion of theoretical perspectives. In light of the
many directions in which forms of religious expression
have developed in recent history, it is becoming in-
creasingly evident that the European process cannot be
taken as a standard and needs to be considered in terms
of its own peculiarities. According to Hans Joas, this
process began in France in the 18
th
century, when for the
first time a small elite had the opportunity to give public
expression to scepticism regarding religious faith. In the
19
th
century, this possibility became a mass phenomenon
in parts of the workers movement and the liberal
middle-classes until, in the second half of the twentieth

34
century, this tendency converged with other
developments of economic modernisation to become a
form of secularism that no longer presupposed an active
ideological decision. In this context, Joas is critical of a
number of tendencies, such as the widespread reception
of Marxism with its intensive religion-critical orienta-
tion and a mythicization of the Enlightenment, which
today is still regarded as providing the standard for an
ostensibly contemporary and progressive relationship to
religious phenomena. What is surprising, says Jos
Casanova, is not the increasing decline of religious ties
in Europe but the fact that this decline is seen through
the lens of the paradigm of secularisation. For this
reason this decline is interpreted as normal and pro-
gressive, and thus as a quasi-natural consequence of
being a modern and enlightened European.
Charles Taylor also does not see any iron necessity at
work in the process of modernisation. He refers to
European development since the onset of the Reforma-
tion as merely a number of causal relations that have led
to a change in the individual and collective attitude to
religion. Complementing his well-known work
Sources of the Self, in which he presents a history of
modern individuality, this approach offers him an alter-
native possibility when analysing the emergence and
development of modernity. He disputes the notion of a
decrease in religiosity. Certainly, says Taylor, we can say
that economic changes and the social mobility that has
resulted from them have led to the destabilisation of
some forms of religiosity: in particular the institutional-
ised form of religion, i.e. the Churches. However, this is
only one aspect of a range of processes of transformation
through which religion has adapted to the conditions of
the modern world. Charles Taylor refers to these devel-
opments in terms of the concept of recomposition,
which the French sociologist of religion Danile
Hervieu-Lger uses to describe the emergence of new
manifestations following the collapse of inherited forms
of religiosity.
The destabilisation of the early modern order, in which
the membership of State and Church were practically
inseparable, led to a privatisation of faith that was
much narrower in scope than might be theoretically
assumed. Taylors thesis argues that religious faith was
in fact supported by a new form of identification with
the state. Although within a certain framework people
could freely choose their confession, it was common for
many members of the Christian religious communities
to equate the values of order, discipline and patriotism
emphasized in these communities with Christianity
itself. In this way, says Taylor, over the course of
history, confessional loyalties have become interwoven
with the notions of identity of certain ethnic, national,
social or regional groups.
However, in the 1960s at the latest, this form of identity
formation was interrupted in a particularly sustained
way in the Western world when a revolution in the
sphere of consumption not only led to a general increase
of individualisation and privatisation but also to a
deconfessionalisation of religious experience and a

35
search for new forms, whether of a Christian-ecumeni-
cal type as in the case of the Taiz community or sources
of spirituality found in non-European religions. How-
ever, the spiritual as such, according to Taylor, is no
longer intrinsically related to the society. Our relation-
ship to the spiritual has become increasingly decoupled
from our relationship to political society.
Whether the post-Durkheimian model will com-
pletely replace its predecessors and whether religious life
will ever become completely fragmented and individu-
alised are, in Taylors view, very much open to question.
It is probable that our relationship to the sacred will
always be mediated in some way by collective entities.
Taking a legal perspective, Astrid Reuter is examining
current religious controversies as conflicts in which
modern societies account for themselves based on their
normative foundations and their self-conception. Using
the examples of France and Germany, she is investigat-
ing how controversies over religious questions are
increasing taking on a legalistic character, or more pre-
cisely, are being negotiated in the courts. In her view,
courts are increasingly being used as a stage on which
religious conflicts are being played out prior or parallel
to the necessary societal discussions. Whether the issue
concerns the ritual slaughter of animals, crucifixes in
classrooms or the wearing of headscarves in schools it
is increasingly the case that courts are pronouncing on
questions that should be subject to negotiation within
civil society. The law is thus assuming a dual function: it
is not only incorporating societal ideas but is also itself
shaping societal ideas of religion and influencing con-
cepts of the social acceptability of forms of religious
expression and their appropriate contexts. This situation
is not without a certain irony, for in this way the secular
or laicistic state, which aims to guarantee religious free-
dom, is itself intervening in the religious sphere.
Comparing Europe and the United States makes it clear
that Europes particular situation is not really suited to
use as a norm for assessing the situation in the Western
world. In the USA, it is not only the case that civil reli-
gious gestures and symbols have a fixed and self-evident
place in political life. Public professions of faith, which
are often found disconcerting in the European context,
are regarded in the USA as recognition of the legitimate
role of religion in the public sphere. As Jos Casanova
explains, from the beginning, religions had a quite dif-
ferent function in the American immigrant society from
that which they had in Europe. Whereas in the Euro-
pean states centuries of conflict shaped by persecution
and religious civil war led to the Church and the State
fashioning a new relationship and to citizens developing
a preference for keeping their faith to themselves, the
situation in American immigrant society was quite the
contrary. There, membership in a religious community
often constituted the first distinctive mark in the process
of finding an identifiable place in American society. As
Casanova explains, within the historical process in
which European immigrant groups melded into a soci-
ety, the acceptance of both the difference and the sub-
stantial equality of religions led to the emergence of an

36
internal social pluralism. The collective religious identi-
ties thus compete with one another on a relatively free
and pluralistic market which is one of the explanations
for the religious vitality of the United States. In the
course of history, the Catholic, Jewish and Protestant
confessions have been accorded symbolic recognition as
elements of the American civil religion. The form in
which the other world religions adapt to this image of
the national identity is a question that will be keenly
observed over the coming decades. Casanova sees Islam
as the most interesting test case and is at the same time
optimistic. He is highly critical of the anti-Islamic reac-
tions of evangelical Christians, which were already
being expressed prior to the attacks of September 11, but
also emphasizes that Muslim imams regularly take part
in public ceremonies alongside representatives of the
Jewish and Christian religions. He sees debates on
whether Islam is compatible with democracy and mod-
ern individual freedoms as exhibiting conspicuous simi-
larities with the reservations confronting Catholicism up
until the 1950s. However, he is convinced that these
discussions will ultimately lead to recognition of the fact
that Islam has put down roots in the United States and is
on the way to becoming an important American religion
that in the future will play a relevant role in the forma-
tion of public opinion.
Whereas in the United States only some ten per cent of
immigrants are of the Muslim faith, Casanova points
out, in Europe immigration and Islam have become
virtually synonymous. In his view, the defensiveness
encountered by these immigrant groups may have a lot
to do with the secularist self-conception of European
societies, which leads to a pressure for the privatisation
of religion. European societies, according to Casanova,
have great difficulty accepting the legitimate role of
religion in public life and in the organisation and mobi-
lisation of group identities. For this reason, organised
Muslim collective identities become a source of fear not
only because of their otherness as a non-Christian relig-
ion, but above all because of their religiosity as such:
For it is the Other of European secularism.
However, it is hardly likely that a general model for
dealing with religion will be found. The scholars agree
that only regionally limited solutions are possible. Jos
Casanova is convinced that just as capitalism takes on its
own particular form in other cultures, such as Japan or
China, religion assumes a particular character in differ-
ent societies. Even for the Islamic world, Hans Joas
argues, there is a plethora of forms between the secular
model of Turkey and a theocracy such as seen in Iran.
Citing the current debate on a global clash of cultures,
Charles Taylor comments matter-of-factly that people
do not seem to understand that the fortunes of our own
societies depend on whether we are able to agree with
Muslims living here on the rules governing our coexis-
tence.

37
Letter from Berlin:
How it Took 175 Years to Get from Mitte to Grunewald
A Fellow traces the footsteps of her great-great-grandparents
through Berlin Fellow 2005/2006
by Carla Hesse
An apple can tell many stories. This one begins shortly
after I arrived in Berlin last fall when the Cox Orange
first appeared at the fruit stand on Westflische Strae.
It was, for me, an unexpected delight. I had never seen
the delicious Cox Orange for sale in a market, though it
is an apple that I know and love because my family has
grown them on our small apple farm in the Santa Cruz
mountains of California for many years. The Cox
Orange is an old English apple, but it has been grown in
Germany for several centuries and today it is one of
Germanys five most popular apples (along with the
Boskoop, the Elstar, the Gravenstein and the Jonagold).
As old and as European as the Cox Orange may be, the
ones on Westflische Strae this year conjured up home.
Like Joan Didion, I have always thought of myself first
as a Californian; one of those rare ones, one who is
deeply-rooted in my case apple tree-rooted in a re-
gion of the world that most people associate above all
with rootlessness and the lure of exotic experimentation.
There were very few Europeans in California when my
great-grandfather a veteran of the Civil War walked
alongside a wagon train from Somerset, Ohio, over the
Plains, the Great Rockies and the High Sierras to estab-
lish his apple farm just south of San Francisco in the late
1870s. And for three generations my family has re-
mained.
During a convivial dinner one evening at the Wissen-
schaftskolleg, my German table companions began to
share stories about their home towns. Herr Kleihues
about his little village on the western plains outside of
Mnster where his father was a Beamter, Frau Wagner
about her tight little Huguenot community near Mar-
burg and Herr Dalferth about his life as the son of a
Lutheran minister on the outskirts of Stuttgart. And
where do you come from? they asked. I could only
reply that I was about as American as one could be
without being an indigenous person; a real European
Mischling whose ancestors came from every corner of
Europe: from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, the
Atlantic to the Danube. But, Herr Dalferth remarked,
your name is German. Where did the Hesses come
from? I realized that I did not really know.

38
Historian that I am, I have had little interest in geneal-
ogy it has been the big stories, not the little ones, that
mattered. Moreover, Germany in the twentieth century
had been so much a part of my husbands family tragedy
that I hardly gave the Hesses before 1860 much thought.
But just out of curiosity, I decided that weekend to ask
my eighty-year-old father if he knew. Here I was after
all. So do you know where the Hesses came from? I
asked. Yes, he said, Berlin. Your great-great-grand-
father, Frederick August Hesse, who was born in 1801
and died in 1882, lived at 47 Ackerstrae. He was ap-
prenticed by his father to be a weaver, though family
lore has it he wanted to be a landscape gardener fond
of flowers. This made sense, because Ackerstrae, like
its neighbor Grtnerstrae, are streets whose names
reflect the skills of the people who first settled them: the
gardeners and fruit and vegetable growers that Freder-
ick the Great invited from the surrounding countryside
to landscape and feed the burgeoning city on the Spree
in the late eighteenth century. Hesses were among them.
Frederick August Hesse married Johanna Friederike
Wilhelmine Krner at the Sophienkirche on Groe
Hamburger Strae on March 28, 1822, and they left
Berlin for America in 1831, ultimately establishing a
farm in Ohio. From there, my great-grandfather, Her-
man Hesse, went on to California and grew apples
first the Gravenstein, and later the Cox Orange. So I
discovered this year that I am an Ur-Berlinerin. It took
my family 175 years to travel from Mitte to Grunewald,
and they took the apples with them.

39
Masthead
Publisher The Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Prof. Dr. Dieter Grimm, LL.M.
Editor Angelika Leuchter, Katharina Wiedemann
Writers Dr. Sonja Asal
philosopher and literary scholar, works as a freelance documentalist and academic
journalist, including for the Sddeutsche Zeitung and for Focus.
Dr. Ralf Grtker
works as a freelance journalist in the fields of philosophy and the social sciences for
newspapers, magazines and radio. His work has appeared in Brand Eins, Frankfurter
Rundschau, Die Zeit, Telepolis and Deutschlandradio.
Translator Joe ODonnell, Berlin
Graphics and Layout Juliane Heise / Reiner Will, das feld
Prepress Angelika Leuchter, Petra Sonnenberg
Printing Druckerei Heenemann Berlin, June 2006
Circulation 600
Im Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin haben international anerkannte Gelehrte,
vielversprechende jngere Wisseschaftler sowie Persnlichkeiten des geisti-
gen Lebens die Mglichkeit, sich frei von Zwngen und Verpflichtungen fr
ein Akademisches Jahr (Oktober-Juli) auf selbstgewhlte Arbeitsvorhaben
zu konzentrieren. Die rund 40 Fellows bilden eine Lerngemeinschaft auf Zeit,
die durch Fchervielfalt, Internationalitt und Interkulturalitt gekennzeich-
net ist. Die Institution sorgt fr optimale Bedingungen, damit die Fellows
sich ganz ihrer intellektuellen Aufgabe widmen und dabei von dem Anre-
gungs- und Kritikpotential einer herausragenden Gelehrtengemeinschaft
profitieren knnen.
Die Zeiten, sie sind nicht so, dass in unseren Hohen Schulen ein gelehrter
und kreativer Kopf sich in Kontinuitt und Konzentration seiner forscheri-
schen Aufgabe hingeben kann. Und: Die Zeiten, sie sind nicht so, dass 'die
Gesellschaft' gleich welchen Landes und welcher Kultur, es sich leisten
knnte, auf den Ertrag der kreativen Arbeit des gelehrten Kopfes zu verzich-
ten."
Peter Wapnewski
Grndungsrektor 1982 - 1986
Das Wissenschaftskolleg ist ein Experiment im Verstehen, ein hermeneuti-
sches Exerzitium, das ein ganzes Jahr lang whrt."
Wolf Lepenies
Rektor 1986 - 2001
Das Wissenschaftskolleg gehrt zu jenen - abnehmenden - Inseln des Nicht-
Kommerziellen, von denen aus die Konsequenzen der vorherrschenden
technisch-konomischen Rationalitt berhaupt noch unabhngig beob-
achtet und beurteilt werden knnen."
Dieter Grimm
Rektor seit 2001

wissenschaftskolleg zu berlin wallotstrae 19 14193 berlin germany

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