Art as a million dollar project

In our capitalist society, works of art represent the ultimate status symbol. The art market is booming, prices are rocketing. Why is it that people are willing to spend millions of dollars on works by van Gogh, Klimt, Keith Haring or Gerhard Richter ...

How many people these days can still recount the story of Romulus and Remus or the punishment of Tantalus? Ulysses and Oedipus are household names in twenty-first century, but characters like Hecuba, Medus, Perseus, Hydra and Cassandra, formerly part of any educated person's vocabulary, are often ...

Compassion is the inner barrier to the inhumane. In Liverpool, two eleven-year-old boys abducted a two-year-old and murder him. This crime could have been avoided if passers-by who heard the child scream had intervened. Arno Gruen asserts that these passers-by placed themselves on the side of the ...

Preface by Gaetano Benedetti

The concept of autonomy, which does not mean power and superiority but full conformity of a human being to his feelings and needs, is an important factor of modern psychology. If this autonomy is lacking - more often the rule than the exception - ...

Much reflection by many disparate thinkers has been devoted to the complex issue of evil in the world, and psychologists have devised different theories to explain the destructiveness of man. But rarely has anyone dissected the causes with such rigorousness as Arno Gruen. He demonstrates how ...

An inside view of the most important power in the Middle East

The Islamic Republic stands for an authoritarian yet modern society grounded in technology and the military which has nevertheless managed to retain a unique Iranian culture. But Iranian society is rent by an ...

Day after day, the internet is inundated by a flood of digital images. We never come even close to seeing all of it. Why is this? In his investigative research, Moritz Riesewieck has focused on the quagmire created by the simultaneous endeavors of censorship and exploitation. His goal: to ...

"In order to love India, I had to get to know Germany again."

Indians, Germans, and an author seeking to answer the question: What is home? Since his marriage to Indian native Saskya, Christopher Kloeble is a notarized "Person of Indian Heritage." In this insightful, ...

What's stirring up France - and who's doing the stirring?

The relentless advance of the Front National is changing the French political landscape. Marine le Pen, the party's head, is quite clearly reaching out for presidency. Julia Heyer describes how the Front National

The post-war occupation had a formative influence on both the Federal Republic and the GDR. How did the occupying forces handle their victory, what were their plans and how many of them did they manage to put into action? How did the German population and the millions of displaced persons cope ...

Much ado on the Eastern front

"Do you feel German, Ukrainian, Russian or Jewish? Or maybe a bit of each?" Filipp Piatov is, as it were, a merge of all these cultures. His Russian father and Ukrainian mother left the Soviet Union as it fell apart around them and Piatov grew up in a ...

If you lie, cheat, defraud or generally step out of line, then trip up and get caught, you have to expect social disgrace to the point of ostracism - even if you happen to be part of the upper echelons. That wasn't always the case; there's a new breed of moral tyranny afoot.