Issue 9 / January 2014
At First
by Katharina Wiedemann
The spectrum of projects every year is great. Equally great are the expectations that a Fellow often has of his or her own creative power during a fellowship. And many are seized by stage fright before their own Tuesday Colloquium, that event where a Fellow lays out his or her work in progress to their Co-Fellows, for the images they present of both themselves
and their work are discussed not only during the colloquium but long after.
Images of the Fellows and their work are also presented in this ninth edition of Köpfe und Ideen, where five Fellows and a focus group are portrayed. Their research extends from the seemingly concrete world of social numbers, in the case of the eight-member quantification group, to the discovery of rhythm as a constitutive element of becoming in natural science, that special sphere of the historian of science Janina Wellmann; from an analysis of the historical and present-day Mediterranean alliances that are on Wolf Lepenies’s mind, to the Russian Revolution, whose failure is investigated by historian Yuri Slezkine in his examination of that Bolshevik microcosm the “House of Government” in Moscow; from
musicologist Laurenz Lütteken's unplanned study of the Berlin mind-set to the classicist Kathleen Coleman's in-depth analysis of Roman gladiatorial bouts.
Kathleen Coleman does not betray whether she sees similarities between the gladiatorial test of physical strength in the arena and the intellectual combat that takes place among Fellows in the colloquium every week. At the Wissenschaftskolleg no one literally dies, and both speakers and discussants leave the venue mentally stimulated and with a keen edge on their appetite – for a shared lunch. It is here that further discussion among the friendly combatants can lead to unsuspected but productive contretemps whose yield often becomes apparent to us only years later. Nevertheless – or for this very reason – we present to you here some previews of the work of certain of our Fellows.
Enjoy!
PS: In case you get a feeling of déjà vu in paging through our booklet, this is for very good reason – all the pieces assembled here have appeared on our website in the course of the academic year. But far be it from us to deprive you of a printed version of the portraits in text and image. Though wed to the Internet, the Wissenschaftskolleg is still in love with paper!