Nominees for the Christian-Gottlob-Heyne-Preis

Victorian sensational novels are saturated with objects which refer to mysteries in the past. My dissertation explores the intertwining of Wilkie Collins’s successful sensational plots and the small, easily overlooked memory objects, which bring the allegedly buried incidents into the present. The reading takes place from a double perspective and adapts concepts of the material culture studies to the literary analysis. The focus on the world of things of the novels will thus complement the established approaches to gender, colonialism and contemporary discourses.

The dissertation constitutes the first comprehensive exploration of an Islamic court of the late middle period. It shows that the sultan’s court of the penultimate Mamluk sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ġaurī, who ruled over Egypt and Syria from 1501 to 1516, was a centre for processes of knowledge transfer, practice of religion and political negotiation. Furthermore, based upon current research results in the fields of historical sociology and European history, the dissertation develops a theoretical understanding of the concept of a court which is advantageously applicable to non-European societies.

Students are prone to a victimisation of the perpetrators and an exculpation of the non-Jewish community of National Socialism. On the basis of these disconcerting results, the dissertation explores whether history school books make such simplifying and unhistorical perceptions of history discussible. Which narratives and interpretations of the “completely normal” Germans, their knowledge of the holocaust, their anti-Semitic attitude and their reactions to the ant-Jewish actions of the Nazi regime are included in textbooks? In short, which impact does the school book, leading medium of learning history at school, make on the awareness raising of entire age cohorts?

Around 540 A.D., Cassiodor published various letters under the title “Variae“, which he had written as a high official at the Ostrogothic court. They include sample letters without specific addressees (formulae), which – allegedly – served as a template at the appointment of officials. These formu-lae are of great interest for the exploration of the Ostrogothic administration; however, the literary over-shaping likewise has to be taken adequately into account. The dissertation offers a complete German translation of this complex Latin text and a commentary with a focus on philology.