This issue explores how intellectual theories migrate from Germany to the United States, asking what makes one theory compatible with and successful in the new society while others have little impact. Avoiding the obvious successes (from Marx to the Frankfurt School) and failures (authors whose translated works have had no effect on intellectual life in the United States), contributors investigate complicated cases in which the US reception was not particularly intense. The examples of Hans Blumenberg, Friedrich Kittler, Reinhardt Koselleck, Siegfried Kracauer, Niklas Luhmann, Alexander Mitscherlich, and Gershom Scholem prompt questions about the importance of clear translations, the effects of the publishing business on dissemination, the transformations that theoretical work undergoes as it moves from its original contexts to new ones, and the role of disciplines and interdisciplinarity in shaping a theory's reception. Contributors. Yaacob Dweck, Philipp Felsch, Paul Fleming, Dagmar Herzog, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Andreas Huyssen, Martin Jay, Anna Kinder, Joe Paul Kroll, Anson Rabinbach, William Rasch, Johannes von Moltke, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Robert Zwarg

Syrian poet Nouri al-Jarrah brings to life a story that can never again be lost in time after a single line in Aramaic on a tombstone fired his imagination. This inspiring epic poem awakens two extraordinary lovers, Barates, a Syrian from Palmyra, and Regina, the Celtic slave he freed and married, from where they have lain at rest beside Hadrian's Wall for eighteen centuries, and tells their unique story. Barates' elegy to his beloved wife, who died young at 30, is, however, not about mythologizing history. With the poet himself an exile in Britain for 40 years from his birthplace of Damascus, the poem forges new connections with today, linking al-Jarrah's personal journey with that of his ancient forebear Barates, who resisted slavery with love. Barates' Eastern song also questions whether the young Celtic fighters, the Tattooed Ones, were really barbarians, as they emerged from forest mists to defend their hills and rivers and their way of life from the Romans, and died or lay wounded at the twisting stone serpent that was Hadrian's Wall.