Sea fortune has always been an issue of good faith and good navigation. While in antiquity, fortuna gubernatrix was praised for shielding the seaborne trade, in the Renaissance fortuna symbolized the conquest of chance and danger. Under such auspices, while relying on risk technologies modern seafaring has never lost its adventurous dimension. Understanding their origin remains a challenge for the history of science and the history of literature.

How can we develop a cultural theory starting with the basic insight that human beings are "storytelling animals"? Within literary studies, narratology is a highly developed field. However, literary historians have not paid much attention to the large and small stories abounding in everyday discourse, guiding all kinds of social activity, and providing common ground for whole societies-but also fueling controversies and hostilities. Moreover, "narrative" is not only a scholarly category but has come into use in many fields of social activity as a tool for cultural self-fashioning. This book is based on the assumption that to a large extent, social dynamics is modeled in an aesthetic manner via narratives. It explores the narrative organization of cultural spaces and time-frames, the mythological shaping of communities and adversaries, and the co-production of narratives and institutions aimed at stabilizing social life. In this framework, the epistemological problem looms large of how an instrument as unreliable as narrative can participate in the creation of a social consensus regarding truth. This problem endows the general topics explored in this book with a particularly contemporary dimension.

German jurist and legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) significantly influenced Western political and legal thinking in the last century, yet his life and work have also stirred considerable controversy. While his ideas have been used and diffused by prominent philosophers on both the left and the right, such as Jurgen Habermas and Leo Strauss, his Nazi-era past, especially his active efforts to remove Jewish influence from German law, has cast a cloud over his life and oeuvre. Still, his many supporters have generally been successful in claiming that Schmitt's was an ""antisemitism of opportunity,"" a temporary affectation to gain favor with the Nazis. In ""Carl Schmitt and the Jews"", available in English for the first time, historian Raphael Gross vigorously repudiates this ""opportunism thesis."" Through a reading of Schmitt's corpus, some of which became available only after his death, Gross highlights the importance of the ""Jewish Question"" on the breadth of Schmitt's work. According to Gross, Schmitt's antisemitism was at the core of his work - before, during, and after the Nazi era. His influential polarities of ""friend and foe,"" ""law and nomos,"" ""behemoth and Leviathan,"" and ""ketechon and Antichrist"" emerge from a conceptual template in which ""the Jew"" is defined as adversary, undermining the Christian order with secularization. The presence of this template at the heart of Schmitt's work, Gross contends, calls for a major reassessment of Schmitt's role within contemporary cultural and legal theory.

This landmark book was first published in Germany, provoking both acclaim and controversy. In this ""history of historiography,"" Nicolas Berg addresses the work of German and German-Jewish historians in the first three decades of post-World War II Germany. He examines how they perceived - and failed to perceive - the Holocaust and how they interpreted and misinterpreted that historical fact using an arsenal of terms and concepts, arguments and explanations. This English-language translation is also a shortened and reorganized edition, which includes a new introduction by Berg reviewing and commenting on the response to the German editions. Notably, in this American edition, discussion of historian Joseph Wulf and his colleague and fellow Holocaust survivor Leon Poliakov has been united in one chapter. And special care has been taken to make clear to English speakers the questions raised about German historiographical writing. Translator Joel Golb comments, ""From 1945 to the present, the way historians have approached the Holocaust has posed deep-reaching problems regarding choice of language...This book is consequently as much about language as it is about facts.

Recognition has become a keyword of our time, but its relation to economic redistribution remains unclear. This volume stages a debate between two philosophers, one North American, the other German, who hold different views of the relation of redistribution to recognition. Axel Honneth conceives recognition as the fundamental, over-arching moral category, potentially encompassing redistribution, while Nancy Fraser argues that the two categories are both fundamental and mutually irreducible. In alternating chapters the authors respond to each other's criticisms, and offer a lively dialogue on identity politics, capitalism and social justice. The volume is a dramatic riposte to those who proclaim the death of grand theory.

Of all the aspects of recovery in postwar Germany perhaps none was as critical or as complicated as the matter of dealing with Nazi criminals, and, more broadly, with the Nazi past. While on the international stage German officials spoke with contrition of their nation's burden of guilt, at home questions of responsibility and retribution were not so clear. In this masterful examination of Germany under Adenauer, Norbert Frei shows that, beginning in 1949, the West German government dramatically reversed the denazification policies of the immediate postwar period and initiated a new "Vergangenheitspolitik," or "policy for the past," which has had enormous consequences reaching into the present.

Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past chronicles how amnesty laws for Nazi officials were passed unanimously and civil servants who had been dismissed in 1945 were reinstated liberally -- and how a massive popular outcry led to the release of war criminals who had been condemned by the Allies. These measures and movements represented more than just the rehabilitation of particular individuals. Frei argues that the amnesty process delegitimized the previous political expurgation administered by the Allies and, on a deeper level, served to satisfy the collective psychic needs of a society longing for a clean break with the unparalleled political and moral catastrophe it had undergone in the 1940s. Thus the era of Adenauer devolved into a scandal-ridden period of reintegration at any cost. Frei's work brilliantly and chillingly explores how the collective will of the German people, expressed through mass allegiance to new consensus-oriented democratic parties, cast off responsibility for the horrors of the war and Holocaust, effectively silencing engagement with the enormities of the Nazi past.