A WATERSTONES BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2023 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 ONDAATJE PRIZE 'A masterful portrait of one of the world's greatest cities... A must-read' PETER FRANKOPAN 'Such a delightful read' KATJA HOYER, The Times 'Berlin may well be Europe's most enigmatic city and John Kampfner is the ideal guide.' JONATHAN FREEDLAND, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Escape Artist 'Gripping' Financial Times No other city has had so many lives, survived so many disasters and has reinvented itself so many times. No other city is like Berlin. Ever since John Kampfner was a young journalist in Communist East Berlin, he hasn't been able to get the city out of his mind. It is a place tortured by its past, obsessed with memories, a place where traumas are unleashed and the traumatised have gathered. Over the past four years Kampfner has walked the length and breadth of Berlin, delving into the archives, and talking to historians and writers, architects and archaeologists. He clambers onto a fallen statue of Lenin; he rummages in boxes of early Medieval bones; he learns about the cabaret star so outrageous she was thrown out of the city. Berlin has been a military barracks, industrial powerhouse, centre of learning, hotbed of decadence - and the laboratory for the worst experiment in horror known to man. Now a city of refuge, it is home to 180 nationalities, and more than a quarter of the population has a migrant background. Berlin never stands still. It is never satisfied. But it is now the irresistible capital to which the world is gravitating. In Search of Berlin is an 800-year story, a dialogue between past and present; it is a new way of looking at this turbulent and beguiling city on its never-ending journey of reinvention.

First English-language edition, with revisions and additions by the author.This classic work by one of the world's most distinguished Egyptologists was first published in German in 1984. The Search for God in Ancient Egypt offers a distillation of Jan Assmann's views on ancient Egyptian religion, with special emphasis on theology and piety. Deeply rooted in the texts of ancient Egypt and thoroughly informed by comparative religion, theology, anthropology, and semiotic analysis, Assmann's interpretations reveal the complexity of Egyptian thought in a new way.Assmann takes special care to distinguish between the "implicit" theology of Egyptian polytheism and the "explicit" theology that is concerned with exploring the problem of the divine. His discussion of polytheism and mythology addresses aspects of ritual, the universe, and myth; his consideration of explicit theology deals with theodicy and the specifics of Amarna religion.

The compelling story of a decades-long collaboration between social and political theorist Isaiah Berlin and his editor, Henry Hardy, who made it his vocation to bring Berlin's huge body of work into print. Isaiah Berlin was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century – a man who set ideas on fire. His defence of liberty and plurality was passionate and persuasive and inspired a generation. His ideas – especially his reasoned rejection of excessive certainty and political despotism – have become even more prescient and vital today. But who was the man behind such influential views? Hardy discovered that Berlin had written far more than people thought, much of it unpublished. As he describes his struggles with Berlin, who was almost on principle unwilling to have his work published, an intimate and revealing picture of the self-deprecating philosopher emerges. This is a unique portrait of a man who gave us a new way of thinking about the human predicament, and whose work had for most of his life remained largely out of view.

The author follows the debates beyond the unexpected unification of the country in 1989/90 and analyses the most recent trends in German historiography, hoping that it doesn't return to the stifling homogeneity that characterized it before the 1960s.

Recently, we have seen a steep increase in the popularity and adoption of XML, in areas such as traditional databases, e-business, the scientific environment, and on the web. Querying XML documents and data efficiently is a challenging issue; this book approaches search on XML data by combining content-based methods from information retrieval and structure-based XML query methods and presents the following parts: applications, query languages, retrieval models, implementing intelligent XML systems, and evaluation. To appreciate the book, basic knowledge of traditional database technology, information retrieval, and XML is needed. The book is ideally suited for courses or seminars at the graduate level as well as for education of research and development professionals working on Web applications, digital libraries, database systems, and information retrieval.

This little book is conceived as a service to mathematicians attending the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. It presents a comprehensive, condensed overview of mathematical activity in Berlin, from Leibniz almost to the present day (without, however, including biographies of living mathematicians). Since many towering figures in mathematical history worked in Berlin, most of the chapters of this book are concise biographies. These are held together by a few survey articles presenting the overall development of entire periods of scientific life at Berlin. Overlaps between various chapters and differences in style between the chap ters were inevitable, but sometimes this provided opportunities to show different aspects of a single historical event - for instance, the Kronecker-Weierstrass con troversy. The book aims at readability rather than scholarly completeness. There are no footnotes, only references to the individual bibliographies of each chapter. Still, we do hope that the texts brought together here, and written by the various authors for this volume, constitute a solid introduction to the history of Berlin mathematics.

W.G. Sebald's books are sui generis hybrids of fiction, travelogue, autobiography and historical expos», in which a narrator (both Sebald and not Sebald) comments on the quick blossoming of natural wonders and the long deaths that come of human atrocities. All his narratives are punctuated with images--murky photographs, architectural plans, engravings, paintings, newspaper clippings--inserted into the prose without captions and often without obvious connection to the words that surround them. This important volume includes a rare 1993 interview called "'But the written word is not a true document': A Conversation with W.G. Sebald about Photography and Literature," in which Sebald talks exclusively about his use of photographs. It contains some of Sebald's most illuminating and poetic remarks about the topic yet. In it, he discusses Barthes, the photograph's "appeal," the childhood image of Kafka, family photographs, and even images he never used in his writings. In addition, Searching for Sebald positions Sebald within an art-historical tradition that begins with the Surrealists, continues through Joseph Beuys and blossoms in the recent work of Christian Boltanski and Gerhard Richter, and tracks his continuing inspiration to artists such as Tacita Dean and Helen Mirra. An international roster of artists and scholars unpacks the intricacies of his unique method. Seventeen theoretical essays approach Sebald through the multiple filters of art history (Krauss), film studies (Kluge), cultural theory (Benjamin), psychoanalysis (Freud), and especially photographic history and theory (Barthes, Kracauer), and 17 modern and contemporary art projects are read through a Sebaldian filter. If Sebald's artistic output acts as a touchstone for new critical theory being written on "post-medium" photographic practices, Seaching for Sebald suggests a model for new investigations in the burgeoning field of visual studies.

Translated by J. Edward Crowley. This radical reconstruction of the origins of Judaism starts by observing that Josephus's sources on the early history of Israel do not agree with the Bible and that the oldest rabbinic traditions show no sign of a biblical foundation. Another interesting question is raised by the Samaritan claim, at the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, that they had only recently received the Sabbath from the Jews. From such details, Nodet creates a comprehensive line of argument that reveals two major sources of Judaism, as symbolized in the subtitle of his work: Joshua was the one who established locally in writing a statute and a law at the Shechem assembly, while the Mishnah was the ultimate metamorphosis of traditions brought from Babylon and combined with Judaean influences.

H. HAFNER and W. F. GATTAZ Between 1891 and 1955, three founders of modern psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) and Kurt Schneider (1887-1967) lectured at the University of Heidelberg: Kraepelin for 12 years, Jaspers for over 25 years and Schneider for approximately 10 years. During this period they laid the foundations of descriptive psychopathology and modern classification and con tributed essentially to the development of our current thinking on schizophrenia. In 1986, on the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the University of Heidel berg, we held a symposium in memory of these three "giants of psychiatry" for which we chose the title "Search for the Causes of Schizophrenia". It was jointly organized by the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim and the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Heidelberg. The intention was to meet one of the major challenges of current psychiatric research, namely the fact that since Kraepelin's masterly description of "Dementia praecox" (1894) and E. Bleuler's slightly different definition of schizophrenia (1911), we have made only insufficient advances in clarifying the aetiology of this frequent and still often dis abling mental disease.