Gathering of Scholars, Fellows and Alumni 2022
©Daimler und Benz Stiftung_Biesenbach
In October 2022, scholarship-holders and alumni of the Daimler and Benz Foundation's development program for up-and-coming young academics met in Cologne for an exchange of ideas on science, professional careers, and developments in society. Together with its Alumni Association – which subsidizes travel expenses through its membership fees, thereby enabling visitors from distant locations to participate – the Foundation regularly invites fellows to these gatherings. The fact that this meeting was able to take place at the University of Cologne is due to a suggestion and the great personal commitment of scholarship-holder Łukasz Jędrzejowski, who conducts research at the university’s Department of German Language and Literature.
The program began on the Saturday morning with a guided tour of “urban art” in Cologne’s Belgian Quarter. This art form, characteristic of public spaces, includes for example graffiti and street art. The guide is very familiar with this scene, which deliberately sets itself apart from established art; she drew the group’s attention both to large-scale murals and to small works of art on entrances, lampposts and window ledges. For the subsequent academic part of the program, the University of Cologne invited the group to the Old Senate Hall with its impressive collection of portraits of former rectors. The many lectures on the program reflected the reality of our times marked by war and crises.
Dr. Félix Krawatzek from the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin opened the academic program with a lecture on the connection between controversial views of history and military escalation; he focused here on the current events in Ukraine. On the basis of empirical surveys from January 2022, just before the outbreak of war in February, Krawatzek outlined the different historical narratives of Ukrainian national identity that are prevalent among the Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking populations. He examined what expectations and “mental geographies” these narratives are capable of generating. In his presentation, Krawatzek described the methods used by governments to deliberately introduce and promote historical narratives among the population through public speeches and publications.
In his lecture, Dr. Hartmut Walther from Xella International GmbH focused on another of the great challenges of our time: anthropogenic climate change. He reported on research carried out by the construction and insulating materials industry to recapture released CO2 in building materials. This research sets out to achieve a better understanding of CO2 balances in building construction, for example. A critical discussion followed, focusing on the measures that sectors of industry are suspected of employing to arrive at excessively favorable CO2 balances for existing processes in view of CO2 certificate trading.
Dr. Lennart Gilhaus from the University of Bonn’s Department of History then followed on from the opening topic of the program with his lecture on the brutality of war in ancient Greece and other societies, spanning a broad historical arc with his analysis of military violence. Citing studies of forms of violence from the wars of the Assyrians, the ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans, and – as a more recent historical example – Japan in the 12th century AD, Gilhaus explained how the nature of violence in war is determined by the values, religious systems, legal concepts, and political goals of the respective belligerent societies. Historical studies of this kind, he continued, have proven valuable in placing acts of war that seem unimaginable today, such as the massacres at Mỹ Lai or Bucha, in an appropriate historical context and – for want of a better word – “explaining” them.
Finally, Dr. Katharina Schregel from Heidelberg University Hospital gave the Foundation’s fellows and alumni insights into a novel diagnostic procedure for detecting brain tumors. Schregel is developing an elastographic method that makes use of the differing elastic properties of healthy brain tissue and tumor tissue. Similar to the way in which seismic waves can indicate the origin and nature of the source of an earthquake, or a bat uses sound waves to gather information about the location and type of objects in its environment, this method uses mechanical waves. Very low-intensity mechanical compression waves cause shearing in sample tissue that can be made visible in MRI images. For this purpose, patients lie in the MRI with their heads on a very softly vibrating pillow. This enables invasive tumor cells to be detected in an MRI image, and progress images of a tumor treatment can be generated. Since different subregions of a tumor have differing levels of rigidity, she continued, the elastographic method yields images of a tumor that are more differentiated than with previous MRI methods. This procedure will therefore provide for more targeted tumor treatment at an earlier stage.
The lecture program concluded with an evening presentation by Prof. Dr. Martin Reuter from the Institute of Psychology at the University of Bonn. Reuter pointed out the conceptual distinction between fear and anxiety and introduced his work on researching and delineating these emotions. He presented models according to which fear, for example, has the function of causing the subject to withdraw from a danger stimulus. Anxiety, by contrast, causes the subject to actively address the danger. Fear is unconditioned, whereas anxiety is conditioned. To measure anxiety, Reuter has devised a world in virtual space that test subjects walk through with VR goggles; they are faced with various tasks for avoiding close encounters. For example, dangerous situations are simulated with threats of (symbolic) punishment, but a reward is also offered if the danger is overcome. Measurement data, relating for example to the time it takes a subject to decide in favor of approach or avoidance, but also to the distance to the source of danger, are expected to help in better understanding the condition of anxiety. The ultimate goal of Reuter’s research is to arrive at a neurobiological explanation for human behavior and thus also for behavioral changes.
The Saturday ended with a round of Kölsch and a cold buffet accompanying lively and intensive discussions about the topics presented. The last item on the program was a visit to the Museum Ludwig on the Sunday morning. Whereas the previous day’s outing had concentrated on the alternative art scene in the Belgian Quarter, here the focus was on the modern classics. During a subsequent guided tour of the museum’s permanent exhibition, the alumni and fellows immersed themselves in the museum’s art collection both alone and in small groups.
The weekend with its many lasting impressions finally came to a convivial conclusion in a Cologne brewery house. Impulses were given and taken up, bonds of friendship were reinforced or forged, contact details were exchanged, and a lively network of alumni and scholarship-holders promised to come together again for further such stimulating exchanges in the future.