Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Integral Humanism and the Crisis of Modern Times -- Problems Facing Catholic Rulers -- The Deification of the State -- Passion and the Origin of Hitlerism -- The Immortality of Man -- The End of Machiavellianism -- Philosophical Values and the Future of Civilization -- On Contemporary Nihilism -- The Person and the Common Good -- Architecture and Western Civilization -- On the Christian Idea of Man -- Natural Right and the Historical Approach -- The Origins of Totalitarianism -- Social Justice and Mass Culture -- On War and Peace -- The Catholic Publicist -- Authority in the Twentieth Century -- What St. Thomas Means Today -- The Thinker in the Church -- Human Estrangement and the Failure of Political Imagination -- Common Good and Common Action -- Is the Intellectual Life an End in Itself?.

The author ponders over the identity of the last self-identifying East German and wonders what he or she will say before leaving memories of the region behind. He distinguishes among three possible candidates for this honor: the ordinary citizen with little aspiration to political or social notoriety; the enthusiast with an interest in perpetuating the old regime's values; and the dissident activist dedicated to transforming that order. After identifying the likely last East German, the author speculates about the message our protagonist will have to share with the leaders of unified Germany. Finally, he provides reasons for why the Federal Republic can benefit from this advice.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies in western democracies are turning increasingly to electronic surveillance tools in their efforts to identify and combat new terrorist threats. But this does not mean that they are equally equipped to undertake these measures. As the author shows by comparing surveillance activities in three countries—Great Britain, the United States, and Germany—the Federal Republic's more restrictive legal norms and institutions provide its government with much less freedom of maneuver than its allies.

The future political culture of eastern Germany and, with it, the relationshipbetween unified Germany's once divided populations willdepend heavily upon how all Germans respond to a distinctive factabout the east. The region experienced not one but, counting theGerman Democratic Republic (GDR), two separate eras of dictatorship.This fact can be, and has been, understood in two differentways, with significantly different implications in each case. The firstis the perspective of the victim. According to this view, the citizens ofthe GDR uniquely had to shoulder the burden of having been born,in effect, "in the wrong place." Not only did they endure greaterhardships than their western counterparts, such as the rebuilding ofGermany after World War II, but they suffered by themselvesthrough the debilitating consequences of Soviet occupation and theirinability, until 1990, to act upon the right to "free self-determination"(to quote the original preamble of the Basic Law). As a result, accordingto this argument, easterners were owed special treatment afterunification because of their distinctive misfortunes.