Books

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

In contrast to Marie Curie, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics more than half a century before her, Maria Goeppert Mayer is hardly known. Wrongfully so, her story is fascinating - albeit in a completely different way - her path is unconventional and tragic, a highly gifted woman who, despite the best conditions, only manages to assert herself against the American scientific establishment by using all her strength. Only after decades of unpaid work, working on the first atomic bomb and researching the atomic nucleus, which brought her close to winning the Nobel Prize, is Maria considered competent enough to be the first woman in the USA to take up a paid professorship in theoretical physics. The later success of the Nobel Prize does not hide the fact that she became a physical wreck along the way and also failed in her private life.

I come across Maria in Los Alamos, New Mexico. To give tourists a taste of the Manhattan Project, the few stone houses that were home to physicists like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller at the time have been restored and are now part of the Atomic Heritage Foundation. In one of these houses there is a plaque listing the numerous Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicists who conducted research at Los Alamos. There is only one woman among them, Maria Goeppert-Mayer. I notice the German name, I've never heard of her myself, I google it out of curiosity and find out that she actually comes from Göttingen. Back in Germany, I read what little literature I found about her, and in the following years I researched American and German archives and reconstructed a unique life.

The Shoah and The Trial- The directing style in the documentary films of Claude Lanzmann and Eberhard Fechner VDM Verlag 2008

Blurb: Following her own documetary film "Gedächtnis der Orte", director and author Susan Reck analyzes the classic documentaries "Shoah" by Claude Lanzmann and "The Trial" by Eberhard Fechner. As one of the firsts, these filmmakers thematize the genocide of the European Jews lying back some thirty years in the creation of their films. The present study focuses on the question of to what extent the personal attitudes of the filmmakers become visible in their works and create a certain style of directing.

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Film and chaos theory - analysis of the opening sequence of the movie "Babel" Grin Verlag 2010

The majority of films follow the traditional 3- act- model even if their content requires another structure. An exception is the film "Babel." In my analysis of the opening sequence, I expose the innovative narrative principle of the film referring to its multi-perspective structure.

"The problem is not the numerous tools at our disposal to improve communication but the fact that nobody listens. If there is nothing to listen to there is nothing to understand. when we cease to understand our language is useless and ultimately leads to divisiveness. "

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Clip Revolution in the movies. The Influences of the video clip on narrative structures Grin Verlag 2009 When we speak about the video clip, we think about breathtaking cut sequences, color filters, zoom, rides, jump cuts, beautiful pictures and stylish rooms. We certainly don´t think about completed stories and action-motivated protagonists. In fact there are an increasing number of narrative modes that differ from the classical model and are affected by the video clip- regardless of what one thinks about it. Postmodern thinking is found both in the video clip as well as in the clip influenced films: blending of realism and fantasy, myth and technology, lack of unity, hybridization, loss of the self and certainly also depth. The world is divided up because it is less understandable as a whole. You might picture centrelessness and pluralism better with new structures and experiments than with the old fashioned three-act model. In some way the video clip frees the narrative structure.

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Approximate Continuum Comics, Trondheim/ Die Sache mit Sorge, Isabel Kreitz/ Gift, Peer Meter, Barbara Yelin/ Faire semblant c´est mentir, Dominique Goblet/

Auszug Buchanalyse Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (PDF 56.8 KB)