When Prof. Ernst Rabel (1874-1955) was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for international private Law at Berlin in 1926, he already was one of the world’s most renowned researchers and teachers of both comparative and international private law. The article outlines major aspects of the uniqueness of his work.

Fantasies of man travelling into space form a main part of the popular movie genre ‘Science Fiction’. These celluloid visions are not only fantasies of improving transport, they also convey a meaning in a figurative sense. They can be seen as a modern adoption of one of humanities oldest metaphors, ‘life as a sea fare voyage’: the meaning, which was once expressed by this ‘nautical metaphor’, has been transferred and can nowadays be found in films, which show astro-nauts crossing the frontier from known space into the unknown space. In order to conclude on their attitude towards technological progress in the early 20th century, the two oldest space travel movies, Le Voyage dans la Lune (F 1902) and Le Voyage a Travers L’Impossible (F 1904) will be analyzed.

The view from above, closely related to modern artistic perception, was new in respect to specific dynamic and irritation. This was caused by movement in three dimensions, and by sensory
deprivation when flying at night and in clouds. The collision between the user surface of flight instruments and the senses had to be tackled. There was a new perception and new semantics of the earth and of the landscape of the clouds, harking back to a European cultural tradition.
This created and spread a new kind of sensitivity, combining the lying machine, machine-induced perceptions and images of nature, and resulting in a techno-hybrid aesthetics.

Mobility today comprises not just being mobile in a traditional sense. It is linked with a range of sociocultural facets to be considered in connection with it, alongside with the specific contemporaneous mythology that led to its rise. All that will be lined out in the following, opening up new perspectives and directions for further research.

This section concentrates on the cultural transfer of technology and its technique. What are the specific triggers and pathways of both technological and cultural diffusion? What influences and consequences are generated by these processes. The introduction of new technologies is not hindered by any cultural barriers but is spreading out and becoming ubiquitous. The continuum [...]

The paper analyzes patterns and cultural path dependencies of German press views on Italy from the 1960s to the 1990s.